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Author : Jerry Bruce Thomas Publisher : University Press of Kentucky Page : 356 pages File Size : 17,56 MB Release : 1998-01-01 Category : History ISBN : 9780813120645
The Depression had already begun in West Virginia before the stock market crash of November 1929 and lasted until the coming of war in 1941. In tracing the responses of the people and government of West Virginia during the Depression, historian Jerry Thomas not only deals with politics and institutions but also tells about ordinary people during the worst conditions in the state's history. 18 photos.
Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural policy. Sara M. Gregg explores the redevelopment of the Appalachian Mountains from the 1910s through the 1930s, finding in this region a changing paradigm of land use planning that laid the groundwork for the national New Deal. Through an intensive analysis of federal planning in Virginia and Vermont, Gregg contextualizes the expansion of the federal government through land use planning and highlights the deep intellectual roots of federal conservation policy.
Upon entering the White House in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced an ailing economy in the throes of the Great Depression and rushed to transform the country through recovery programs and legislative reform. By 1934, he began to send professional photographers to the state of West Virginia to document living conditions and the effects of his New Deal programs. The photographs from the Farm Security Administration Project not only introduced “America to Americans,” exposing a continued need for government intervention, but also captured powerful images of life in rural and small town America.New Deal Photographs of West Virginia, 1934-1943 presents images of the state's northern and southern coalfields, the subsistence homestead projects of Arthurdale, Eleanor, and Tygart Valley, and various communities from Charleston to Clarksburg and Parkersburg to Elkins. With over one hundred and fifty images by ten FSA photographers, including Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, this collection is a remarkable proclamation of hardship, hope, endurance, and, above all, community. These photographs provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of West Virginians during the Great Depression and beyond.
How New Deal economic policies played out in the small town of Arthurdale, West Virginia Today, the U.S. government is again moving to embrace New Deal-like economic policies. While much has been written about the New Deal from a macro perspective, little has been written about how New Deal programs played out on the ground. In Back to the Land, author CJ Maloney tells the true story of Arthurdale, West Virginia, a town created as a "pet project" of the Roosevelts. Designed to be (in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt) "a human experiment station", she was to create a "New American" citizen who would embrace a collectivist form of life. This book tells the story of what happened to the people resettled in Arthurdale and how the policies implemented there shaped America as we know it. Arthurdale was the foundation upon which modern America was built. Details economic history at the micro level, revealing the true effects of New Deal economic policies on everyday life Addresses the pros and cons of federal government economic policies Describes how good intentions and grand ideas can result in disastrous consequences, not only in purely materialistic terms but, most important, in respect for the rule of law Back to the Land is a valuable addition to economic and historical literature.
In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
Author : Ronald D. Eller Publisher : University Press of Kentucky Page : 492 pages File Size : 21,32 MB Release : 2008-10-24 Category : History ISBN : 0813138639
This award-winning history examines the politics of progress in America through a close look at industrial development in Appalachia since WWII. Appalachia has played a complex role in the unfolding of American history. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of material production and technology decried what they saw as a the isolation and backwardness of the region and sought to “uplift” its people through education and industrialization. In Uneven Ground, Ronald D. Eller examines the politics of development in Appalachia while exploring the idea of progress as it has evolved in America. “Passionate, clear, concise, and at times profound,” this volume demonstrates that Appalachia's struggle to overcome poverty, to live in harmony with the land, and to respect the value of community is a truly American story (Chad Berry, author of Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles). Winner of the Appalachian Studies Association’s Weatherford Award and the Southern Political Science Association’s V.O. Key Award
Author : Richard B. Drake Publisher : University Press of Kentucky Page : 304 pages File Size : 45,80 MB Release : 2003-09-01 Category : History ISBN : 0813137934
Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.
Author : George T. Blakey Publisher : University Press of Kentucky Page : 271 pages File Size : 39,10 MB Release : 2014-07-15 Category : History ISBN : 0813162130
The Great Depression and the New Deal touched the lives of almost every Kentuckian during the 1930s. Fifty years later the Commonwealth is still affected by the legacies of that era and the policies of the Roosevelt administration. George T. Blakey has written the first full study of this turbulent decade in Kentucky, and he offers a fresh perspective on the New Deal programs by viewing them from the local and state level rather than from Washington. Thousands of Kentuckians worked for New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Projects Administration; thousands more kept their homes through loans from the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Tobacco growers adopted new production techniques and rural farms received their first electricity because of the Agricultural Adjustment and Rural Electrification administrations. The New Deal stretched from the Harlan County coal mines to a TVA dam near Paducah, and it encompassed subjects as small as Social Security pension checks and as large as revived Bourbon distilleries. The impact of these phenomena on Kentucky was both beneficial and disruptive, temporary and enduring. Blakey analyzes the economic effects of this unprecedented and massive government spending to end the depression. He also discusses the political arena in which Governors Laffoon, Chandler, and Johnson had to wrestle with new federal rules. And he highlights social changes the New Deal brought to the Commonwealth: accelerated urbanization, enlightened land use, a lessening of state power and individualism, and a greater awareness of Kentucky history. Hard Times and New Deal weaves together private memories of older Kentuckians and public statements of contemporary politicians; it includes legislative debates and newspaper accounts, government statistics and personal reminiscences. The result is a balanced and fresh look at the patchwork of emergency and reform activities which many people loved, many others hated, but no one could ignore.
How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.
Seventy-five years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, here for the first time is the remarkable story of one of its enduring cornerstones, the Works Progress Administration (WPA): its passionate believers, its furious critics, and its amazing accomplishments. The WPA is American history that could not be more current, from providing economic stimulus to renewing a broken infrastructure. Introduced in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment and desperation ruled the land, this controversial nationwide jobs program would forever change the physical landscape and social policies of the United States. The WPA lasted eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 8½ million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Now this fascinating and informative book chronicles the WPA from its tumultuous beginnings to its lasting presence, and gives us cues for future action.