Appalachian History A store that anchored a town When Pocahontas Fuel Company built out its Boissevain operation in Tazewell County, it gave the camp a brick centerpiece that was part supermarket, part office, and part civic hall. Period photographs from the Norfolk & Western Railroad collections confirm a substantial commissary complex standing at Boissevain in 1931 and again in December 1935, the very years that defined the camp’s heyday.

Appalachian History Series A company town takes shape In 1916 Pocahontas Fuel established a new camp on the Guyandotte and named it for company president Isaac T. Mann. Within a short time Itmann gained pre cut houses, two early frame stores, a theater, and segregated schools. The store site was graded in 1917 in anticipation of a larger, permanent building that would anchor the town.

How two brothers from Leslie County helped turn bluegrass into college-concert fare, took a state song nationwide, and brought it all back home to Hyden. Origins in Leslie County Bobby Osborne and his younger brother Sonny were born in Hyden, the county seat of Leslie County, Kentucky. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum lists both brothers’ birthplace as Hyden, with Bobby born December 7, 1931 and Sonny born October 29, 1937.

International mobility has long been framed as a hallmark of academic success. A postdoctoral stint in Europe, a fellowship in North America, or an exchange program in Asia is often seen as both a professional milestone and a rite of passage. The benefits are undeniable: exposure to cutting-edge facilities, immersion in new scientific cultures, and access to broader collaboration networks.

We’ve all peeked at that “Received, Revised, Accepted” section of a paper and instantly regretted it. Those dates often read less like a timeline and more like an archaeological record. And that, kids, is why one should NEVER ask a PhD student about the timings of their PhD. From all variables that define the fate of a PhD, one of the harder ones to control is indeed… the peer reviewing process (wow, on a blog that writes about peer reviewing.

Appalachian History Why Sycamore Shoals mattered In late September 1780, Patriot militia from the Holston and Watauga valleys answered a frontier alarm and converged on the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River, near present-day Elizabethton, Tennessee. There they set a firm rendezvous to carry the war over the mountains, find Major Patrick Ferguson, and break his Loyalist column.

To begin something is difficult; to keep something going is a different challenge. Even when it is the right thing to do, if it does not yield economic benefit in the short term, it may be difficult to sustain. Open science, including open-source software development and open data, is precisely such an example.

At rOpenSci, our Code of Conduct (CoC) committee works to support a healthy, welcoming, and inclusive community. A big part of this work is making sure that the processes we follow are transparent, consistent, and fair. Over the years, we’ve developed a set of templates that guide us through different stages of incident response and reporting.

Appalachian History On a cold Saturday morning in Anderson County, Tennessee, the Knoxville Iron Company’s Cross Mountain Mine No. 1 blew apart and turned the little coal town of Briceville into a scene of grief and rescue work that lasted ten long days. Eighty-four miners were dead, yet five men emerged alive after fifty-eight hours behind a hastily built barricade.

Breaking the Barrier of Women Coal Miners In the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, where coal seams carved both livelihood and hardship, Diana Baldwin carved history. At just 25 years old, in December 1973, she became one of the first two women, often credited as the first in a union mine, to work underground in a U.S. coal mine.

Appalachian Figures In the spring of 1948, eastern Kentucky sent a familiar courthouse figure to Washington. William Lewis had been a teacher, sheriff, prosecutor, and circuit judge across the upper Cumberland for half a century before he ever took a seat in the U.S. House. When he finally did, at age seventy-nine, he represented the old Ninth District for just the balance of one term, then stepped back home to London.