Appalachian History Series – Blue Diamond Coal Company: From First Creek to Scotia and Stearns On a March morning in 1976, the name Blue Diamond Coal Company suddenly appeared in headlines far from the mountains. Two methane explosions at the Scotia Mine in Letcher County killed twenty six men over the course of three days and put a relatively quiet Knoxville based coal firm under a national spotlight.

Appalachian History Series – Brashear’s Salt Works at Leatherwood: Salt, War, and Memory in Perry County Where Leatherwood Creek meets the North Fork of the Kentucky River, the valley opens just enough for a bottom, a road, and a cluster of houses. Today visitors see a memorial park, a ballfield, and green highway signs for Cornettsville. In the nineteenth century the thing that drew people to this bend in the river was not scenery but salt.

Appalachian History Series – United Mine Workers of America in the Appalachian Coalfields From the outside, the story of the United Mine Workers of America can look like a national saga of strikes, contracts, and Capitol Hill showdowns.

Appalachian History Series – Hindman Settlement School: Education, Music, and Community on Troublesome Creek At the forks of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, a cluster of school buildings once looked like a small village in its own right. For generations of eastern Kentucky families, the place was more than a campus. It was a clinic, a community center, a farm, and a front porch where ballads and stories moved from one generation to the next.

Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Ethel de Long Zande of Harlan, Kentucky On winter evenings at Pine Mountain Settlement School, the lights in the Chapel still dim for the Nativity Play. Students and neighbors move quietly into place, scripture and carols weave together, and for an hour the Harlan County hills hold a story that has been told in the same clear mountain cadence for more than a century.

Appalachian History Series – Smithville’s Dark Afternoon: The 2011 EF5 Tornado in Appalachian Mississippi On the afternoon of April 27, 2011, a violent tornado dropped out of the clouds over a small Appalachian town on the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway and turned a mile wide swath of Smithville, Mississippi into shattered foundations, stripped trees, and twisted metal.

Appalachian History Series – “Bloody Madison”: The Shelton Laurel Massacre and a Divided North Carolina Mountain County High on the ridges above the French Broad River, the road into Shelton Laurel still feels like a place that time would rather forget. The pavement narrows, the houses thin out, and the holler closes in until there are more trees than mailboxes and more old stories than street signs.

Appalachian History Series – Miners and Convicts in the Coal Creek Valley: The Coal Creek War of 1891 to 1892 Where Coal Creek cuts a narrow path between Walden Ridge and Vowell Mountain in Anderson County, Tennessee, the valley looks quiet. Houses and churches cling to the slopes, freight trains still follow the creek, and most travelers think of Rocky Top as a song title or a highway exit.

Appalachian History Series – Letters from the Fraterville Mine: The 1902 Explosion in Anderson County, Tennessee If you follow the narrow road up Coal Creek Valley in Anderson County, Tennessee, the ridges close in around you. To the east rises Walden Ridge, to the west Vowell Mountain.

Appalachian History Series – Coalfield Classrooms: The Kanawha County Textbook War and the Rise of the Culture Wars In the late summer of 1974, a school board meeting in Charleston turned into one of the most intense curriculum battles in American history. The fight began over a stack of language arts textbooks meant to bring multicultural voices into Kanawha County classrooms.

A pivotal moment in my academic career, or at least one I remember clearly, was when a very senior professor in the US sent me his book proposal for an academic book/monograph on the author Thomas Pynchon. The other thing he included was a crossed off list of all the presses he had courted with the proposal and with whom he had not succeeded.