To get through pertaining to this event, so first we want to thank the city of charles bell as a sponsor for this conversation and for hosting us. This program is being broadcast on the citys government Access Channel on tv ten and streamed live on the Facebook Page so if anyone is listening or watching at home and wants to see it on facebook is Charlottesville City Hall is the handle. Because this is a recorded event, during the q a portion of the event, please raise your hand and a volunteer will come to you and give you a microphone before you ask your question. So, a couple more logistical issues. Please silence your cell phone at this point in time. However, we encourage you to tweet about the event using the hash tag vabook2018. So by all means, take the lessons youve received from the authors here and share them with people. You should have received program evaluations. Fill these out before you leave, please. They will be useful to help keep the festival free and open to the public. If you didnt get an evaluation or have to leave quickly, you can do this online at vabook. Org survey. Please support the authors today and those that you encounter throughout the festival as well as the local booksellers. There are books for sale that we can peruse after the event. One of our guests today actually is a local bookseller and i would expect she would encourage you to please do the same. Shop local. The authors will be available for a book signing after the program. Okay. Lets get started. So, introductions, Elizabeth Catte is the author of what they were getting wrong about appalachia. All three are lined up on the table in front. It shes a public is torn from east tennessee and coowner pitchh yields a phd in public history from middle Tennessee State university and currently lives in stanton virginia. Ramp hollow this one. He is a professor of history at the university and the author of the great delusion and learning the earth. His writings have appeared in harpers magazine, a quarterly at the new haven review. And we have wendy welch the author of fault or fly the story of foster care and adoption in appalachia. Shes also the author and editor of three previous books including the bookstore of Big Stone Gap and she runs a bookstore in southWest Virginia. I want to see the thought at the start of the event to thinking about some of the topics. In his essay, James Baldwin has some thoughts about how the stories of device or comfort ahead of the greater understanding and that can weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is in ourselves as we are. He concludes with a fought but i try to bear in mind when encountering the works of history and what they have reached back over hundreds of years or what we are doing with contemporary issues. All of these books give us history often by the difficult work. To get started, id like to ask everyone to share the stories for these three books. When a when and how did the concerns and the ideas for this books first take shipwrecks if we could start with elizabeth and then go to stephen and windy and hear from everyone. The origin orchestra of my s anger. I had recently moved from tennessee to texas with my partner just as the 2016 president election started hotting up. Rt i consumed every piece of media that i could about what was happening in appalachia during the election, how and what the feeling was, what the mood was, what the predictions weree and the stories were atrocious. It reminded me of the phenomenon that happened during the war on poverty when reporters and journalists and photographers went to the mountains to mine misery. And so wanted to study that phenomenon from the ground up in the president ial election could be that moment but the other thing that was happening as i made small talk and got to know people and the university committee, business leaders, people i hope would be my colleagues compare view and what her too me about hillbilly elegy. [laughing] and he wanted to know what i thought about this book and they werent curious in what i thought about it. The wanted me togy answer for i. What is wrong with your people . Why do they vote against their own interests . Why do they misbehave . Why cant they get it together . And that may be angry when it went on job interviews, this book was in my face and when i try to make new friends this book was my face and when i try to understand about politics this book was in my face and would open the newspaper his face was in my face. [laughing] and so i i very happily connecd to a publisher in ohio who is having similar feelings about the rust belt because people cant tell the rust belt and appalachia apart. She was kind enough to give me a platform to work through some of these feelings and that is how my book was born. [applause] ill just interject quickly. I expect we will probably talk more about j. D. Dances book. We will try to not let that dominate. I dont have a story thats it when youre as entertaining as that. My book started maybe ten or 12 years ago i was trying to understand american capitalism and wanted to write about people losing their land, dispossession as w an essential element of how capitalism develops and grows and what essential to. I couldve written a book about American Indians. I could have written a book about the greatest dispossession in history of north america, it was too vast and to general. When it went looking for a story about dispossession that people dont often think about or consider to be about capitalism, and something that i myself did nott understand, there were the southern mountains and a complicated storyou about how a white settler culture at one time was considered nearly heroic and then lost its land. I set out to write about appalachia as a case study but it took over the book and some ways it took over my life as i i dedicated years to try and understand it as very much an outsider. So my book is really about capitalism, which im environmental historian and a method for storing of political economy. So i was putting those things together and that was the southern mountains. So i hope you like the result. [applause] my book was born out of kindness. Theres a pastor at a church that shall remain nameless who i would do anything for. This is a lovely, lovely man eddie came to me about two years after the bookstore was out and he said, the bookstore, if someone sums it up they say its a triumph of the human spirit. He came to me and he said can you do for foster parents what you did for bookstores . Pardon . He says,m we need more foster parents and we are not getting them and its going to kill us all. Would you write about it, would you write a book about it . And im thinking monograph self publish table. We will sell 80 copies to people who are already fostering. Its an important story but its the core to get outside the parameters of the people who are already playing in the sandbox because the other people to want to hear. How do you a story nobody wants to hear . We settle on a blog and that also got us past the anonymous park or foster parents could talk without being judged. Because if your faucet. You already judge. The next word of your mouth doesnt matter. So i said lets do this blog. He said thats fine. You are remembering this man is a pastor. We set up the plug. I started editing of the peoples stories. I really, really love to work with other peoples stores. I love to help them to shape the stories. Its exciting for me. I had for five people is working with and where shipping their stories and the Appalachian Studies association was holding its annual conference near my home in johnson city, tennessee, and i said to the pastor this is perfect. We will launch the blog. The people will feel a sense of accomplishment. The grant will be over and we will all be happy. So we do that at any of you have been to the Appalachian Studies association know they put out this huge book of all the things that are going to happen. My phone rings. This woman says i note with interest your doing a blog about appalachian stories on adoption of prosecutor is there a book associate with the project . I said no. She said, would you like there to be . [laughing] i called the pastor and i said duty, that was totally cheating to get a book deal. [laughing] and thats of the book came about. [applause]e] im going to start off with a question for another sort of question for everyone, each of these books exists directly or indirectly in a certain tension with other older accounts of appalachia. Both stephen and elizabeth write about travel writing, about local color essays that depict appalachia and its residents as something other. They also get into how those depictions affect come have affected the region and its people. Stephen, theres a line that it want to flag from ramp hollow, a moment where youre right that aspirations of stupidity backwardness and volatility coincided with the seizure of environment. Tell us about the relationship. Tell us about the relationship between these sorts of narratives, bias, misleading, misperceived and that environmental seizure. Can we have the screen put down . Great, if we could do that. Can you talk louder, please . Sure, id be happy to. When people ask me, what is this book about, i said its how daniel boone became hillbilly. Its how the people from the southern mountains kind of slipd down what i call a cultural gradient. In Effect People who live close to their environments very often administered authority called them savages, even though its the way most people have lived overs the last 10,000 years. In fact, aquarians are the largest class in human history. But its an easy for us to forget that and then to forget, a fact how to talk about them and have actually lived. So an image like this i couldve showed you daniel boone rolling through Cumberland Gap with all the people behind them, that picture, painted by thomas art beckett. But instead this is kind of the best image, that of documentary image that i could find depicting these poor white folk. They are poor but they are sufficient. So the remarkable thing is that inside 50 years, excuse me while through my entire thing. Inside 50 years we get to this. We get to the georgia cracker. And so i wanted to understand how it is that this happened, how this intellectual process took shape and how it coincided with the rise of extracted industry at the same time. You can actually watch it as people begin to understand that there was a great deal of wealth to be pulled out of appalachia. The role that those pioneers played, the ones who rolled with the daniel boone, was basically obscured. In other words, there was a moment in which the poor whites of the south essentially coincided with the kind of American Foreign policy, which is they were there dispossessing him just before they themselves became dispossessed, they were this possessors. Or say a group of poor whites in the United States could essentially become a separate race as a process on the way of having them delegitimize so they could be pulled out of the hollows and given to coal and lumber companies. So, thats the travel writing was part of that. It wasnt a conscious attempt. It was almost like everybody was watching and seeing what was happening. The people in the mountains were in their own ways not doing that well. Their own agriculture and their own way of life was, in fact, suffering at the same time. Let me leave that there. Great. And elizabeth touches on specifically and for me one of the most effective moments of what youre getting wrong about appalachia. Elizabeth is writing about the seizure of land what is now shenandoah park. When that process began, writers, photographers, journalists, social scientists, im partially doing scare quotes here, they all travel to Shenandoah Valley and document families displaced and elizabeth writes specifically about hollow folk, that depicts mountaineers as primitive and backwards. Where this gets interesting and complicated in elizabeths book is that she also brings in a photographer who goes to many of the same locations in hollow folk and takes picture of a number of the same subjects, specifically in this case, elizabeth, i wonder, what do these people who are coming into the area, often from outside of it, what do they see . What do they miss . And how do their depictions in hollow folk in the photographs. What are the ways in which they damage appalachia . I want to see if i actually have a i thought i had a little clip from hollow folk on my phone that i could read. But essentially what happened in the 1930s and it matches clearly the art of appalachia history, separating poor people from the richness of the land around them and that takes many shapes. And the industry is the best example, but natural beauty, tourism. Dedevelopment is a part of at that story as well and in the 1930s the consolidated power of the federal government thought it would be beneficial to the people of the region, to politicians and Business Owners if there was a National Park so the shenandoah National Park was born. It was facilitated through the Eminent Domain, the conservation act, and through removal of people from their homes. In order to do that, industry sprung up around them. Photographers and journalists, some employed by the federal government came to the valley to assess the people that lived the there, the university of chicago sent social scientists to come and document the condition of life in the valley and in the mountains and almost, you know, most significantly to me, the leaders of the American Eugenics Movement were watching all of this unfold and salivating with interest. So these forces come together, a photographer named Arthur Rothstein created a visual portfolio of the valley hatching what social scientists, the portraits they were constructing from the region and they sent them to the National Park service who gleefully said we would colonize, and what happened to many of them, many of them children were taken to the land that they lived on and they worked, that happened to be not in some isolated faraway land from two miles from one of the most wealthy resorts in the area, which was eager to expand to serve the National Park, and so the fate of the Shenandoah Valley for almost two generations was to make people wealthy even wealthier and thats the story of the mountain so often. Wendy, youre taking on, you know, a subject that is very much a pressing contemporary issue, its one that, you know, we wendy and i discussed previously. Its not that there are many, you know, news rooms in america that have a reporter who is assigned to cover adoption, fostering, owe circumstances that really create the challenges that inform, that inform both the systems. What are the ways in which depictions of appalachia have informed and have affected adoption and foster care . Okay. This is ugly. What steven and elizabeth have been talking about and the stereo types and presumptions is very wellknown and wellfelt by the people those are aimed at, right . Were smart enough to know when were being stereo typed and presumed. The awful, awful elements of adoption and fostering is the vengeance factor by the people who enter it. This is layered, its hard to set up. If i say whats the most important industry in appalachia, how many of you are going to say coal . All right, okay. Coal has directed our past and is rightly or wrongly, i think elizabeth tackles this really well, engrained in some of the ways that arguments play out. So, if you are suspicious of the government and the government is going to pay you to look after someone elses family, the worst thing you can be in central, rural appalachia is bad to your family. They useded to be telling the revenuers, they had a still was the joke about that. Its not anymore, the worst thing you can be is bad to your family. So, all of a sudden, here is this big bad, the man, government to pay you to look after someone elses family. Youve got the moral high ground, youve got the economic high ground and youve got the Community High ground. Its hideous, absolutely hideous and first time i hit it when i was researching and the first time i went back and explained this to some of the people i was talking to, you cant say that, nobodys going to listen to. Its not okay to say that, but the really hideous thing is what you guys are describing is what the people in the region are taking advantage of and holding the kids hostage for. And the first time kids become Collateral Damage in a war between adults, you know, weve all seen the divorce stories, right . Now write it with a culture versus the government and the kids in the middle. Western civilization is doomed and it should be. Sorry. [laughte [laughter] were going to so, one of the things i have about working with the history of the place, it seems like much of the radical power of Historical Research and writing is in the ability it has to kind of articulate something thats been overlooked or has been buried, whitewashed, overwhelmed by other powerful forces. So i want to ask some questions about kind of breaking with previously published histories. And steven, so steven early on in hollow writes its predicated on the collision of two forms of academy in appalachia. One is represented by corporations and the other manifested in families and farms and resulted in agriculture itself. So, you know, writing about kind of the latter, families and farms, steven writes that the household is this basic unit for communities, and he writes the household spreads the risk of ventures and reproduces skills and traditions and translates vast economical logic, no other Human Institution does these things and then 70 pages later, steven talks about how theres really no shorthand for how material or money moves through a household, and theres a powerful moment where he writes this paucity of language seems like an artifact of capitalism and tendency for all competing economic forms. Where im interested here, capitalism is also shaping our ability to tell other peoples stories. Its shaping the language that we us