West Virginia University Studies in American History
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1909
Total Pages: 102
ISBN-13:
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Looming Civil War
Author: Jason Phillips
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-09-20
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0190868171
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class, shaped what people thought about the future and how they imagined it. Some Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions. Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the conflict. In this creative history, Jason Phillips explains how the expectations of a host of characters-generals, politicians, radicals, citizens, and slaves-affected how people understood the unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be short and glorious at the outset, a ninety-day affair full of fun and adventure. Much more than rational power games played by elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and darkened horizons that changed over time. Looming Civil War highlights how individuals approached an ominous future with feelings, thoughts, and perspectives different from our sensibilities and unconnected to our view of their world. Civil War Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil War changed more than America's future; it transformed how Americans imagined the future and how Americans have thought about the future ever since.
West Virginia University Studies in American History
Author: West Virginia University. Dept. of History and Political Science
Publisher:
Published: 1908
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWest Virginia: A History
Author: John Alexander Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1984-08-17
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0393243834
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJohn Alexander Williams's West Virginia: A History is widely considered one of the finest books ever written about the state. In his clear, eminently readable style, Williams organizes the tangled strands of West Virginia's past around a few dramatic events—the battle of Point Pleasant, John Brown's insurrection in Harper's Ferry, the Paint Creek labor movement, the Hawk's Nest and Buffalo Creek disasters, and more. Williams uses these pivotal events as introductions to the larger issues of statehood, Civil War, unionism, and industrialization. Along the way, Williams conveys a true feel for the lives of common West Virginians, the personalities of the state's memorable characters, and the powerful influence of the land itself on its own history.
Mountaineers Are Always Free
Author: Rosemary V. Hathaway
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781949199307
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"The West Virginia University Mountaineer isn't just a mascot: it's a symbol of West Virginia history and identity that's embraced throughout the state. Folklorist Rosemary Hathaway explores the figure's early history as a backwoods trickster, its deployment in emerging mass media, and finally its long and sometimes conflicted career-beginning officially in 1937-as the symbol of West Virginia University"--
Wheeling's Polonia
Author: William Hal Gorby
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781949199390
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWilliam Hal Gorby's study of Wheeling's Polish community weaves together stories of immigrating, working, and creating a distinctly Polish American community, or Polonia, in the heart of the upper Ohio Valley steel industry. It addresses major topics in the history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, while shifting from urban historians' traditional focus on large cities to a case study in a smaller Appalachian setting. Wheeling was a center of West Virginia's labor movement, and Polish immigrants became a crucial element within the city's active working-class culture. Arriving at what was also the center of the state's Roman Catholic Diocese, Poles built religious and fraternal institutions to support new arrivals and to seek solace in times of economic strain and family hardship. The city's history of crime and organized vice also affected new immigrants, who often lived in neighborhoods targeted for selective enforcement of Prohibition. At once a deeply textured evocation of the city's ethnic institutions and an engagement with larger questions about belonging, change, and justice, Wheeling's Polonia is an inspiring account of a diverse working-class culture and the immigrants who built it.
The Line Becomes a River
Author: Francisco Cantú
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-02-06
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 0735217726
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTEREST FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.
West Virginia University Studies in West Virginia History
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1909
Total Pages: 48
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTransforming the Appalachian Countryside
Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000-11-09
Total Pages: 367
ISBN-13: 0807862975
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.
Hillside Fields
Author: Bob Barnett
Publisher:
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 429
ISBN-13: 9781935978671
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWest Virginia's championship teams at WVU and Marshall and athletic superstars like Jerry West and Mary Lou Retton are familiar to all, but few know the untold story of sports in the Mountain State. Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia chronicles the famous athletic triumphs and heart-breaking losses of local heroes and legendary teams, recording the titanic struggles of a small state competing alongside larger rivals. Hillside Fields provides a broad view of the development of sports in West Virginia, from one of the first golf clubs in America at Oakhurst Links to the Greenbrier Classic; from the first girls basketball championship in 1919 to post Title IX; from racially segregated sports to integrated teams; and from the days when West Virginia Wesleyan and Davis & Elkins beat the big boys in football to the championship teams at WVU, Marshall, West Virginia State and West Liberty. Hillside Fields explains how major national trends and events, as well as West Virginia's economic, political, and demographic conditions, influenced the development of sports in the state. The story of the growth of sports in West Virginia is also a story of the tribulations, hopes, values and triumphs of a proud people.
