Blair Mountain: the forgotten civil war

images/voice_uploads/18_Mother-Jones.gif To the commissioners of Jefferson County, West Virginia it looked like a slam dunk. All they wanted to do was level the 80-year old former Jefferson County jail that sits on the main street of the sleepy community of Charles Town and has not housed any creatures except rats for years. The commissioners planned…

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Remembering the Past, Working for the Future

I am a child of Appalachia, and I say that with pride. I was born and raised in a coal camp up Cabin Creek Hollow near Kayford, West Virginia. As was often the practice then, my family shared a house with my paternal grandparents. The home in which I was born is still standing; but…

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Discovering the Underworld of Crayfish

images/voice_uploads/C.-chasmodactylus.gif You get a line and I’ll get a pole; We’ll all go down to the crawdad hole, Ho-ney, ba-by, mine. “The Crawdad Song,” southern American folk song Growing up in western North Carolina, I have two distinct memories related to crawdads- The Crawdad Song, a popular children’s tune sung by family members; and the…

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Lost Mountain

Riverhead Books. New York. 2006 250 pages. $24.95 The removal of entire mountain tops merely to extract coal is such a staggering idea that it’s often presented in religious metaphors – to move a mountain, after all, is an act most often associated with religious texts. The environmental devastation wreaked by mountaintop removal is so…

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Time Honored Songs of the Coal Miner’s Struggle

Harlan County USA Rounder 11661-4026-2 Protest songs are a time-honored method of American political expression. From Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era union anthems up through current fare by Neil Young and the Dixie Chicks, politics and music have long intermingled. Songs serve as vehicles for stating opposition, rallying support, and spreading news in a fashion more potent…

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