Books published by West Virginia University Press

Central Appalachia and South Wales were built to extract coal, and faced with coal's decline, both regions have experienced economic depression, labour unrest, and out-migration. After Coal focuses on coalfield residents who chose not to leave, but instead remained in their communities and worked to build a diverse and sustainable economy.

First published in 1973, this debut novel is the deeply moving coming-of-age story of Speer Whitfield, whose recollection of his upbringing and his large, remarkable, and often peculiar family evokes the forces that set the path for a boyi?1/2s growth into manhood in 1940s Appalachia.

This gonzo-style metamemoir follows Chuck Kinder on a wild tour of the back roads of his home state of West Virginia, where he encounters Mountain State legends like Sid Hatfield, Dagmar, Robert C. Byrd, the Mothman, Chuck Yeager, Soupy Sales, Don Knotts, and Jesco White, the "Dancing Outlaw".

In exploring the ways that Appalachian people speak and write, Amanda E. Hayes raises the importance of knowing and respecting communication styles within a marginalized culture. Diving deep into the region's historical roots - especially those of the Scotch-Irish and their influence on her own Appalachian Ohio - Hayes reveals a rhetoric with its own unique logic, utility, and poetry.

In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains, a popular history now considered a classic. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a lesser-known Mother Jones crusade in Kanawha County. His daughter Ginny drew on his notes and files, and her own research, to complete this book-length account of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912-13.

Tells the story of oilman Ralph Bramel Lloyd, a small business owner who drove the development of one of America's largest oil fields. Putting the history of extractive industry in dialogue with the history of urban development, Michael R. Adamson shows how energy is woven into the fabric of modern life, and how the "energy capital" of Los Angeles exerted far-flung influence in the US West.

As children, two sisters make homes for their toys trying to create safe places after the loss of their mother to psychosis. Grace, a schoolteacher married to a doctor, appears to have a conventional life but has a breakdown. Dinah has married a self-ordained preacher with a troubled past. Meanwhile, a childhood friend is linked to an abortive attempt to blow up the FBI's fingerprint records facility.

The first book dedicated to telling the stories of West Virginia's extensive community of songwriters. Based on oral histories conducted by Stimeling and told largely in the songwriters' own words, these profiles offer a lively overview of the personalities, venues, and networks that nurture and sustain popular music in West Virginia.

In the mid-1970s, Nancy L. Abrams, a young photojournalist from the Midwest, plunges into life as a small-town reporter in West Virginia. The Climb from Salt Lick is the remarkable memoir of an outsider coming into adulthood. It is the story of a unique place and its people from the perspective of woman who documents its burdens and its beauty.

Offers a broad study of the literature and culture of the ""long 1980s"". The Argument about Things in the 1980s contributes to of-the-moment scholarly debate about material culture, high finance, and ecological degradation, shedding new light on the complex relationship between neoliberalism and cultural life.

In the hills of north central West Virginia, there lives a cast of characters who face all manner of problems. From the people who are incarcerated in West Virginia's prisons, to a woman who is learning how to lose her sight with grace, to another who sorely regrets selling her land to a fracking company, Jaws of Life portrays the diverse concerns the people of this region face every day.

In this third edition of East Africa: An Introductory History, Robert M. Maxon revisits the diverse eastern region of Africa, including the modern nations of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. With revised sections and a new preface, this comprehensive text surveys East Africa's political, economic, and social history from pre-colonial to modern times.

Originally published in 1948, this is the germinal text on nearly 250 species of spring wildflowers found in West Virginia. Common or English names and scientific or Latin names are given for each species. Each description is accompanied by a facing page detailed line drawing. This book is a must have for those interested in the beauty and science of West Virginia's spring flora.

A comprehensive reference tool in humanities computing. Essays in nine disciplines describe resources and introduce the state of humanities computing. Platform, price, system requirements, and means of acquisition are noted with substantial descriptions of each project plus review citations.

In this revised and expanded edition of Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders, George Constantz writes about the beauty and nature of the Appalachian landscape. While the information is scientific in nature, Constantz's accessible descriptions of the adaptation of various organisms to their environment enable the reader to enjoy learning about the Appalachian ecosystem.

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.

This volume first appeared in 1963, a little book by a man with no training as either a writer or a historian. Since then, it has become an essential sourcebook, consulted and quoted in nearly every study of coal field history. The surprising impact and durability of the book are due to both the information in it and the personality behind it.

This volume is devoted exclusively to the macrofungi that occur in association with oak trees in the forests of eastern North America. More than 200 species of macrofungi are described and illustrated with vibrantly coloured photographs. Information is given on edibility, medicinal properties, and other novel uses as well.

The members of Dunlap Fellowship of All Things in Common share everything from their meager incomes to the only functioning toilet in the community house - everything, that is, except secrets. When Omi Ruth Wincott loses her only brother, Woodrun, she withdraws from everyone and fixates on a secret desire: she wishes only for an extravagant headstone to mark Woodrun's grave.

Not only highlights stories that both amuse and raise goosebumps, but also begins with a description of the people and culture of the state. Based on material Patrick W. Gainer collected from over fifty years of field research in West Virginia and the region, Witches, Ghosts, and Signs presents the rich heritage of the southern Appalachians in a way that has never been equalled.

This is an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Elleanor Eldridge's life from her birth through the first publication of almost yearly editions of the text between 1838 and 1847. Because of Eldridge's exceptional life as a freeborn woman of colour entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England.

This verse translation of the most popular and enduring fourteenth century romance to survive to the present offers students an accessible way of approaching the literature of medieval England without losing the flavor of the original writing. With a foreword by David Donoghue, the close verse translation includes facing pages of the original fourteenth-century text and its modern translation.

Offers an important new perspective on media narratives about poverty in Appalachia. It focuses on how small-town reporters and editors in some of the region's poorest communities decide what aspects of poverty are news, how their audiences interpret those decisions, and how those two related processes help shape broader understandings of economic need and local social responsibility.

In this collection rife with humour and pathos, alienated characters struggle to subvert, contain, control, and even escape their bodies. Dark humour and magical realism put in sharp relief the everyday trials of Americans in a story collection that asks, in what way are we more than the sum of our parts?

Explores the ways the primary places in our lives shape the individuals we become. It proposes that place is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. The themes of the book transcend specific localities and speak to the relationship of self and place everywhere.

First published in 1975 and long out of print, Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills is a major work of folklore poised to reach a new generation of readers. Drawing on Patrick Ward Gainer's extensive ethnographic fieldwork around West Virginia, it contains dozens of significant folk songs, including the internationally famous and the distinctively West Virginian.

Between 1899 and 1908, five long works of fiction by the Nashville-based black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs appeared in print. One of them, The Hindered Hand, addresses the author's key themes of amalgamation, emigration, armed resistance, and US overseas expansion. This scholarly edition of the novel provides newly discovered biographical information and copious historical context.