Books in the West Virginia & Appalachia Series series

Anna Jarvis organised the first official Mother's Day celebration in West Virginia in 1908 and then spent decades promoting the holiday and defending it from commercialization. This book explores the complicated history of her movement to establish and control Mother's Day, as well as the powerful conceptualization of this day as both a holiday and a cultural representation of motherhood.

No person involved in so much history received so little attention as the late Robert C. Byrd, the longest-serving US senator. In The Last Great Senator, David A. Corbin examines Byrd's complex and fascinating relationships with eleven presidents, from Eisenhower to Obama.

Between 1880 and 1922, the coal fields of southern West Virginia witnessed two bloody and protracted strikes, the formation of two competing unions, and the largest armed conflict in American labour history. Corbin argues that these violent events were collective and militant acts of aggression interconnected and conditioned by decades of oppression.