Department are very happy to be presenting a talk by steve, professor of history at florida university. The university. He works and teaches on environmental history, history of capitalism, agrarian studies and other topics interest objectsubjects. Hes a writer of other works including the lean earth soil Anand Society in 19th century 1y america, the great delusion, a mad inventor stuck in the tropics into the utopian origins of economic growth. Tonight, hes going to be talking to us about his new book that will be released on november 21, just in time for the holidays, so please mark your calendars. The book is of course the ordeal of appalachia as you can see by the picture of its lovely cover. And i am excited about the talk and thrilled to have him with us at the new school. Theres been a lot of talk obviously about the places left behind, the sort of poor rural communitiecommunity, the white s who voted for trump, you know, and th they sense that the Historical Context of the postindustrialization was something that we had to grapple with and understand and to understand those issues what he is showing in this case is a 400 year story of dispossession and dispossessindispossessing into f appalachia but needs to be understood by way of the particular relationship to the land and as i said several centuries of integration into global, historical forces. And the book i think is going to help us to deeply contextualize some of the political questions that we are looking at today to try to understand for those of us of course who live in urban environments and see these kinds of locations and populations as very far away from our own experiences as it may be the case here in new york city. Thank you very much to steven fostephenfor joining us, and pln me in welcoming him. which mac i just wanted to launch right into this. Its a book about culture and how the members hunted and gathered and farmed. We know something about appalachia. Its the region of parallel Mountain Range as and where people lived in small valleys called hollows often known as codes. If no one is actually a road outside of morgantown West Virginia where i went during the research of the book. And this is where i took a walk one day and felt that it was in some ways kind of symbolic of the story that i wanted to tell. But it isnt identical with its mountains. This is the Mountain Range itself which you can see goes from northern alabama all the way up into new england in some parts it is a geological region that is defined by the blue ridge back there and the entire atlantic plane leads right into it. There is a large plane from out of space that looks like tissue paper with all of these thousands of little towns and valleys and rivers and branches. Its more than that and we know that. It is a region that is defined more by its history and its geology. In other words the southern mountains may be geological, but appalachia is hard to define and there are many competing nations nobody really agrees. There isnt a great distinction in the culture, the language the people in the mountains and those who lived on the low lands of the south. We know of course that its where coal comes from. We know it as the location of the mountain top removal mining. We know it as that as a place e the rivers run and where the coal ash that come flooding into town and cause enormous havoc and it is a place of water contamination which happened just recently. So in the ones in, its about how certain parts of southern mountains became this region called appalachia. Asked the question when did the region by that name appear and what historicaup here andwith hd environmental relationships are the key to creating it and other questions what is progress is it certain people were designed as being incapable of it outside of it, whatever it is and how did capitalism shaped the sense of progress in how we use certain landscapes and human labor, how does this play out . I cant tell you about all of that this evening, but im going to try to give you a sense of the book as i looked more closely at one particular argument within it. And that is the industrial removal of the Forest County industrial extraction of taking lumber was a crucial event in the takeover of the mountains and across the creation of appalachia. That is the scheme of the book that i am going to take out for you. This is going to be a central image for the lecture and i will show it to you more than once. It is essential for the book itself. Its the document im going to try to make sense of by creating a rich context. It is just a map. Anybody that studies the sort of things planned in the United States and europe it is really no big deal. It is a spatial record of private property. But if we think about what its done that doesnt fit as well as what it does, then the math tells us all kinds of things about the history between the 1790s and the 20th century. So, the map includes coal deposits depicted here i think completely imaginary. That is theoretical but when you data down to the different places that you will reach these layers it tells you in its detail the distances of certain points in the mountains from baltimore, new york city, philadelphia and each of these has the name of a land owner written on it and in some cases the original land owner going back to the 1760s and 1770s. George washington is one of those names on the map. What struck me about it an thisd why i elevated it into the reason i am elevating it to you is that it is a twodimensional representation of the mountains from the point of view of the people who value it only in terms of the private property. The way that an investor looks at the southern mountains and their view is actually depicted on the map. But the way the residents look at it is like this. It is a twodimensional vision that doesnt match and threedimensional ecological reality, they are two different things. And in fact, we need the landowners here underneath their funny shapes but sometimes all the water forces and sometimes rises through the streets in which nothing is through the streets to this. Of those that found their way to the mountains in the 1750s and 1830s or so came up for a number of reason but many of them wanted to reproduce the world of Northern Europe. They were the legacies of scots, irish. They brought an economic culture that was entirely different from that of the logging and Mining Companies that came later in this coalition between the agrarian economy and the capitalist economy is the central conflict in the book. But let me back up. What exactly do i mean by an agrarian . I interpret the settlers as a part of a broad calvary. It is a term that includes peasant. One thing that struck me about writing the book. Yet we have a hard time finding the language. But its a much higher portion of the worlds population that lived just a century or two ago. And yet it is difficult to find and explain the way that i have to explain to students exactly what it is that i mean we have misconceptions. Its the main purpose of the agrarian house. They predate commodities and make all kinds of stuff and raise things for themselves to eat and consume, but that isnt all they do. They exchange all sorts of things. Whatever they produce but they dont need, the exchange. They loved exchange and money. The reason is baptized to cool stuff far away from where you live. It ties you to the greens that are not isolated. They are heavily engaged in markets and they sell a portion of it and then they go back and produce the same commodities a and. Even though they love money, the agrarian households do not organize themselves. It is an attribute of the household, but that is not its primary purpose. This is crucial, because as the money becomes the primary purpose, all other things change. You might say that money is a fantastic sleeve and a bad master and be understood that and kept it as an attribute. If the cash crops failed and if the merchant closeparen, they are fine. Money buys cool stuff, the stuff that you want, but you can live to some extent nowadays. All the stories are more complicated and i cant go into the complex of these. Households that begin to use money to some extent can become dependent but cant go into that. Most of all, for our purposes tonight, the most important thing i have to tell you about agrarian is they require the ecological resources that give them food and commodities without expecting anything from them except labor. In the area that they didnt know to some extent managed to gather so i break up the products and uses into these large categories of outfield and infield and what you see is what start with the infield. So you would grow Something Like rice, you could feed your animalit to youranimals and diso whiskey. The garden is for all of the delights, all the fruits and vegetables that you love each year trading with people near and far away that you have a sense of those like those known to the region and those that are very much beloved wristwatches. We are accustomed to looking at these species into saying that it is a farce. It is a farm. If you dont have that, something has to replace that. Now this is what i would call the outfield if you will, and that is for hunting and forage food so that is what the forest gets you. This requires very little labor and the payback is huge. Then you came back with large things. It wasnt the kind of poverty or. We would think of scavenging for those desperation. That is misunderstanding what it was. It looked for every single year they made all kinds of stews and they were consumed with eggs and i understand you can buy them in Brooklyn Today at the farmers market, so evidently you can package them in new york city which is remarkable. Heres the thing. There is always a market attribute. It is in a form that is nonperishable, stable value traded like i currency wherevert went. It is parallel in the woods and they walked to the market. Its money on a host. Did they consume some of the cattle and pigs yes they did but they turned it into money dealing with merchants say towards baltimore or in the other way towards the ohio river. Again, it gives including commodities for money without costing money. Nothing in the agrarian worker can cost money. Now, however, that would be very nice if they were all kind of neat like that, but it wasnt. There was a contradiction built into the ecological basis of and guess what, it wasnt really a commons. It was a property. It didnt really belong to them. Not as the state of virginia saw it and the state of West Virginia. It didnt belong to them. Beginning at the end of the french and indian war, the governors of virginia granted enormous chunks of land to people like George Washington and Robert Morris. There are two things that you should know about this land. First is the grantees themselves, George Washington, Robert Morris almost never took possession of the land. They didnt go there to live on it in some cases their entire lives they never even visited it. They were absentee landowners in the purest sense of the word. Second, when they did pay any attention to that land, George Washington had this piece of land on the river right near charleston West Virginia. The present town near so when they granted to him can be granted the land to washington over the mountains. He hired his own surveyor a guide by the name of crawford he sent him out of there and basically said i dont know what this is. I want you to survey only the flat land. And by the way, if you get caught crossing, we never even met. Because it was illegal for him to go there and do this after 1767. Crawford went and he made a survey from this crossover to the tree to the island down there and he voiced washingtons initial point of all things, the cherry tree. He came back and said there is your land and washington said it is flat. What does that mean . It leaves Everything Else but washington owned and notice all of those surrounding the piece of land today when i it comes at an elevation of 200 feet, but he didnt care about that at all. He didnt care about it or have it surveyed. It wasnt that. Nobody cared about this. So, if you are someone looking to get away from slaveholders, if you are someone looking for hunting as the least of your concerns, this is the ideal place for you to find a place to live. It was sort of a cloak of invisibility in the sense that you could go ou up into the mountains, take what he wanted to add someone like Robert Morris was George Washington who clearly didnt care if you were there, if they did they have no way to pry you out. The second thing i want to tell about this land is that it has no value. It is an extremely delicate sport and Robert Morris owned milliononmillions of acres in te southern mountains and died poor and in debt. He bought the land on speculation and its never increased in value. It was a gigantic wilderness liability. So, they held onto it. And i will get back to that. Where does this lead us flex by the 1790s, mountain households tended not to own the land they were on which was regarded as a vast commons by which they took everything they need. They wrote their own deeds as it belonged to them. Writing duties for the piec gooe of land that the state of virginia said they did not own. This became commonplace. But the thing is there was the semantic belief that was a part of the United States was represented by alexander hamilton. They wanted the backwoods to join the atlantic economy. Someone like hamilton had a very different notion about the United States and his rifle, thomas jefferson. But jefferson wanted to buy as much land as possible. Why the louisiana country when people would say that the united beats cant govern it. It is too drastic an area. He said that is exactly how i want it. We want a place where they can escape because what we want is the weakened Central Government even though the constitution has defined a strong way. He has an entirely different view. For alexander hamilton, the constitution needed to govern in every single square mile. He wanted the invention of the modern nationstate where every single space would be governed anwith the governedand the law y everywhere. As the unite United States as a territory and has an economy. So the way to get people to join the political entity and to find them together economically. He didnt like those pioneers and those people out there. They used the money on their terms when they had it and when they didnt. They made whiskey and sold it down the highway an and bought t they wanted and produced the other crops for subsistence. And he said and he believed that in time, they would evolve. It would follow the theory of stages, so popular among the Atlantic League success ultimately, they would get there. Id 1790s, they have not gotten there yehad not gottentha different idea. Hamilton proposed and enforced the whiskey tax. In large part to the worst people of the mountains to get money and use money. They said we do not have the money to pay the tax. He said if the tax must be paid in money you will get the money to pay the tax. He lost the fight. The same mountain folk found themselves in an increasingly difficult position. They one around number one from the elite, but the class was landing in the occupied nationstate and the land and labor produce surplus value, to have an exchange value, to be valued and many turn kind of came together as a kind of vice. It was tightened in the next generation. By the 1840s, and especially after the civil war, they confronted a formidable form of capitalism that was represented by George Washington and Robert Morris because rather than speculate in the mountain land, the next generation of capitalists were interested in the project industrial extraction. Steam engines, trust me, there was a demand. The demand side was there and that is why it had value. The title map is a sense of the investors in various stages of acquiring the land from, George Washington speeds, and selling it to the logging and Mining Companies. The names on the map in some cases are Mining Companies, but in many others it is a bank of individual investor. They have no interest in exploring the land themselves. That is when the speculation paid off. They turned around and sold it to the Mining Holding company of the hundreds of the mining corporations that were chartered by the state of West Virginia. This frantic rapid colonization of the mountains after the civil war called the scramble for appalachia which by the way was happening at the same time. So, thats fine, but the scramble wouldnt have been possible. It wouldnt have happened without the states. The state that i i am most interested in is West Virginia. West virginia was created and associated from virginia in 1863 during the civil war is the only state to be formed after seceding from the state. For our purposes, the reason of the formation and West Virginia is important to understand. The first thing is the state had the power to claim legal primacy over the governments. The state can claim to overrule that the county government sets if you are a cool company and you set up shop in the county and they say actually, we are not interested in having the development here. We declare it to be illegal. States can pass the laws that say you cant do that. The state decides Economic Activity and where it has been. This has a parallel which i will not go into. But the states when it the number of their clients in this way a corporation can deal with the governor and legislature and doesnt have to do with the people in other counties, because they dont matter. They cant stop it. Second, it has the power to create a judicial system where suddenly disputes. This is a world in which people sue and use the courts vigorously all the time. The judicial system in which they would be sympathetic to the industry is crucial and that happened by 1890. For et 90, the courts in virginia offered the same after et 90 they did not. And of course, it has the power to charter the corporations and attract capital. So, this is what the merchants way up north in the panhandle between ohio and pennsylvania, they are the ones that hashed out this whole thing. Its morits more of a conspiraa democratic movement. And you didnt have to deal with slavery. It didnt have to deal with the slaveholders whom they were beholden to two because you could see in virginia they had a notion that they were going to develop all of the medals by sending their slaves up there to take the money from all of the resources that settle. That is when the merchants, many of them that were union sued sympathizers were active during the war. They wanted to seize control of the Natural Resources and West Virginia and in the western counties for themselves. And so, they created their own state. The scramble required governors, senators who acted in favor of capital as well. It is not too much to say and in fact i dont think its an exaggeration at all to say that Johnson Camden has one constituents, a senator from West Virginia john d rockefeller. The only person he represented i dont think he wouldve disagreed with that. We actually said his purpose was to liquidate as much as possible the Natural Resources of West Virginia and put them into private hands. They did try to gloss over to paper over what they were actually doing. Heres my point recently. It is that the capital of the state act together in tandem and we see it happening, not on a national level, we see it in West Virginia and believe me there are abundant examples that i point out and together they set out to rent value from the mountains and from households very different from washington or even hamilton. Hamilton wanted to tax people he wanted to tax the product of their land and labor but the next generation of capitalists they didnt want the product of the land, they wanted to own the land and redefine its purpose. They wanted to dispossess people of the land and hire them back for wages as workers what they wanted was enclosure. We think of enclosure as something that happened a long time ago in england. We think of enclosure is something that took place between the 16th century in the 19th century in england. A lot of americans dont think there was enclosure here and the indian wars were anything up but. It was a 400 year process of enclosure. But by enclosure i mean the legalized, legal dispossession, first practice and in Great Britain between the 16th and about the 19 centuries in which the board from the common lands in order to declare that land the very first point property. Private property never existed before. Like the title mount from West Virginia this map obliterates the present landscape, indicating that property and its an analog to what ive been showing you. The map in which you have almost nothing of a landscape in which you cant see is that there were villages there in the field took an entirely different shape and there was a longstanding century present world places like this that was obliterated by the landowners. Enclosure is essential to capitalism but it didnt happen everywhere the same way. It didnt even happen in Great Britain the same way every place and it must point out that this is an extremely subtle movement. How did it happen in the southern mountains . I will give you four elements of this american dispossession. The first is that in almost every instance in every dispossession it acquires an intellectual process to proceed. You cant dispossess someone just like you cant there cant be an act of genocide without a period of time in which people become illegitimate in their practices or in their possession of something. That may be the possession of their citizenship but in this case is the possession of their land, none were racialized, they were reinvented as white trash, back with, primitive, illegitimate. The chapter that i have on this, the thing that got me is how to get from daniel boone to hillbilly. How do we get from the hero of the backwoods, someone was subject of dimestore novels, he was a legend in his own time and he was placed on the floor of the house of representatives. How do you get from daniel boo boone, the first novels about daniel boone for coming out right after his death in the 1840s, 30 years later, i mean, 20 years later you have an entirely different view emerging of the southern mountaineer like the georgia crack. This is an astonishing period of time for these people to fall down this cultural gradient. So, by the way, very similar to what happened in the southern tribes, the turkey right before the dispossession and i draw this parallel is they were delegitimized in much the same way. There was all kind of fascinating parallels between poor whites of the southern mountains and American Indians. They were often talked about in much the same way, i just wanted to throw that out there. The second thing is that not Mountain People had insecure title or no title to their land at all. This is what ive been saying. That is what youre looking at are two kinds of deeds. George washington d wouldve been this one, imagine with this stamp the governor on it and its all very official and recorded in the state house in virginia, right . What about this other deed. Anyone who is literate would write a deed anyones past a piece of land to your son is getting married to someone in the next hollow and he wanted to set them up for their first home they will take this in your building something and you write a deed. Sometimes deed did not record the sale of land but they really showed how it bounced around within households and it was the transfer of land very likely for any money changing hands at all. The point is that will get is a twotiered land system of official deeds that are sitting in a drawer in new york city and what happened when the person basically was the grandson basically says we have a land in the mountains and their school on it and we want to go back there. What i want to say and i go into great detail in the book is that the states themselves recognize this they created an inferior right to trade those deeds only long enough so that when the capital class was already to see the land they were able to do it. The house with themselves wait a minute. The commodities they created had declined in quantity and quality by the 1890s, the preparation had gone up but they were unable to spread out there their farms became smaller and smaller. This is not something that i want way and its something that i go into more detail and that is there was a crisis that was basically internal to the Mountain Culture itself. They needed to intensify and they needed to do certain things given their circumstances that they either cannot or did not want to do. Some people in the mountains made the transition and they became highly commercial cattle farmers and cattle dealers as an example. Some became successful farmers but very many of them did not. They are terrible land, it was extremely steep, the commodities were plunging in value as the same things were being produced in illinois, wisconsin, minnesota and they were losing basically every end. They have been taught . But they have improved . People from the adversity experiment come to them with all of their knowledge by the way, this entire University Experiment station complex was rocketing, founded in every state. They were educating scientists and agents who go out and help people improve the way they cultivated everything. Why didnt they come to the southern mountains and teach people how to plant more productive gardens . They did not. He wrote them off. Few people at the time is why. Most of all, you want to know the biggest thing . How it is that they lost their land, what was really the essence of the dispossession it was the destruction of the forest itself. The numbers of this are simply astonishing. By one estimate lumber Companies Cut 500 million feet of lumber a year during the 1890s, that decade alone. 197 in 19,141,000 separate bills turned out 1 billion feet of lumber a year. One board feet is 1 inch square. The total take of the mountains into the 1920s was about 30 billion board feet of lumber. This is a steam skitter which i described that the forest landscape, a locomotive with all of these tendrils like a spider when the cruise cut the trees these cables go out and attach to the tree and the steam engine basically pulls them in and upgrade, downgrade, wherever. Hundreds. You could hear it working and was basically taking it and then a train would pick it up and put it onto a flat bed of a railroad car not far away and this is a coordinated effort to take all the stuff out. The taking of the forest. This is a big. It accomplished and enclosure all by itself. It not only created an alien landscape in which the people had no purpose and no way to make a living but it actually, literally, put people out of the mountains. Remember enclosure did two things. It created land is private property and it dispossessed people so that they had to live and work for wages. Enclosure takes many different forms. As the destruction of the mountain did both of those things. As their capacity to create commodities collapsed check this out. This is davie West Virginia. When i saw this picture which is a government photograph of the 1930s i said what is a picture of nevada doing in a collection having to do with West Virginia. Its not nevada. Youre looking at a completely deforested landscape. Its like the lorax. When the [inaudible] cuts the last three this is what this is. There was no trees left to cut. It almost defies, in almost defies explanation. This was a densely forested place and this was happening people of the mountains took jobs anticipated in the liquidation itself. Why did they do that . Remember when i said they left money . Heres the thing. You can be an agrarian and you can live in a subsistence household without money but its hard in mean. Money connects you to a transactional realm of things far away, cool stuff, dishes George Washingtons picture on them. Pools that you cannot buy. Dresses made in boston. The people in the mountains for consumers of consumer goods and they wanted these things. Money allows you to do that. How do you place money when the source of money, remember it cost you know money, ecological base when it disappears how do you replace that . They believed that wages could do that. They believed that they could go to work on a logging crew and wages remain an attribute of the Household Economy but not is court. You cant blame them for wanting to make it work. Its just that it didnt work. The wages in the wage world sucked them in. The lumber companies had opened the door to the outside world, contemporary observer he observed freaks open the door to the outside world and they became aware of things, things that money can buy, things that made life easier or harder. Things to see, things to do, the isolation had ended and they had opened an exit they had opened the door, a door we were forced to use as an exit from our ancestral homes. After the exit the door was closed to us. We were given visitors rights to the land, to come and look, but not to stay. I have a few summary points. Wages did allow them into a larger world of things, especially if you are one of the first people hired on the logging crew or in a coal mine, likely wages were a revelation and there are accounts of people coming home with bags of toys for christmas things that no one in the household had ever seen before. Like i said, money is a good place for the bad master. It was a cool replacement of ecological base because currency is a monolithic form of value. It is issued by someone, it is issued against your labor, it is good only for your labor but it replaced forms of value that were diverse. When you made whiskey, you printed your own money. When you produced cattle you did the same thing. These things treated for currency and in a world that was extraordinarily diverse in what could be accepted as currency. But with money they lost control of value. The value was determined by the coal company that you should describe, by the United States that issued the dollar and when it became associated only with your labor and the value your labor produced you fell into a trap and it was no way to get back. They could never produce enough money, they were never paid enough money, i mean to say, to buy the standard of living they wanted to have. Losing control of the function meant losing control of the landscape in their labor because of the tide. Losing control of their commodities and even the way their households functioned, this was a revolution in gender relationship. Its amended and what men were responsible for taste and what women did and what women were responsible for changed. Mountaineers had lousy options by 1900. They can move to mining and lumber camps like West Virginia pictured here. Many believed that they could earn enough money to get back to their rich and hollow and im only doing this for a little while and will only be here for six months and then they would say oh yeah, we said the same thing and we been here six years. That didnt work out. They could stay in the declining comment and hunt small animals and basically start. This is the agrarian household circa 1930 when the new deal agent showed up they said this people have always been poor and this is how theyve always been because they never saw them at the peak of their power and they never were invited to dinner at the enormous spread of food that they were capable of producing. With huge divide he and diversity from garden and forced when they showed up this is the family look like. Living from the garden and only a garden is no way to live. It doesnt work. The garden they had forest, field and garden. They lost two legs of the chair and they only had the garden and you cant do it. The people who hung on this is what they look like. This is why we need history otherwise we might assume that they always live that way and its like walking into a place where a hurricane had come through in the city is in complete devastation in thinking that the people there had always lived in ruins. Some would think that didnt you know a hurricane happened here last week and it is like that. The last thing they could do is leave. They could go down what is the only highway. Its not a specific highway, its any road of appellation. It usually led to ohio, michigan, illinois and led to the places where people from southern mountains went to work in factories to make automobile parts cars, flint michigan. This is where i have to leave it but the story does continue. The Great Depression brought a number of new policies intended to resettle dispossessed families and what the new deal called subsistence homestead. After the depression the Appalachian Region commission basically undertook a Massive Development project like something that would be going on in india or mexico. They had mixed results. I think my real point is that appalachia has a history and its history even more than its place in its place having gone to certain events and its a set of social relations and most production unfolding in a corner of the Atlantic World and is one of other stories of the collision of an agrarian economy and capitalistic economy that happened all over the Atlantic World. Is that it happened in these mountains in the United States that we have to understand it. Thank you. [applause] i am happy to answer your questions. [inaudible] hello, thank you so much. That was riveting. Sends a tragic index ability to the story you tell in the money in the participation and the consumer economy is so great that these farmers virtually welcome their own dispossession not aware they will not be able to reproduce what they left behind. I want to know where their alternative scenarios and you beg the question of agency and did any of these people have insight into what was happening to them and finding effective ways in diligently or collectively to resist and how comparable is this to declare cutting of the amazon or devastation of the resources and is at the same basic story whether it appalachia or the amazon or is there a significant difference based on local circumstances . Yeah, same basic story. I like to acknowledge something is the same basic story and then to say we have to understand the details and what makes it unique or else we dismiss these cases because they can need to tell us something. About resistance, i was looking for resistance. There were all kinds of reasons for how it is they had a lot of trouble getting together. Even though there would be a group of people to kin or live in a set of hollows they often found it very difficult to organize against Something Like a clearcut or a coal mine. The counties and the states were pitched against them and there were lots of people from the mountains essentially came at a certain positions where they then began to see the world from a point of view of development. Remember their own economy were collapsing. They saw this money and these jobs as opportunities even at the same time they thought people were losing their lands. I think it happened quickly and i think they were awfully duped as an example you mineral rights of someone selling mineral rights but what would happen is an attorney would come to the farm and they would say you want to stay here, right . No, we dont want to sell this land we want to stay here. Why dont you sell us the rights of the coal underneath your farm and you can stay and you dont have to leave and you just have to own what is hunt hundreds of feet under your farm and they would say really . It was given to them in a way that was confusing and was meant to bamboozle them and they would sign away a right to something they would hold tenuously in the first place. They didnt understand what it would mean for these companies to come and act on that right. Finally, something i didnt describe is that they often sold it for a price they thought was a good price. It is this dispossession . I would say it is. When a coal company with millions of dollars pulled that same spot over the next century they were paid 3 an acre i would say they were ripped off. But some of them did sell and it doesnt stop there. People were given a chunk of money dont know how to make it make more money and that when they burn through it they have nothing. In other words they didnt know how to use that money in any other way but to spend it and some were insightful and one of them said the money were paid we cant take it and by what they have the rails there is no way for us to basically have the same standard of living by taking the money and we dont have any that. There are many different ways that they lost. [inaudible] no, no, no, not at all. Great talk. You mention this intriguing line about the parallels for the disposition and im curious in the most broad terms and how much race in any form played in these interactions. The sense of these elites you mentioned likening this group of whites to some sort of racial other or actual interaction and enslave people and that was a part of the discourse. Im extremely empathetic to the people i studied and they were not empathetic to many other people. They did not like either American Indians or africanamericans. Their opposition to slavery had nothing to do with racial equality. There is that. But i said that daniel boone enjoyed a remarkable career as a frontier hero but he was really an odd exception in that is if you went back to the colonial. The 17 and the 18th century the people who lived out in the frontier word deeply, deeply suspected and hated by colonial officials, accused of every kind, accused of cannibalism. They were utterly depicted as monsters. There was a moment in which the ambitions of the United States to take over the prairies and the mountains from the british and then later from American Indians coincided with the people in that part of the world were doing anyway and when the interest of the United States and interest of the mountain folk dictated they became pioneers. The pioneers like in the work of Francis Parkman was a very brief period that they enjoyed that kind of place. Before and after they were trashed. That is what is odd about the story. The racialized very early for that word existed for later on in the 20th century it was a different language and you can see in the writing about appalachia the word degeneracy. They were degenerate and they were described as being having different kinds of spaces and they had long angular pieces and long bones and there were lengthy and awkward and they were literally grotesque. In how they looked and moved. Certainly they were considered white but when you visualize a group of people you deprive them of any possibility that they would enjoy inclusion in the white elites and it was very easy to depict them as being completely different and that is what happens. Yes sir. [inaudible] would the over briefing or overpopulation without industrial fertilizer and things like that have inevitably resulted, albeit by a different course, then the same result. They were in trouble for all this happened. Yes. [laughter] they were in trouble. They were. Their solution to density was always to go over the next county or state of these people settled more land than perhaps any other humans in human history, more rapidly. They really began in the lower Delaware River south of philadelphia in new sweden, in the 17, 1680s and they exploded and in they were in organ. Like an arcadian idea which you would have liked to continued but it didnt happen that way and now i am thinking of the way Extraction Industries are bamboozling people into letting them fracking in their lands which causes and same idea. Will pay you money what you think is a lot of money and will arsenic down it and to put it differently they were a land extensive agrarian culture. Could they learn to get more out of their gardens and they learn to produce things more intensively . Everyone does understand that thats how garden works. They did get it. But they werent willing to give up wanting and forest practices. It was so crucial to they were that they simply cannot make the transition and it was a lot of their undoing. There were people who internalized some of the functions of the forest in other words instead of grazing their cattle out in the woods they produced and they started to see them and basically coordinate feeding cattle and in fact, began in mountain virginia and they did do that and they took that cattle there were a lot of people who didnt though. There were advances of science who overwhelmed the agrarian ideal. And it was science and then it was aligning with agriculture that also worked against them. No bank loan the money. There would be no credit. They could use no machinery for the lift. There were all sorts of ways in which they were losing. Its weird to hear my own history spoken back. What county are you from . They were pioneers and eventually moved to indianapolis out of kentucky. Very weird its weird to not know any of this. How was it taught you in grade school . It wasnt. Parts of it was most of what i understood and ive only understood recently about what it means to come from appalachia culture is has been reading history books and political activists from appalachia, and yeah yeah, that must be. The cultural history and things work in my family but im wondering how do people react to this book that are from there . Because like, i dont know, the way it was depicted it felt like you had ended the story and it feels downtrodden and how were talking now and the way these are manipulated this cultural narrative. [inaudible] narrative spirit yeah, its creating a place where this can happen. No, i dont and it there. I dont know how people react to it because the book is not been published yet. [laughter] not officially. You know, i have. Yeah. I dont really know what will happen but when i was finishing it i did not want to leave it in this trash and i started making bullet points of what post appalachia would look like and i ended up putting it into the form of a piece of legislation called the Conference Committee act which i have to tell you i went command select about five times and i thought not going to do this and ended up doing it. Its a way for local governments or the federal government to take possession of abandoned land and return it to people who could have any kind of business or career they want they can have a piece of land for nearly nothing and they can live from an ecological base that is robust enough. It doesnt mean they will disappear and i have them connected with a shared publication, the internet, i have a college is coming and studying it and have riders and president s and this is not an isolated community. Was careful not to do that, sending kids to college free, all of it is in this piece of legislation but my thinking is i didnt want to imagine a future of appalachia that owed itself to another set of Corporate Overlords or employers and when i was there and you asked and i talk to people in reception and i did talk to people there that i found in a few people i spoke to all i want is my own piece of land, a pickup truck and i want to hunt and fish have a garden. I saw people with gardens of an acre. When you have an acre garden your producing food for a lot more than a family intensive. I saw spectacular gardens, all of the place. I saw people wanting practicing parts of that in the literature is clear and its extremely popular to essentially lead a combination of substances and lifestyle and weight working on what people can put together. This is not some sort of fantasy its really putting into Public Policy in a way that people lived anyway. Thats how i try to leave it. [inaudible] yeah, the practice come back. Absolutely. No, they forage. Yeah, there are many people doing it. The Coal Companies still own enormous pieces of land where they dont like around fall river and ironically right near George Washingtons land where call river meets the [inaudible] river is a whole bunch of people there and the library of congress documented them and they documented in a series of histories about how they lived extensively. Im not making this up. Ive dissipated into a hopeful vision that is more consistent with the palace but its not in exercise in romanticism or fantasy. That is my thought and i dont think apple or intel will come save them. [inaudible] curious. They were curious. I had one guy in particular thanked previously because he drove me around for days and we had a long time to talk and they were fine with it. Other people were not interested in talking to me. I had to go to place and cozy up to someone at the bar and say what is going on but im a historian and not a sociologist and it really was there to go and look in archives so im not claiming that i did a broad survey and i dont know exactly how it will be received because its an odd book in the sense that its deeply empathetic to the Mountain Culture into a way of living that i think appeals in some sense to lefties but other conservatives might in fact find within it what they want to see wrapped in an argument that is basically anticapitalist. [leftsquarebracket not basically, it is. [inaudible] [inaudible] i dont know. Id rather not know. Thank you for this amazing and informative talk. I had a couple of questions picked up from other things what you said and maybe a little bit beyond the scope of the talking presented tonight. When were talking about regionalization it occurred to me that the stereotype of appellations and those in the ozarks is about inbreeding actually and thats the source of the degeneracy, right . Im wondering if there was any intersection between the regionalization of these folks and the stereotypes around their monstrous figures and motion intersect with the rise of modern eugenics. Coming out of history a little bit and picking up on the tail end of your talk i wonder if you could speak and it picks up on the last line of questioning about the political legacy of these communities and the history of the 20th century so when you left us you left with folks staying but having two or three letters of this pool kicked out and when they did Auto Industry works and when they moved to the ozarks or to other kinds of regions to try to reproduce or plains regions or Something Like that and so far as folks are going to work in industry there is also the people who say behind as coal miners and their strength within the Union Movement and their tenacity within the movement heard about that at all. How do they interact within the Union Movement and other kinds of industrial workplaces and how did they work with the legacy there between the other white ethnics or africanamerican people out of this history and in terms of shaping of the way the history of the midcentury unfolds and what does what is the story which was sort of a long 19th century in many ways as you presented tonight could you speak more about the legacy a cast just to begin with your last to you for the question. Of course, i did not talk about the enormous linguistic racial National Diversity of coal mining towns but what i found because i looked at the papers of the flattopped Mining Company and there was a manager and he would interview people from the mountains would come as they wanted to be hired and this was early on in that late 1880s and he would say why do you want to work here and someone would say well i want to make enough money to buy my back and he said we are not hiring you. Because what happened was they would work until they had a certain amount of money, not saying it was enough to buy a farm, and they would drop the tools and walk away. Because they didnt want industrial discipline and they were trying to use coal to their own ends. One reason for the italians, hungarians, and africanamericans coming up the reason for the popularity and why the companies invited them in had labor agents, labor contractors go to these Different Countries and to the south to bring them in is it destroyed the kind of labor monopoly as odd as that may sound all on the people who lived on the mountains they had to accept industrial discipline where they were not getting any work at all. It basically radically changed labor market and destroyed their hold on it. It was an absolutely intentionally as an cant wait for that carload of gary and this one Company Called them all figure is. It didnt matter where they were from they were all areas. So i cant wait for another carload of hungarians because these people walked away and basically they shut down the line. I found that and it was an interesting way to watch how the desire for agrarian and household autonomy intersected with the formation of this veritable United Nations in the coal camps. I didnt do a lot about unionization except i looked into one strike, the paint creek strike of 19. Its not a book about unionizing and i had to keep my eye on the subsistence in this case how the Mining Company infected people from their homes and gardens whenever they join the union as a way of starving them. People would have a garden and a home but the Coal Companies could eat it you for any time in any reason. You were not seen as a normal tenet had writes and paid rent. You are basically a ward of the companies, evicting someone immediately say in june or july when the crops were coming due in the garden was a way of basically starving them into submission. The strikes had great difficulty gathering food and people will try to get back to their garden evening in guards, risking being shot in order to get a chicken, a bushel of beans or anything they could while they were on strike. My view of that is subsistence. Finally, about inbreeding there is a very important book about appalachia called night comes to the cumberlands. Theres a group of scientists who wrote a book called night comes to the chromosomes and what they found was inbreeding within people who are closely related, that is to say siblings or first cousins, was no greater in appalachia than in almost any other place. People lived in the same regions as they were intermarried in a number of different families and they often had the same last names. This was always mistaken for the fact that closely related people were, in fact, coupling. There is no human group that endorses sexual relationships between siblings actually, the one exception was the royal families of egypt. It seems as though king tut was the child of siblings so there you go. And no one called him white trash but yeah, that actually happened but the thing is there was no greater evidence for that happening in West Virginia and in fact, you can vary your first cousin in half of the states. It is legal to marry your first cousin in about half its illegal. Its illegal in West Virginia. [inaudible] right. They did have these population bottlenecks in which there werent enough people for someone to marry and they want to marry a sibling or a first cousin so they needed to get people from the outside and bring them in and something that happened like in Crown Heights today where they need people to come in and diversify a gene pool, they actually do that. But that is when the degeneracy is solar came about and i didnt see it as directly related to inbreeding and that came that conclusion came later. [inaudible] [laughter] yeah, that is right. Very good. This was puzzling to people who said that here they are of socalled this is wrong, good english stock they were irish and scottish and german and swedish and how is it that they could have gone backwards down this gradient civilization was confusing and an raging to some people who strive every possible way to explain it as geographical isolation as leading to this dullness and stupidity it was only poverty. Thank you for this talk. You kind of answered my ask it anyway. I was wondering where the People Living in appalachia settled from and i was wondering just because if these people settled from Different Countries and how they were able to develop a culture of the agrarian economy and how that was developed. Yeah, go all the way back to the 1680s you get swedes and finns from the heart scrabble edge of Northern Europe and they brought the log cabins and they brought the long rifle and they brought the early forest practices that launched this group that was very different from the english and there was all kinds of conflicts with william penn and his people on one side and peters to dissent and the new yorkers utterly hated them because the states pay no attention to anyones rules. They fought indians when penn and those were trying to make peace and they were absolutely troublemakers. We do not think of seeds in exactly that way today but trust me. They were. As they went out looking for all that new land they were joined by this other kind of hyper nice group these scotch irish people who were fleeing from the British Empire in the 1720s and they basically were doing the same thing and they met up. All i can say is by the time of the revolution the majority culture was scotch irish. It was just more people and yeah, new environments force people to name things differently, speak differently and cultivate different plans. Indians were intimately into this and that they accepted burning practices, hunting practices, they learned how to gather certain plants from indians and theres even some suggestion that there were early intermarriage but by the time of the revolution there seem to be pretty purely hostility. Thank you so much for this. I was curious about this analog you draw in this scramble for appalachia because much of what you described is the place im more familiar with which is kenya and im wondering if there is material or intellectual connections that you can drop what is happening in this region and the rest of the world the same. Theodore roosevelt. I dont know. [laughter] maybe because he was basically through his own government and his interest in logging and the development of the mountains and on the other sides foreignpolicy people like him were a kind of bridge across the atlantic to the two different scrambles and the belief in the cases that it was bringing civilization and moving people to a later stage of civilization. There is no direct connection really. In the book i draw a parallel between hamiltons taxation and how it is supposed to be an education tax and is what i got from african colonization and that is correct here but in madagascar are and in British East Africa they would come in and they would have a poll, that means head that every hut tax would pay and why would it pay and they were blunt about it and the only reason to pay was to get them to start using money. That they will sell their commodities for money and we can get a hold of them and send them to london. I maintain that hamilton was doing much the same thing in western pennsylvania and that was more than just education tax and that a real revenue raising tax. Yeah, absolutely. That is my argument. Yes, theres the connection. In the very end in the last chapter i had land grabbing from secondary sources in the documentary that i had of fun part in only to show that enclosure appalachia and today is still happening. They are still being defined as incapable of progress in the development is more so than we would like to think deeply invested in the notion of people losing their land as a form of progress. [inaudible] [inaudible] no one can hear . Everyone is right here. Im so sorry. I was just saying to the last comment about africa, im an africanist is that the similarity is almost uncanny. If i didnt have maps in front of my eyes i wouldve been thinking of a story of africa meaning multicurrency, the same subsistence origin through what you described, salient and having multiple regimes of land tenure exchanged of rights to land et cetera but the difference and this is why wonder to the question about is this another set of [inaudible] is enclosure did not happen in africa or did not happen in systematic homogeneous passion. People would go work in the mines and go back to their subsistence on the land, not just gardens and that has always been the conundrum of understanding capitalism in africa. Yeah, im walking line between telling a story that many people know that a lot of my readers do not know and picking out what is specific about this case for specialist in my field. Im kind of doing both. As far as africa, yeah, you know more than i do but its happening now and the story and the origin of a Company Called [inaudible] the idea is that the state went to the present and said they didnt say we are taking your land although they had done that before but they were saying it would be a really, really good idea if you would give up this land and then you could grow sugar and life would be better for you and you will have wages and a garden and its a similar story but because of the transparency of today actually cant come in and take it although there were cases in which it was taken at gunpoin r, as well. I think what is interesting is the enclosure may be happening now yes, the present occupation dates to a time long before private property so, i dont know if i wanted to the same old story or a different story. [laughter] i guess it really is both. Yet. Again, thank you very much for this. Maybe i had missed this but im curious as to and i think pertains to the last question how you said early on that there were four owners of land and wealthy entrepreneurs owned different parts of West Virginia and they were only fascinated with flatlands and so anything else that happened in the forest you could have pioneers or runaway slaves for people and they didnt care about them and how would those people then or would those people go about laying claim to land that they had settled on and what they and if they did would it have to be a legal transaction and was it that participating in that as you said twotiered system of [inaudible] yeah, its strange and complicated. Virginia was an absolute mess. It was absolutely chaotic and dysfunctional land scape system. The only reason why George Washington wanted landscape was plantations there would be slaves and plantation crops. This is what the state of virginia was hoping for when he gave all that land away. Why give it away . They saw it as a promissory note with ultimately the owners would make good on it because they would use it in some way and i thought perhaps for cotton and even though it was never going to happen is the only thing that was in their mind just like the owners also have to pay property taxes on that land and this is where it gets interesting. They didnt always pay those property taxes. So, do you know what adverse possession is which markets we move on to a piece of land that is neglected perhaps no ones been there for 20 years and maybe no one has paid the taxes in ten years if you move on to that land and improvement and pay the taxes you can go to court and say i now own this land and sometimes the judge will say you are right, you do. In fact, it works today. What is it . Sometimes its ten or 11 or 20 or 21 it depends years. The people who moved on there they liked to know what they were doing and when Robert Morris died in 186 people bought there would be a bonanza and in the state of virginia then basically repossessed all of the land in 1830 a number of families moved into the area. They might have believed that if they laid a state to a portion of Robert Morris estate that they could claim it as their own. It didnt actually work that way but if you did have a farm and he started to pay taxes in the county and you recorded it you began to accumulate rights. The state of West Virginia at first upheld a lot of these deeds and said to have a perfect right to it and they did xy and z and the investor in new york city who came along his grandmother never paid the taxes on it, you lose. That absolutely happened. As time went on it happens less and less. Im assuming that runaway slaves would be able to go to court and lame claim to land themselves. Well into the 20th century really. Where would they go or what would they do. Runaway slaves tended to be squatters. Everyone here were talking about is a spotter but its just someone whos moved on to land they probably know or dont know is private property. Runaway slaves deftly do that and as steven said, very famously in the roots of southern populism there were ten flaws in other things that former interested to make it impossible for people to make it in the woods, especially if they were africanamericans. Even if they were poor whites and force them to earn wages. Slaves tended to be abrasive in the mountains of virginia, santa ana, North Carolina but not as many in West Virginia. I think they found the environment more hostile socially. I had another question about the hillbilly highway because you talk about michigan and if you go to detroit and flint today there are whole communities around 28 descendent known even as Taylor Tuckey and they have a distinctive southern accent. I wonder if you could talk about the ways that these immigrants tried to recreate appalachia culture in an incredibly Different Community with none of the same resources they had before. I cant really. I really dont know anything about that. In all honesty i think its fascinating there people who know much more about that like pete daniels. What i would say is that is that they maintain the type and this gets to something you asked in the connection was that people moved back and forth so that in the Great Depression when the coal mine is shut everyone but no, let me do this to really. In the 1920s there was a movement in the manufacturing and the Great Depression when the factors shot people went back to the mountains and you can have a garden and perhaps a good hunt. Cspan where history unfolds daily. Was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. Brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider john newman details his career serving as a prosecutor and now as a federal appellate judge for 38 years of the u. S. Court of appeals for the second circuit. Hes interviewed by senator richard blumenthal. Senator blumenthal serves on the Judiciary Committee anjudiciaryd five terms as connecticuts attorney general. This is a weekly Interview Program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. Tnk