Summary

New paperback edition with an introduction by Robert B. Reich

Monongah: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster documents the events and conditions that led to the worst industrial accident in the history of the United States. This mining accident claimed hundreds of lives on the morning of December 6, 1907, and McAteer, an expert on mine and workplace health and safety, delves deeply into the economic forces and social-political landscape of the mining communities of north central West Virginia to expose the truth behind this tragedy. After nearly thirty years of exhaustive research, McAteer determines that close to 500 men and boys—many of them immigrants—lost their lives that day, leaving hundreds of women widowed and more than one thousand children orphaned. 

The tragedy at Monongah led to a greater awareness of industrial working conditions, and ultimately to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which McAteer helped to enact. This new paperback edition includes an introduction by Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration.

Purchase the jacketed cloth edition.

Contents

Author

Davitt McAteer is internationally recognized as an expert on mine and workplace health and safety. He worked with consumer advocate Ralph Nader to help enact the landmark 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. During the 1970s, he led the safety and health programs of the United Mine Workers of America and founded the Occupational Safety and Health Law Center. During his career, Mr. McAteer has consulted and lectured extensively on health and safety issues for governments, unions, and corporations in South Africa, China, Australia, Chili, Peru, and elsewhere. From 1994 to 2000, he served as assistant secretary for Mine Safety and Health at the US Department of Labor under President Clinton and for nearly two years, 1996 to 1997, also served as acting solicitor of the US Department of Labor. Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, he was called on as an advisor to the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, consulting with union representatives of equipment operators and subway workers. Mr. McAteer served as vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University from 2005 until his retirement in June 2012.

On four occasions, at the request of two West Virginia governors, he has conducted independent investigations into mine disasters and accidents. Most recently in April of 2010, then West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin III requested that McAteer conduct an independent investigation into the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, the largest coal mine disaster in the United States in forty years, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine miners. He has testified before Congress on safety and health issues on numerous occasions.

Davitt McAteer maintains a law office and lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, with his wife Kathryn.

Review

“Monongah is an important book, long overdue.”
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor

“McAteer skillfully analyzes the tragedy, examining players on the company side from the upper levels of the rich and powerful to the mine supervision and operations level, while giving equal weight and voice to the immigrant groups that provided the vast majority of the victims. . . . It is fortuante that a man of David McAteer’s caliber undertook to tell the tragic story.”
Charles McCollester, West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional History

“Monongah is a major scholary work, and another in a series of WVU Press offerings that tells previously untold stories about the people who really built West Virginia, and often suffered in doing so.”
Ken Ward, Charleston Gazette-Mail

“A compelling, cautionary tale of avarice and corruption, as well as a testament to the ultimate resilience of exploited people.”
Shirley Stewart Burns, the Journal of Southern History

“McAteer’s work is undeniably significant and his extensive research is evident.”
Joshua Stahlman, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies

Summary

Virginia B. Evans (1894–1983) was an important figure in the field of art in the Upper Ohio Valley during the mid-twentieth century. A native of Moundsville, West Virginia, Evans was a talented impressionist and abstract expressionist painter, a skillful designer of art deco glass, and a teacher. 

Virginia B. Evans tells the story of this often overlooked, yet remarkable artist. Educated, willful, strongly opinionated, and independent, she enjoyed considerable acclaim in the Ohio Valley region of West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and beyond. Because of her focus on professional achievement and her disregard for the cultural and societal expectations of her era, she was often the subject of scorn and suspicion. Yet undaunted, she devoted her life to the field she loved, facilitated by a distinctive talent and unbridled energy.

Through an analysis of primary resources including correspondence, memoirs, newspaper articles, photographs, and other documents, Virginia B. Evans elucidates the compelling life and work of a versatile artist.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

John A. Cuthbert is the Director of West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University Libraries. He is the author of David Hunter Strother: One of the Best Draughtsmen the Country Possesses, Early Art and Artists in West Virginia, and Richard Kidwell Miller.

Reviews

"Before John Cuthbert published his Early Art and Artists of West Virginia in 2000, the artistic contributions of the state were essentially unexplored territory. Now Cuthbert has followed up his ground-breaking achievement with an in depth study of one of the state's finest and most well-rounded artists, Virginia B. Evans.  Cuthbert details her life story and the admirable variety of her themes--landscapes, domestic scenes, figure and portrait imagery, and pastoral and industrial subjects, while also demonstrating her increasingly free brushwork and exciting color symphonies.  Cuthbert  follows Evans's travels, both domestic and worldwide, while always returning her to the beautiful images she created in her native state. He has also introduced her unique involvement with the designs she contributed to Imperial Glass."
William H. Gerdts, Professor Emeritus of Art History,Graduate School of the City University of New York

Summary

Seasons for Fasting, a late Old English poem probably composed in the early eleventh century, focuses on proper fasting observances in England. This poem, composed in eight-line stanzas, survives only in a sixteenth-century transcript made by the antiquary Laurence Nowell. With its topics, vocabulary, sources, and style derived from those of contemporary ecclesiastical prose, it belongs to a school of late tenth/early eleventh century poetry that only now is coming to be recognized and defined.

The Old English Poem Seasons for Fasting: A Critical Edition provides a new text and translation of the poem, accompanied by an extensive introduction, commentary, and glossary. The introduction includes analyses of the poem’s manuscript origins, sources, language, meter, style, and structure. The text is collated with all previous editions. The commentary elucidates points of grammar and style, and justifies all editorial decisions. The glossary covers every instance of each word in the poem.

Since its discovery among the papers of Laurence Nowell in 1934, the poem has had only four editions, two of the text with basic notes, and two in doctoral theses with more commentary and analysis. This new edition brings the latest resources on manuscript study, lexicon (through the Concordance and Dictionary of Old English A-G), poetics, and cultural milieu to bear on this fascinating poem. The apparatus, including the glossary, will allow fellow scholars to extend these findings through links to their own work.

Medieval European Studies: Volume 15

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Mary P. Richards is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Delaware. The author of four books and numerous essays and reviews, she has focused on Anglo-Saxon and early Norman manuscripts and texts, especially those associated with Rochester Cathedral Priory and Old English laws. Her book Texts and Their Traditions in the Medieval Library of Rochester Cathedral Priory, drew together all of these interests and laid the foundation for her recent work on Seasons for Fasting. Since 1986 she has published eight essays on the laws, three on Rochester materials, and two on Seasons: “Prosaic Poetry: Late Old English Poetic Composition” in Old English and New: Essays in Language and Linguistics in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy, and “Old Wine in a New Bottle: Recycled Instructional Materials in Seasons for Fasting,” in The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation.

Reviews

Coming Soon.

Summary

Emory Kemp is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he also served as a chair and professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. This collection of essays encompasses over fifty years of his research in the field of the history of technology.

Within these twelve essays, Kemp describes and analyzes nineteenth century improvements in building materials such as iron, steel, and cement; roads and bridges, especially the evolution of the suspension bridge; canals and navigable rivers, including the Ohio River and its tributaries; and water supply systems. As one of the few practicing American engineers who also researches and writes as an academic, Kemp adds an important historical context to his work by focusing not only on the construction of a structure but also on the analytical science that heralds a structure’s design and development.

Contents

Foreword, Lance E. Metz 
Preface
Introduction, Robert Kapsch 

1. The 1959 Wheeling Custom House: A Harbinger of Iron and Steel Skeletal Framing
2. Charles Ellet Jr. (1810-1862): Portrait of an Engineer
3. A Thoroughfare Through the Howling Wilderness: The Weston & Gauley Bridge Turnpike, Emory L. Kemp and Janet K. Kemp
4. The Pulaksi Skyway—Railway Economic Theory Applied to Superhighway Design, Dara Callender and Emory Kemp
5. James Finley and the Origins of the Modern Suspension Bridge
6. French Movable Dams in America
7. Building the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway
8. Bejamin Franklin Thomas and the Introduction of the French Needle Dam into the United States
9. John Jervis and the Hydraulic Design of the Old Croton Aqueduct, Emory Kemp and Edward Winant
10. The Muskingum Navigation
11. French Movable Dams on the Great Kanawha River
12. The Little Kanawha Navigation, Larry Sypolt and Emory Kemp

Acknowledgments
About the Authors

Author

Emory Kemp has been a practicing engineer for more than half a century, as both a chartered civil engineer and structural engineer in Great Britain, and elected a distinguished engineer in the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he was also chair and professor of civil engineering in the College of Engineering, and a professor of history in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. He has served as president of the Public Works Historical Society, is a codirector of the Smithsonian Institution/West Virginia University Joint Project for the History of Technology, and has presented numerous papers and published many articles on industrial archeology, engineering, the history of technology, structural mechanics, and public works in journals such as the Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, Public Historian, Essays in Public Works History, Public Works Magazine, and Canal History and Technology Proceedings. He lives in Morgantown, WV.

Summary

It’s the 1960s. The Vietnam War is raging and protests are erupting across the United States. In many quarters, young people are dropping out of society, leaving their urban homes behind in an attempt to find a safe place to live on their own terms, to grow their own food, and to avoid a war they passionately decry. During this time, West Virginia becomes a haven for thousands of these homesteaders—or back-to-the-landers, as they are termed by some. Others call them hippies.

When the going got rough, many left. But a significant number remain to this day. Some were artisans when they arrived, while others adopted a craft that provided them with the cash necessary to survive. Hippie Homesteaders tells the story of this movement from the viewpoint of forty artisans and musicians who came to the state, lived on the land, and created successful careers with their craft. There’s the couple that made baskets coveted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery. There’s the draft-dodger that fled to Canada and then became a premier furniture maker. There’s the Boston-born VISTA worker who started a quilting cooperative. And, there’s the immigrant Chinese potter who lived on a commune.

Along with these stories, Hippie Homesteaders examines the serendipitous timing of this influx and the community and economic support these crafters received from residents and state agencies in West Virginia. Without these young transplants, it’s possible there would be no Tamarack: The Best of West Virginia, the first statewide collection of fine arts and handcrafts in the nation, and no Mountain Stage, the weekly live musical program broadcast worldwide on National Public Radio since 1983.

Forget what you know about West Virginia. Hippie Homesteaders isn’t about coal or hillbillies or moonshine or poverty. It is the story of why West Virginia was—and still is—a kind of heaven to so many.

Contents

• Preface
• 1. Traditional Handcrafts in Appalachia
• 2. The Serendipitous Timing of West Virginia’s Arts Outreach Program
• 3. Pacifists, Protesters, and Draft Dodgers
  -The Times, They Were a’Changin’
  -Joe Chasnoff – Furniture Maker
  -Tom Rodd – Attorney
  -John Wesley Williams - Furniture Maker
• 4. Hell No! We Won’t Go Either!
  -Ric MacDowell – Photographer and Community Activist
  -James Thibeault and Colleen Anderson – Cabin Creek Quilts
  -Dick and Vivian Pranulis – Wolf Creek Printery
  -Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer – Weaver, Social Activist, Dancer
  -Norm Sartorius – Spoon Maker/Sculptor
• 5. A Safe Place to Live
  -The Putnam County Pickers
  -This Land is Cheap Land 
  -Goin’ Up The Country 
  -Oh, The Hills…Beautiful Hills
  -Leaning on Friends
• 6. Living the Good Life
  -Looking for the Good Life
  -Jim Probst– Furniture Maker
  -Bill Hopen– Sculptor
  -Gail and Steve Balcourt – Candlemakers
• 7. Finding Utopia in Floe and Chloe
  -Keith Lahti – Potter
  -Tom and Connie McColley – Basketmakers
• 8. Communes and Intentional Communities
  - Living in Harmony
  -Joe Lung – Potter, Painter, Jeweler
  -Jude Binder – Dancer, Mask Maker, Teacher
  -Ron Swanberg – Leathersmith
• 9. Passing it Down
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Author

Carter Taylor Seaton is the author of two novels, Father’s Troubles and amo, amas, amat . . . an unconventional love story, numerous magazine articles, and several essays and short stories. She has directed a rural craft cooperative, was nominated for the Ladies Home Journal “Women of the Year 1975” award, and ran three marathons—Atlanta, New York City, and Marine Corps—after she was fifty. A ceramic sculptor living in Huntington, West Virginia, she is a 2013 Tamarack Foundation Fellowship winner, an award given to artisans in recognition of their lifelong achievement in the arts.

Reviews

“Outstanding. This story has come nowhere near being told with such depth and breadth until now.”
Paul Salstrom, author of Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region's Economic History, 1730-1940

“A distinctive story. Engaging. Fascinating.”
Dona Brown, professor of history, University of Vermont 

“You don't have to be born here to be a West Virginian.

“West Virginia takes people in and makes them her own, as truly her children as any in the history of the state.

“And that is what this book is about—about people who came to West Virginia in the late sixties and early seventies, people who came as pilgrims come—to a warm hearth, seeking the companionship of welcoming souls, the safety of the enfolding mountains, and the comfort of friends who encourage growth and creativity.

“Seeking intellectual and political freedom—the same holy grails that created West Virginia in the first place.

“These people did not start out to be West Virginians. In a time when young people were fleeing West Virginia to the clutter, press, and numbing dullness of big city factories, others were arriving. Others, who started out to be something else and the world interfered. They found themselves in a universe not of their creation and not of their liking. Perhaps West Virginia truly was not a part of that universe.

“And so they came.

“Hippies. And they were. On the surface. Young people with their bandanas, T-shirts, ragged shorts, and sandals. Hippies, yes, but, in this book, not hippie caricatures. Carter Taylor Seaton’s writing does not allow that. Ms. Seaton knew that to see them only on the surface was a mistake and a disservice to their contributions to the state they chose as home. These were, and are, real people with real depth and real lives, not people easily described and categorized. They are complex, varied, and as multi-talented as any group could possibly be. Using only the talents they brought with them, they sought, and created, riches that are beyond the reach of most of us. These are people who created to live. And, eventually, lived to create.

“These people are West Virginians, who fit within the spirit of West Virginia, and West Virginia should be extremely proud of them.

“And West Virginia should be extremely proud of Carter Taylor Seaton.

“This book was waiting to be written, and perhaps only Ms. Seaton could have written it. Her clear, direct prose is, perhaps, the only prose that is appropriate for this story. Her own creative background and her historian’s grasp and presentation of the details, moods, and unrest of the times take the book far beyond a mere description of arts and crafts, providing a marvelous addition to the understanding of what makes West Virginians the people they really are.

“Ms. Seaton's writing, like these people, is a treasure.”

Lee Maynard, author of the Crum Trilogy: Crum, Screaming with the Cannibals, and The Scummers and The Pale Light of Sunset

Summary

Moving through time and space, Out of Peel Tree unfolds the patterns of an Appalachian sensibility that reverberate everywhere: a fatalism balanced by humor and flinty, hard-won hope, an appreciation for the surprises of the everyday, and a search for love and home amid strange and familiar places and people.

This innovative debut novel reveals the lives of a far-flung contemporary Appalachian family through a web of delicate turning points. A child discovers a grandmother she never knew has died. A runaway teen schemes to start a new life in Texas. A man on parole falls hopelessly in love with a shoplifter. A woman receives a letter about her husband’s other wife. An old woman confronts a burglar with the help of her ghost-husband. United by a connection to their matriarch, these characters search at home and beyond to make a fresh sense of their changing lives.

As a novel in stories, Out of Peel Tree brings a new lyricism to the page and a new voice to American and Appalachian literature—a voice deeply inflected by the beauty of the natural world and by working-class grit.

Cast of Characters

Author

Laura Long has received a James Michener Fellowship, James River Writers Award, Donald Barthelme Fellowship, PEN-Texas Award, Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowships, and has published in magazines including The Southern Review and Shenandoah. She is the author of two books of poems, Imagine a Door and The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems. She teaches at Lynchburg College in Virginia and has taught in numerous community and university settings in Austin, Houston, and far west Texas.

Reviews

"In an elaborate mosaic that is both moving and uplifting, Out of Peel Tree tells the story of three generations of West Virginia women and their survival against the odds. This vivid, compact work is akin to an unforgiving family portrait that reveals everything—warts and all."
Clifford Garstang, author of What the Zhang Boys Know and 2013 recipient of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction.

“Oh you must read this book!  Laura Long, with a poet’s eye for sensory details and a storyteller’s keen sense of narrative tension, has written a novel ripe with longing. Her characters are fierce and tender, lost and hopeful, and always rooted—even if by the tiniest thread—to their Appalachian heritage. A wondrous read in great gulps, savored sentence by sentence.”
Laurie Lynn Drummond, author of Anything You Say Can And Will Be Used Against You, a PEN/Hemingway finalist and Texas Institute of Letters Best Book Award.

"Laura Long writes with such tenderness for her characters, for place, for the natural world. The images shimmer and the links delight. Out of Peel Tree is tatted into the finest lace—delicate, seamless, and strong. Is it any wonder this is a poet’s novel?"
Sara Pritchard, author of Help Wanted: Female and Crackpots

“Long is sensitive to the details of life and people. Her themes, characterizations, and story are built on a foundation of symbolism and imagery. She transforms the everyday—butter clogging bread, the shaking of cornflakes, an African Violet plant, wrinkles—into meaning. . . .This kind of layered writing creates the feeling that every word is important. Meaning reveals itself bit by bit, and the book invites a slower reading.”
Alicia Sondhi, ForeWord Reviews

Summary

With welcoming remarks by West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and West Virginia State Senator Brookes F. McCabe, Jr.

At the turn of the twentieth century, West Virginia was in the throes of its formative years as a state. After more than two decades of alternating its government seat between Wheeling and Charleston and the destruction of the Gothic Revival Capitol in Charleston by fire in 1921, a building commission was formed to create a permanent Capitol that would display the young state’s pride, wealth, and sophistication to the entire nation. To achieve these goals, the legislature approved a budget of more than $6.5 million for the design and construction of this statehouse and the Commission appointed by the Governor hired internationally renowned Cass Gilbert as its architect. After much debate, an impressive site along the shore of the Kanawha River in Charleston was selected as its location.

As one of the most influential architects of the early twentieth century, Cass Gilbert is known for structures such as the Woolworth Building, the United States Supreme Court building, and the Minnesota State Capitol. He believed architecture should reflect historic tradition and established social order, and this conservative philosophy is evinced within the classic form and proportions of the West Virginia State Capitol. As one of his final commissions, the West Virginia Capitol, with its golden “dome of majestic proportion,” marble interiors, ornamental reliefs, and rich woodwork, remains a distinguished example of noble simplicity in American architecture.

Cass Gilbert’s West Virginia State Capitol narrates the intricate story behind this architectural feat. Its close examination of the design, construction, and execution of this commission not only reveals the social, political, and financial climate of West Virginia during this period but also provides insight into the cultural importance of this public building. As Cass Gilbert’s design process is traced through unpublished documentation, drawings, and letters from several archives, the more than one hundred accompanying photographs—many historical and others newly commissioned for this book—divulge the subtle beauty of the Capitol complex. At the same time, an extensive analysis of historical and contemporary illustrations and primary sources further elucidates the architectural value of this structure.

With welcoming remarks by West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and State Senator Brooks F. McCabe, Jr., a prologue by art historians Bernard Schultz and Mary L. Soldo Schultz, and an epilogue by Chad Proudfoot, this revealing and comprehensive study examines the importance of this often overlooked architectural accomplishment, solidifying its significance as a socio-political symbol as well as its place within the history of American public architecture.

Contents

Author

Ann Thomas Wilkins retired as Associate Professor of Classics at Duquesne University. She is author of Villain or Hero: Sallust's Portrayal of Catiline and of articles on Bernini and Ovid, the Tullianum prison in Rome, and the relationship between the architecture and urban developments of the ancient Roman emperor Augustus and the 20th-century dictator Mussolini.

David G. Wilkins is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He served as both Director of the University’s Art Gallery and as Chair of the department. In 2005 he was honored by the College Art Association with their national Award for the Distinguished Teaching of Art History. His books include Donatello, Art Past/Art Present, History of Italian Renaissance Art, and A Reflection of Faith: St. Paul Cathedral, Pittsburgh, 1906-2006.

By 1921, when he was selected to design the West Virginia Capitol, Cass Gilbert had become one of the most famous architects in the world. While his international reputation was largely based on the Woolworth Building, for many years the world’s tallest building, his reputation in America was rooted in his Minnesota State Capitol. Gilbert was also recognized for the integrity of his practice and his ability to manage simultaneously the construction of large-scale projects. Although he was a contemporary of European and American architects who championed modernism, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Gilbert was a traditionalist whose writings and buildings—including the West Virginia State Capitol—demonstrate his profound dedication to the forms, motifs, symbolism, and proportions of the Classical style.

Reviews

 Coming Soon.

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