>> many of these authors have or will appear on booktv and you can watch them on our website booktv.org. >> hi, everyone. welcome. my name is julia ott.

i'm an associate professor and chair of the history department here at the new school. i also codirected the robert center for capitalism studies, and tonight the center for capitalism studies and the history department are happy to be presenting a talk by steven stoll. steven stoll is professor of history at fordham university. he works and teaches on environmental history, history of capitalism, agrarian studies of the topics and subjects. he is a prolific writer of several acclaimed works, including the lien earth, soil and society in 19th century america. the great delusion, a mad inventor in the tropics, , and e utopian origins of economic growth. tonight is going to be talking to us about his new book which will be released on november 21 just in time for the holidays,

so please mark your calendars. the book is, of course, "ramp hollow: the ordeal of appalachia." as you can see by the picture of its lovely cover. i'm really excited about this talk and really thrilled to have stephen with us today at the new school. there's been a lot of talk obviously in the last year about the places left behind, the sort of poor world community, the white populations who voted for trump, you know, in the sense that the historical context of post-industrialization was something that we had to grapple with and understand, understand those political issues. what steven is showing in this case come in this book i believe, is really it's a 400 year story of dispossession and dispossessing. in the case of appalachia they need to be understood by way 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 really help us to deeply contextualize some of the political questions that we looking at today and trying to understand for those of us of course live in urban environments and see these kinds of locations and these populations very far away from our own experiences, as it may be the case here in new york city. so thank you very much to steven stoll for joining us, and please join me in welcoming professor stoll. [applause] >> thank you very much. i just want to launch right into this. "ramp hollow" is a book about

eight culture, how its members hunted and gardened and gathered and farm. we all know something about appalachia, don't we? its original parallel mountain ranges and an undulating plateau which where people live in small valleys called hollows, also known as codes. the actual ramp hollow from which the title comes is actually a road outside of morgantown west virginia where i went during the research of the book. but, and this is ramp hollow road actually itself where i took a walk one day and felt that it was in some ways kind of symbolic of a larger story that it wanted to tell. but appalachia is not identical with its mountains. this is the mountain range itself, the great appalachian ridge which you can see goes

from northern alabama all the way up into new england. it's a large geological region that is defined by the blue ridge right there, the entire atlantic plain runs right into it. after that there is the great valley, the shenandoah valley. after that there is this large plane from outer space, it looks like tissue paper with all of these thousands of little towns, little valleys, rivers and ranches. but appalachia is more than that. we know that. it's a region that is defined more by its history than by its geology. in other words, the southern mountains may be geological, but appalachia is hard to define. and, in fact, there are many competing definitions. nobody really agrees exactly what it is. in fact, there are even some

geographers who would say that appalachia doesn't exist, in the sense that there's not a great distinction in the culture, the language, the foodways of people in the mountains and those who lived on the low lands of the south. we know, of course, appalachia is work all comes from. we know it as the location of mountaintop removal mining. we know it as a place where the rivers run orange, and they actually do. and where there are giant sledge keeps of coal ash that come flooding into town because enormous havoc. we of course know it as a place of water contamination. which happened just recently. in one sense "ramp hollow" is about how certain part of the southern mountains became this region called appalachia. it asked the question, went to

the region by that name appear? and what historical and environmental relationship arche to creating it? it asks other questions, too. what is progress, and why is it certain people were defined as being incapable of it? outside of it, whatever it is. how did capitalism shape the sense of progress and then determine how were you certain landscapes and human labor? how did that play out in the southern mountains? i can't tell you about all of that this evening, but i'm going to try to give you a sense of the book as a look more closely at one particular argument within it, and that is that the industrial removal of the forest, the industrial extraction, taking lumber, was a

crucial event in the industrial takeover of the mountains, and thus, in the creation of appalachia. that's the scheme of the book that i'm going to take out for you. this is going to be our central image for the lecture. i'll show it to you more than once, and it is central image of the book itself. the document uncle to try to make sense of why creating a rich context for it. it's just a cadastral map. anybody who studies the sorts of things, land in the united states, in your, it's really no big deal. it's a spatial record of private property, but if we think about what it does not depict as well as what it does, then the map tells us all kinds of things about the history of the southern mountains between the 1790s and a 20th century.

so the map includes coal deposits depicted here i think completely imaginary really and theoretically. when you dig down, the different places where you reached these layers of coal, it tells you and its detail but the distances of certain point in the mountains from baltimore, new york city, philadelphia. and most of all, of course, each one of these pieces of land has the name of a land owner written on it, and in some cases the original land owner going back the 1760s, 1770s, george washington is one of the names on this map. but what struck me about it and the reason why i can elevate it to such an extent in the book and read what i'm presenting it to you is that it's a two dimensional representation of

the mountains from the point of view of people who value it all in terms of private property. the way that an investor at the southern mountains, their view is accurately depicted on the map. but the way the residents look at it is like this. two dimensional vision of the mountains does not match three-dimensional ecological reality. they are two different things. and, in fact, beneath the gaze of the land owner share, underneath their funny shape that sometimes follow watercourses and sometimes run ruler straight in a world in which nothing runs ruler straight, isn't this. -- is this. suttles and found a way to the mountains in the 1750s to the 1830s or so, they came for a number of reasons. many of them wanted to reproduce

the material world of northern europe. they were the legacies of sweets, scots, i restrict a broader economic that was entirely different from that of the logging and mining companies that came later and that collision between an agrarian economy and a capitalist economy is the central conflict in the book. but let me back up. what exactly do i mean by an agrarian? i interpret these settlers as part of a much broader category. agrarian is a term that includes peasants. it includes all people who produce their own food and commodities but one thing that struck me about writing this book is that this is the largest class in yemen history. most of the people who have ever

lived, lived in agrarian households. and yet we have a very hard time finding a language of just define exactly how they lived. so removed are we from the way in which 2 billion people still live today, but you know, a much higher proportion of the world's population lived just a century or two ago, and yet it's difficult to define, to explain, the way that i i have to explan to students exactly what it is i mean we have misconceptions of who they were. so let me give you a tiny course in it. that usually lived and work together in households. they pooled pulled the resourcn order to reproduce the households. the reproduction of the household is the main purpose of the agrarian household. they create commodities.

that is to say, they make all kinds of stuff. they raise things for themselves to eat and consume, but that's not all they do. they exchange all sorts of things. whatever they can reduce that they don't need, they exchange. they love exchange. they love money. the reason is that money ties you do cool stuff far away from where you live. my money ties you to a larger world. world. agrarian are not isolated. they are heavily engaged in markets. they produce commodities. they sell a portion of it and then they go back and they produce the same commodities again. but even though they love money, agrarian households do not organize themselves in order to make money. money is an attribute of the household, but it's not its primary purpose. this is crucial because it money becomes the primary purpose, all sorts of other things change.

you might say that money is a fantastic slave and a bad master, and they understood that and they kept it as an attribute. so if the cash crops failed, if their gambit with a distant merchant falls through, they are fine. my need by -- money buys cool stuff but you can let some extent without it. all the stories are more complicated and they can go into the complexity. households the begin to use money to some extent can become dependent on money but it i can go into that. in the book i do point out some of his complexity. but most of all of our purposes tonight, the most important thing that i have to tell you about aquarians is that they require -- aquarians -- ecological resources given food and commodities without

expecting anything from them except labor. and ecological base gives but it doesn't cost anything. in the southern mountains, households cleared fields and they gathered firewood and forge foods like rants which is an onion, pictured here all in an area that they did not own but which they to some extent managed to gather. so i break up there products and uses into these large categories of outfield and need field. so what you see is that, let's start with the infield. so the garden is closest to the home, or the home plate. and that you get of the home and garden would be the field. you would go something like ride that you could feed your animals can into bread and distill into whiskey. the garden is for all of the delights, of the fruits and

vegetables that you love each year. you are trading seats with neighbors and people far away, but you have set of crops like certain being varieties that are known to your region and that are very much beloved, or squashes. that's what we think of as the farm. no peasant or no agrarian whatever -- we are accustomed think that's a farm. that's not a farm. every farm needs the subsidy that comes from an ecological base. if you don't have that, something has to replace that. that base is what i i would cal the outfield, if you will, and that is for hunting and forge foods. that is truly what the forest did you. you go out and you literally take an animal, like a a bear r an elk. this requires very little labor, and the payback is huge. not only that but it's smart. people like doing it.

it connected them to the woods and you came back with large things to eat. forge foods was not a canna poppy endeavor endeavor. i think we would think of scavenging for mushrooms as some sort of act of desperation. that is a misunderstanding what it was. it was beloved and look for every single year. ramps made all kinds of stews. they were specially consumed with eggs, and i understand you can buy the in brooklyn today at farmers markets picks evidently you can scavenge for them in new york city. which is remarkable. but here's the thing. there is always a market attribute, just as the field could be used to turn into whiskey which can go -- what is whiskey? it is rye in a form that is nonperishable, stable value. it traded like currency wherever it went.

it's parallel in the woods was cattle. they walk to market. it was money on the hoof. did they consume some of the cattle and the pigs? of course they did but they turned that into money by dealing with merchants, say towards baltimore, or any other way towards the ohio river. again, the ecological base gives, including commodity for money, without costing money. nothing in an agrarian world, nothing can cost money. however, that would be all very nice if it were all kind of neat like that, but it wasn't. the problem was that there was a contradiction built into the ecological base itself as they encountered it. guess what. the commons was about a comments. it was private property. it didn't really belong to them.

not as the state of virginia sought and later at the state of west virginia. it did not belong to them. beginning with the end of the french and indian war, colonial governors and the governors of virginia granted enormous tracts of land to people like george washington and robert morris. there are two things that you should know about this land. the first is that the grantees themselves, george washington, robert morris, never, almost never took possession of the atlantic they didn't go there to live on it and in some cases in their entire lives they never even visited it. they were absentee land owners in the purest sense of the word. secondly, when they didn't pay any attention to that land, george washington had this piece of land on the river right near

charleston, west virginia. the present down here. so when the colonial governor granted it to him, he granted land to washington all over the mountains. but washington hired his own surveyor, i can't for the new f crawford, and sing about there basically said i don't know what this is. it belongs to me. i want you to survey only the flat land. i only care about the flat land. and by the way, if you get caught crossing the proclamation line, we never even met. because it is illegal for crocker to go there and do it after 1767. crawford win any made a survey from this rock to that tree over to that island down there, and he blazed washington's initials on of all things cherry tree. and came back into the snap and said look, there shall land. washington said it's flat, right? it's all flat.

good. what does that mean? it means that it be else that washington owned, and notice all of the hills surrounding a piece of land today, all of that which goes up an elevation of 200 feet, he didn't care about at all. he didn't care about it. he didn't have it survey. it wasn't mapped. nobody cared about it. so if you are someone looking to get away from slaveholders, if you are someone who is looking for good hunting and farming at 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 up into the mountains, take what you wanted to, and someone like robert morris or george washington really didn't care if you were there. if they did they really had no way to pry you out. the second thing i want to tell you about this land is it that no value here speculation is an extremely delicate sport, and

robert morse owned millions of acres in the southern mountains, and died poor and in debt. why? because he bought the land on speculation and it never increase in valley. there was a gigantic wilderness liability. so they held onto it, and i'll get back to that. where does this leave us? by the 1790s, mount households tended not to own the land that they lived on, which they regarded as a vast commons for which they took everything they needed. they wrote their own deeds as though the land belong to them and to begin trading these deeds between themselves, writing deeds for a piece of land which the state of virginia said they did not own. this became common, but the thing is that there was this semantic delete them three much part of the early united states, represented by alexander

hamilton -- elite. and they wanted the backwards to join the atlantic economy. someone like hamilton had a very different notion about the united states and his rival, thomas jefferson, but jefferson want to buy as much land as possible, the louisiana country when people would say but the united states can't govern it. it's too vast and airy. jefferson said that is exactly how i want it. that's exactly right. we want a place for people, that is to say, slaveholders, to be able to escape to. because what we really want is a week central government even though the constitution has defined a strong one. this guy has an entirely different view. for alexander hamilton the constitution needed to govern in every single square mile. he wanted, he invented the modern nationstate where every single space would be equally governed. the law would apply everywhere, and he also made an overlapping

notion of the united states as a territory and as an economy. so the way to get people to join that political entity was to bind them together economically. but the people of the southern mountains were a problem turkey did not like those people out there. they use money on their terms when they had it come when they didn't. they made whiskey and sold it down the highway and got the money and bought what they wanted and produce all the other crops for subsistence. and he said, he believed that in time they would evolve. they would follow along this theory of stages, , so popular among the atlantic elite which is ultimately a would get there. by the 1790s they had not gotten there yet, and he had a different idea. hamilton proposed and enforced a

whiskey tax in large part to coerce the people of the mountains to get money and use money. they said we don't have 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 that fight. he lost that fight, but less than a century later those same mountain folk found themselves in an increasingly difficult position. they won round one, okay, from the atlantic elite, but a capitalist class whose land the occupied and the nationstate wanting their land in labor to produce surplus value, right, to have an exchange value, to be valued in money terms, kind of came together as a kind of vice. it tightened tighten the next . by the 1840s, and especially after the civil war, they

confronted a far more minimal form of capitalism than that represented by george washington and robert morris. because rather than speculate in mountain land, the next generation of capitalists interested in the direct industrial extraction from the southern mountains. i can't go into, the lumber, coal, steam engines, trust me, there was a demand. the demand side was there. that's why this stuff had value. but the title map is a synthesis of investors in various stages of acquiring land from old deeds, george washington's deeds, selling it to logging and mining companies. the names on the maps in some cases are mining companies, but in many cases it's a bank, an individual investor. they were not going to have mining company.

they had to interest in exploig that land themselves, but that's when speculation paid off. they turned around and they sold it to the flat top mining holding company, the pocahontas company or the hundreds of mining corporations that were chartered by the state of west virginia. this frantic, rapid colonization of the mountains after the civil war i call the scramble for appalachia after the scramble for -- which by the way was happening at the same time. so that's fine, that the scramble would not even possible. it wouldn't have happened without states this date i most interested in is west virginia. west virginia was created, west virginia seceded from virginia in 1863 during the civil war. it's realistic to be formed after seceding from the state. for our purposes the reason for the formation of west virginia

is important to understand. the first thing is a state has the power to claim legal primacy over county governments. a state can claim to overrule what a county government sets. just imagine if you are a coal company and you set up shop in the county and the canvas is actually we're not interested in having coal development here. we declare coal development illegal. states can pass laws that says two counties, you can't do that. the state decides economic activity and what happens, not any local town and not any county. this has a parallel in federal law which i won't go into, but states, this is how states limit the number of the clients. this way a corporation can deal with the governor and the legislature and it doesn't have to do with all the people in the county because they don't matter. matter. they can't stop it. secondly, , it has the power to

create a judicial system for settling disputes. this is a world in which people sued and used the courts vigorously all the time. the judicial system and which of those judges would be sympathetic to industry was crucial, that happened by about 1890. before 1890 the courts in west virginia often helps mountain deeds and after 1890 day did not. of course it has the power to charter corporations and attract capital. so this is what the merchants way up north in the panhandle that is right between ohio and pennsylvania, they are the ones who hatched this whole thing. becomes more of a conspiracy than a democratic movement. it didn't have to do with slavery, not really. it did have to deal with the slaveholders, they would be beholden to because the slaveholders in virginia, they had a notion they were going to develop all of the coal, all of

the metals and the lumber by sending their slaves up there and take the money from all those resources themselves. that's when the wheeling merchants, of the court deep union sympathizers, that's when it acted during the war. they really want to seize control of the natural resources in west virginia, in the western counties for themselves. and so they created their own state. the scramble required governors, senators who would act in favor of capital as both. people like johnson campton, this may sound familiar, he owned a large coal company which he did not divest himself of when he became a united states center. -- syndicate. he was acting as owner of the

coal company at the same time he was a senator. he sold to john d. rockefeller. the only person represented, i don't think -- johnson kim had one constituent, ascended from west virginia, john d. rockefeller who was the only person he represented. i don't think he really would've disagreed with that. william mccorkle black to said his purpose was to liquidate as much as possible the natural resources of west virginia and put them into private hands. they did not in any way try to gloss over, to paper over what they're actually doing. here's my point recently. it is that capital and the state only act together in tandem, and we see it happening not on a national level, we see it in west virginia. believe me, there are abundant

examples that point out, and together they set out very different from washington or moore's or even hamilton. hamilton wanted to tax people. he wanted to tax the products of the land and labor, but the next generation of the capitalists didn't want the product of the land. they wanted to own the land and we define its purpose. they wanted to dispossess people of the land and hired him 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 as something that took place between the 16th century and a 19th century in england. a lot of americans don't think there was enclosure here. the indian wars were anything

but a giant 400 year process of enclosure. sometimes were explicitly cast that way than others. but by enclosure i mean the legalized, legal dispossession first practiced in great britain between the 16th and about the 19th century in which lords evicted peasants from the common land in order to declare that land the very first defined private property. private property never existed before. and like the title map from west virginia, this map obliterates the the present landscape, indicating only private property. it's a perfect analogue to the map i've been showing you. it's a cadastral map in which you can have almost nothing of the landscape, and which you can't see that were villages there, the fields took an entirely different shape. there was a long-standing centuries old peasant work in

places like this that were of literate by the land owners. so enclosure is essential and capitalism but it didn't happen everywhere the same way. it didn't even happen in great britain the same way every place. and i must point out that this is an extremely subtle movement. so how did it happen in the southern mountains next i'm going to give you four elements of this american dispossession. the first is that it almost every instance, in every dispossession it requires an intellectual process to precede it. you can't dispossess someone, just like you can't, there can't be an act of genocide without a time in which people become illegitimate in their practices or in the possession of something. that may be the possession of their citizenship, but in this case it's the possession of the

land. mountain folk were racialized. they were reinvented as white trash backward, primitive, illegitimate. in the chapter i have on this the thing that got me is, how do we get from daniel boone to hillbilly? how do we get from the hero of the backwoods, someone who was the subject of dimestore novels, he was a legend in his own time. he was praised on the floor of the house of representatives. how do you get from daniel boone, the first novels about daniel boone are coming out right after his death in 1840s, 30 years later, i mean, you know, 20 years later you have an entirely different view emerging of the southern mountaineer, like the georgia cracker. this is an astonishing time for these people to fall down this cultural gradient.

by the way, very similar to what happened to the southern tribes, the choctaw, the cherokee right before the dispossession, at a draw this parable is they were delegitimize in much the same way. they were all kinds of fasting parallels between poor whites in the southern mountains and the american indians. they've often talked about in much the same way. i just want to throw that out there. the second thing is that mountain people at insecure title or no title to the right at all. this is what i've been saying. and that is what you're looking at are two kinds of these. so george washington's deed would've been this one. the stamp of the covenant on it and it's all very official and it is recorded in the state house in virginia, right? what about this other deed? anybody who is literate would write a deed, you want to pass the piece of land to your son is getting back to someone in the next hollow, and you want to set them up for the first home and

they will take this and you are building something and you write a deed. sometimes deeds did not record the sale of land, but they really showed how it bounced around within households. it was the transfer of land very likely without any money changing hands at all. the point is that what we get is a two-tiered land system of official deeds that are sitting in a drawer in new york city, right, , and the deeds that are trading around among the people. what happens when a person with the official deeds basically the grandson finally says, we owned a piece of land in the mountains and there is call on and now we want to go back there and want to take it. -- coal. what i want to say, i go into great detail in the book and i'm not going to do it now, is that the states themselves recognized this and basically created an

inferior right to allow people to trade those deeds, only long enough so that when the capitals class was already to come in and sees the land, that they were able to do it. the households themselves -- wait a minute. the households themselves were not thriving. this is number three. the commodities that they created had declined in quantity and quality by the 1890s. the population had got up. they were unable to spread out. their farms became smaller and smaller. this is not something that i want to sweep away come into something i go into more detail, and that is the was a crisis basically intro to them mountain culture it so. they needed to intensify and do certain things given the circumstances that the ether could not 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 didn't. they had terrible land. it was extremely steep. the commodities were plunging in value as the same things are being produced in illinois, in wisconsin, in minnesota. they were losing basically on every end. could they have been taught? could he have improved? could people from the university experiment stations have come to them with all of the knowledge? by the way, this entire university experiment station compass was rocketing, founded in every state. educating scientists and agents would go out and help people improve the way they cultivated everything. why didn't they come to the southern mountains and teach people how to plant more productive gardens? they didn't. they wrote them off. few people of the time asked why. but most of all, if you want to know the biggest thing, how it is that the lost their land, what was really the essence of

their dispossession, it was the destruction of the forest itself. the numbers of this cake are simply astonishing. by one estimate, lumber companies cut 500 million board feet of lumber a year during the 1890s, that decade alone. between 1907-1914, 1000 separate mills turned up 1 billion board board feet of lumber a year. a board feet is one inch, foot square. the total take of the mountains into the 1920s was about 30 billion board feet of lumber. this is a scheme skitter which i described. that's a forced to landscape but this is kind of a locomotive with all of these, kind of like a spider. when the logging crews cut the trees, these cables go out and

attached to the tree and the steam engine basically pulls them up a grade, down a grade, whatever, hundreds of trees. you could hear it working and it was basically taking it and that a crane would pick it up and probably put on a flatbed 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 point, accomplish an enclosure all by itself. it not only created an alien landscape in which the people had no purpose in , no way to ma living, but it actually literally pulled the people out of the mountains. remember, enclosure did two things pick it greater land as private property and dispossessed people so that they had to live and work for wages. enclosure takes many different forms, as the destruction of the mountains did both of those

things. as their capacity to create commodities collapsed -- check this out. this is dd, west virginia. when i saw this picture, which is a government photograph in the 1930s, i said what's the picture of nevada doing at a collection having to do with west virginia? but it's not nevada. you're looking at a completely deforested landscape. it's like the lorax. when he cut the very last tree, this is what this is. there was no trees left to cut. it almost defies, it almost defies explanation. that this was a densely forested place. as this was happening, the people of the mountains took jobs and participate in the liquidation itself. why did they do that? remember when i said that they

loved money? here's the thing, you can be an agrarian, you can live in a subsistence household without money, but it's hard and mean. money money connection to a transactional realm of things far away. cool stuff. dishes with george washington's picture on it. tools that you can't buy. italian dresses make in boston the people in amounts were consumers of consumer goods. they wanted these things. money allows you to do that. how do you replace money when the source of money -- remember, that cost you no money, the 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 would remain an attribute of the household economy, but not its core. you can't blame them for wanting to make it work.

it's just that it didn't work. wages and the wage world sucked them in. the lumber companies had open the door to the outside world, wrote a contemporary observer. they had open the door to the outside world. they became aware of things, things that money could buy. teens that made life easier, or harder. things to see, things to do. our isolation had ended. they are open and exit. then open a door, adored we were forced to use as an exit from our ancestral homes. then 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're one of the first people hired on the logging crew or in a coal mine, likely wages were a revelation. there are accounts of people coming home with bags of toys for christmas, things no one in the household had ever seen before. but like i said, money is a good slave but a bad master. it was a cruel replacement for the ecological base because currency is a a monolithic forf value. it is issued by someone pick it is issued against your labor. it is good only for your labor, but it replace forms of value that were diverse. when you made whiskey, you minted your own money. when you produced cattle, you did the same thing. these things traded for currency in a world that was extraordinarily diverse in what could be accepted as currency.

but with money they lost control of value. value was determined by the coal company that issued the script of the united states issued the dollar. and when it became associated with your labor and the value of your labor produced, you fell into a trap. there 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 that they once had. losing control of the functional of, smith losing control of the landscape and the labor because they were tight. losing control of the commodities and even the way that their households functioned, this was a revolution in gender relationships, it's what minted and what men were responsible for change, and what women did and what women were responsible for change. mountaineers had lousy options by 1900. they could move to mining and

lumber camps like holden, west virginia, pictured here. many believed that they could earn enough money to get back to the rich and hollow. i'm only doing this for a little while. we've only been here for six months and they would say we had we have said the same thing but we have been a for six years. that didn't work after they get state and the commons and other small animals and basically start. and this is the agrarian household circa 1930 when the new deal agent showed up and saw them, they said these people have always been poor. this is how they have always been. because they never saw them at the peak of their power. they never invited to dinner at the enormous spread of food that they were capable of producing. the huge variety and diversity

of garden and forest. when they showed up this is what the family looked like. living from a garden and only a garden is no way to live. it doesn't work. because the garden, they had forest, field and garden. they lost two legs of the chair and the only had the garden. you can't do it. but the people who hung on, this is what they looked like. this is why we need history, otherwise we might assume they had always lived that way. it's like walking into place were a hurricane that come through in the city is in complete devastation and thinking that people had always lived in ruins. some would say to do know a hurricane happened here last week? it's sort of like that. the last thing they could do is leave. they could go down what became known as the hillbilly highway. hillbilly highway is not a specific highway. it seemed out of appalachia. usually it led to ohio, to michigan, to illinois. it led to the places where

people from the southern mountains went to work in factories to make automobile parts, right? cars. flint, michigan. so this is were i have to leave it, , but the story does contin, right? the great depression brought in a number of new policies intended to resettle dispossess families, and what the new deal called subsistence hosted. after the depression the appalachian regional commission basically undertook a massive development project like something that would be going on in india or mexico, like the green revolution. for the southern mountains with mixed results. i think my real point is that appalachia has a history and it is a history, even more than it is a a place. it is a place having gone through certain events. it is a set of social relations and most production unfolding in the corner of the atlantic world, and it's what of other

stories of the collation of an agrarian economy and a capitalistic economy that happen all over the atlantic world. but my point is that happen in these mountains in the united states, and that we have to understand it. thank you. [applause] >> i am happy to answer your questions. >> thank you so much. that was absolutely riveting. you present a kind of tragic inexorably to the narrative you tell that the lower of money and participation in the consumer economy is so great come these farmers virtually welcomed their own dispossession, not aware that they will not be able to reproduce the standing -- stempel in the young. were there alternate scenarios, and you make the question of

agency, did in the people of insight into what was happening to them and find effective ways individually or collectively to resist? another question is how comparable is this to clearcutting at of the amazon r the devastation of natural resources? is at the same basic story whether it's appalachia or the amazon, or is there significant difference raced on local circumstances? >> same basic story. i like to acknowledge when something is the same basic story, and thing to say, but we have to understand the details of what makes it unique, or else there we just kind of dismiss these cases because they can each 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. because even though there would be a group of people or link group of people who live in a

certain hall or a set of hollows that often found it very difficult to organize against something like a clear-cut or a coal mine. the counties in the state were pitched against them, and there were lots of people from the mountains who essentially came at a certain position where they then began to see the world from the point of view of development. remember, their own economies were collapsing. they saw this money and these jobs as opportunity, , even at e same time they knew people were losing their land. i think it happened very quickly and i think they were also duped. as an example, you heard of like mineral rights, someone selling mineral rights. what would happen is that an attorney would come to the farm and they would say, you want to stay here, right? you don't want to sell?

we don't want to sell. okay, why don't you sell is the rights to the coal underneath your farm. you can stay. you don't have to leave. which is going to own what is hundreds of feet under your four. they would say, really? it was given to them in a way that was confusing and it was meant to bamboozle them, and they would sign the way our right to something that they held very tenuously in the first place. they didn't understand what it would mean for these companies to, and act on that right. and finally something i didn't describe is that often sold their land. they sold for a price they thought was a good price. is this dispossession? i would say it is. when a coal company pulls millions of dollars from the same spot over the next century and they were paid three dollars an acre, i would say that they were ripped off. some of them did sell and it doesn't stop there. if people are given a chunk of money who don't know how to make

it, make more money, when they burn through it, they've got nothing. in other words, they didn't know how to use that money in any other way but to spend it. some of them were insightful, and one of them said, the money that we are paid, we can't take it and then by what we had somewhere else. there is no way for us to basically have the same standard of living like taking this money and buying it someone else. we don't know how to do that. so there were many different ways that they lost. [inaudible] >> no. [inaudible] >> no, no, no, not at all. yes, back there. >> great talk, so interesting. thank you for it. >> my question, you mentioned this very intriguing line about how there are parallels with disposition of native americans.

i'm curious in the most broad terms of how much race in any form placed into these interactions. either the sense of these elites that you mention, likening this group of whites to some sort of racial other or actual interaction with either native peoples or enslaved people. i'm just curious whether that was a part of the discourse? >> i'm extremely empathetic to the people who i studied her they were not empathetic to very many other people. they did not like either american indians for african americans. their opposition to slavery had nothing to do with racial equality. so there's that, but i said that daniel boone enjoyed a remarkable career as a frontier hero, what he was really an odd exception. and that is, if you would go back to the colonial time, to the 17th and 18th century, the people who live out in the

front year were deeply, deeply suspected and hated by colonial officials, accused of every kind, accused of cannibalism. they were utterly depicted as monsters. so 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 what the people in the part of the world were doing anyway. and when interest of the united states at the interest of the mountain folk came together, they became the pioneers. but the pioneers, like in the work of francis parkman, actually was a very brief time that they enjoyed that kind of praise. before and after, they were trashed. that's what's kind of odd about this story. so the racialized very early before the word existed, but then later on in the 20th

century they were, it was a different language. you can see in the writing about appalachia the word degeneracy. they were degenerate. there were described as being kind of having different kinds of spaces. they had kind of long angular faces and longbows. they were lanky and awkward. a were literally grotesque in how they looked and how they moved. certainly, they were considered white, but really when you racialized a group of people you deprived them of any possibility that they would enjoy inclusion like the white elites. it was very easy to depicted as being completely different, and that's what happened. yes, sir. [inaudible] >> -- assume he could have such a thing as government neutrality. with the over breeding or the overpopulation without industrial fertilizer and things

like that have inevitably resulted, albeit by a different force, the same result? >> they were in trouble before all this happened, yes. they were in trouble. they were. their solution the density was always take over the next hill, to the next county, to the next state. these people settled morland and perhaps any other humans in yemen history, more rapidly. they really began in the lower delaware river just south of philadelphia in new sweden, in the 16 \80{l1}s{l0}\'80{l1}s{l}) pick and they just exploded and they were in oregon by the 1840s. >> like an arcadian ideal which is what you would like to have continued. >> yes. >> but it didn't happen that way. i'm thinking of the way extraction industries are bamboozling people into letting them fracking their lands which

causes all these problems do we pay a lot of money, what you think is a lot of money and will pour arsenic down deep and speedy to put it gently, they were a land extensive agrarian culture. could they learn to get more out of their gardens? could they learn to produce things were intensively? everybody does understand that. that's how a garden works. they did get it. but they weren't willing to give up hunting and force practices. it was so crucial to who they were that they simply could not make that transition. 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 the cattle out in the woods, they produced barter crops and they had then and they started to feed in corn, you know, basically corn feeding cattle in fact, begin in the mountains of virginia. if they did that and it took the

cattle and they sold it to the coal companies, the were people who did that. there were just a lot of people who didn't. >> in a sense it's the advances of science that permitted industrialization to overwhelm the agrarian ideal. >> and it was science and its allies with agriculture that work against them. no bank was going to lend them money. there would be no credit. they could use no machinery where they lived. ..

integrated school. >> it was that. i mean, like parts of the common i mean, mode of what i understood in them only understood recently about what it means to come from appalachian culture has been from reading history books and political risk from appalachia for inspiration. the cultural history of things that work and my family. i am just wondering, how did people react to this book better from there?

because i, the way was to dictate, it felt like you send the story and it feels downtrodden and even in how we talking now with light guns, science and the way things are manipulated into this cultural narrative that is creating a place where this can happen. >> i don't know how people react to it because the book has not been published yet. i have, yeah. i don't really know what's going to happen. but when i was finishing it, and i didn't want to leave it in the trench. i started making bullet points

on what a post-appalachia might look like i ended up putting it into the form and piece of legislation called the common community act. i went command select delete about five times. i thought i'm not going to do this and i ended up doing it. but it does is a way for local government or the federal government to take possession of abandoned land and return it to people who can have any kind of business or career that they want for nearly nothing. they can live in an ecological pace with its robust enough. doesn't mean they are going to disappear. i have connected them with college is coming and coming writers in residence. this is not like an isolated community. i was very careful not to do that. sending kids to college, all of it in this piece of legislation.

my thinking as i did want to imagine a future of appalachia that owed itself to another set of corporate overlords or employers even i was there and talk to people and i did talk to people there and i found in a few people i spoke to only one is my own piece of land come a pickup pickup truck. i went to hunt these fish. i saw people with guarding people with guardians over like an acre. when you have an acre garden in the produce food for about more than just a family. i suspect secular gardens all over the place. so i saw people wanting to still practice parts of that in the literature is clear. it's extremely popular to essentially lead a combination of a subsistence lifestyle with wage were anything people can put together.

this is not some kind of a fantasy. it is really just putting into public policy the way that people live anyway. that is how i try to leave it. [inaudible] yeah, absolutely. no, they forage. very many people doing it and the whole company of an enormous piece of land. or they don't come ironically near george washington's land for coal river meets the kid in a river, a whole bunch of people there in the library of congress in fact documented them with an entire series of loyalist greek all talking about how they live up sensibly. so i'm not making this up. i'm just putting it into a hopeful vision would be more consistent with the past, but there's no going back to the

past and it's not an exercise in romanticism. that is my thought because i don't think apple or intel will come and save them. [inaudible] >> one guy in particular who i think profusely because he drove me around for days. we had a long time to talk. they were fine with it. but other people were not interested in talking to me. i had to go to public place and cozy up to someone at the bar and say what was going on. i'm an historian, not a sociologist. i was there to go look at archives. i am not claiming that i did it on saturday. i don't know exactly how it is going to be received because it is an odd book in the senate that it's deeply empathetic to the mountain culture in a way of living that i think feels 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 anti-capitalists. but basically it is. [inaudible] >> i don't know. i'd rather not know. he might thank you for this amazing and informative talk. i had a couple of questions come the sun picked up some things said and maybe a little bit beyond the scope of the talk he presented tonight. when you're talking about racially station, it occurred to me that the stereotypes of appellation like folks in the ozarks is about inbreeding, like that is the source of the degeneracy. i was just wondering if there's any intersection between initialization of these folks in the stereotypes around their

monstrous figures than emotion intersect with the rise of modern genetics. and then coming out your little bit and picking up on the tail end of her talk, it picks up on the last line of questioning about the political legacy of these communities in history in the 20th century. we met some folks who are they going to go do auto industry work. i wonder if folks moved to the ozarks or other kinds mountain regions to reproduce or plains regions or something like that. and so far as folks are going to work in industries. there's also people who stay behind working as coal miners in the kind of strength within the

union movement. we have heard about that at all. how do they interact within the union movement and other kinds of industrial work places. is there a legacy bear with relationships and other white ethnics are african-american people out of history and passionately in terms of the way the history of the midcentury kind of unfolds. what does this story, which was sort of a long 19th century story in many ways as he presented it tonight. could you speak more? spinmeisters to begin with, thank you for the question, julia appeared of course i didn't talk about the enormous linguistic racial national diversity of coal mining towns. but what i found because i looked at the papers of the five top mining company then there was a manager and he would interview people from the

mountains would common want to be hired very early on in the late 1880s. he would say what you want to work here and some would to work hearings on what they want enough money to buy my farm back. he would say we are not tire review. what happened is they would work until they had a certain amount of money. not saying it was about to buy a farm and they would drop the tools and walk away. because they didn't want industrial discipline and they were trying to use coal one reason for italians, hungarians of african-americans coming up with everything for the the popularity of medical companies had labor agents, labor contractors coached these different countries to bring it in his ap stories that kind of labor monopoly as odd as that may sound.

all the people who lived in the mountains had to accept industrial discipline or they were not going to get any work at all. it basically radically change the labor market and their hold on it. there was done absolutely intentionally can't wait for the carload of hungarians. it didn't matter. they were hungarian. i can't wait for another carload of hungarians to get here because these people just walked away and basically shut down the lane. i found that and it was an interesting way to watch how the desire for aquaria and in autonomy intersected with the formation of this united nations camps. i didn't a lot about unionization but i did one strike of 1912.

it is not a book about unionization. i have to keep my eye on subsistence and in this case how the mining company is evicted people from their homes in their gardens whenever they joined the union as a way of starving them so people have a garden in a home at the coal companies could at any time for everything. you weren't seen. you want scene. you weren't seen as a normal turn into a great unpaid rent. you're basically a word that the company is. if it didn't someone immediately say in june or july when they were coming due in the garden was away at basically starving them into submission. the strikes had great difficulty gathering food and people of québec to their gardens, risking being shot in order to get a chicken, a bushel of being, anything they could won't strike. my view of that is through subsistence.

finally, about immigrating. there's a very important book about appalachia called night of the cumberland. there's a group of scientists who wrote a book called night comes to chromosomes. but they found was inbreeding within people closely related to that is to say siblings were first cousins with no greater than it was in almost every other place. people lived in the same regions and they were intermarried in a number of different families said they often have the same last names. and this is always mistaken for the closely related people in fact coupling. there is no human group that endorses relationships between siblings. the royal families of egypt seems that keypad was the child of siblings. so there you go.

and no one called him white trash. but that actually happening. the thing is there is no greater evidence for that happening in west virginia. and in fact coming you can marry your first cousin than half of the states. it is legal to marry your cousin it is illegal in west virginia. [inaudible] >> way. they did a population bottlenecks in which there weren't enough people for someone to marry because they were going to buy their first cousin or a sibling, said they needed to get people from the outside and bring them in an something that in crown heights today but they need people to come in and diversified gene pool. they actually did that. when the degeneracy slur came about, i didn't to inbreeding.

i think that conclusion came later. [inaudible] last match

when they were trying to make peace. there absolutely troublemakers

from the beginning. we don't think is don't think us we cannot wait today, but trust me they were. as a kind of went out looking for all that new land, and they were enjoyed by the souther hibernates group. they were fleeing from their british empire in the 1720s and they basically were doing the same thing in nevada. all i can say is by the time of the revolution, the majority culture with dutch irish. it was just more people. new environments which people to name things differently, cultivate different plans. indians are intimately accepting practices from indians. they learned how to gather certain plants from indians.

even some suggestion there was early intermarriage. by the time of the revolution, there seems to be pretty purely positive. >> thank you so much for this. i was curious about this analog you draw because much of what you describe actually sounds much like the place i've were familiar with his kenya. i wonder if there's more the terrorists are connections between what you draw in this region and the rest of the world in the same. >> theatre roosevelt. i don't know. maybe. he was basically through his own government and interest in blogging and development of the mountains and on the other side his foreign policy, people like ken were kind of rich across the atlantic to the two different scrambles in the belief in both cases that it was bringing

civilization in moving people to the stage of civilization. there is no direct connection really appeared in the book i draw a parallel between hamilton's view of taxation and how it is supposed to be an education tax is a word that i got from african culmination and no correct me here, but in madagascar are in british east africa, they would come in and have a whole, it was they had tax with a pair the governors were really blunt about it. the only way to get them to pay his dues money consent also commodities and we can get a hold of them and send them to london. i maintain hamilton is doing much of the same thing in western pennsylvania, a real revenue raising tax.

>> yeah, absolutely my argument. >> so there is a connection between them. in the end of the last chapter i talk about land grabbing from secondary sources in a documentary that i had a very small part in only to show that enclosure would appalachia and today is still happening. that presidents are still being defined as incapable of progress in the development is more so than we may be like to think deeply invested in the notion that people losing their land as a form of progress.

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> i'm so sorry. i apologize. the last comment about africa is that the similarity is almost uncanny. if i didn't have a map in front of my eyes in the story of africa, multiple currencies, the same distance foraging you described could likewise seem bland and multiple regimes of land tenure exchange, et cetera.

the difference in this is why wonder to the question of is this yet another story of the enclosure did not have been in africa but did not have been in systematic homogeneous fashion. people who work in the mines and go back to their land. that has always been the sort of conundrum of understanding capitalism. >> i'm walking the line between telling a story that many people now but a lot of my readers don't know and pointing out what is specific about this case for specialists in mayfield. i'm kind of doing both. as far as africa, yeah, you know more than i do. it's kind of happening now in the story for molly at the origin of a company called susa more committee ideas the states went to the peasants and said they didn't say we are taking

their land although they had done that before. it would be a really, really good idea if he would give up this land and grow sugar and life will be better for you and you can have wages that occurred in nsa similars doria but because of the transparency of today they can't come in and take it although there were cases in which it was taken at that point recently as well. what is interesting is the enclosure may be happening now. but yes, the present occupation this to a time before private property. i don't know if i want it to be the same old story for a different story. because it believes both. >> again, thank you very much for this. maybe i had missed this, but i am curious as to what pertaining to the last question, how you said early on that there were

like four owners of land and wealthy entrepreneurs who in different parts of west virginia and that they really fascinated with flatlands and anything else that happened in the forest you could have pioneers for runaway slaves or people that didn't care about the mayor. how would those people are with those people go about laying claim to land and if they did would it have to be a legal transaction and participating in this two-tiered system. >> it's really strange and complicated. virginia was an absolute mess. an absolutely cannot than dysfunctional lan system. the reason george washington only one file and is just the

only thing anyone could imagine is to be used for plantation. this is what the state of virginia was hoping for when i gave up and away. why give it away? i saw it as a promissory note that ultimately the owners that make good on it because they would use it in some way and they thought perhaps for cotton and even though that was never going to have been, it's the only thing that was in their mind. owners would also have to pay property taxes and this is where it gets interesting because they didn't always pay those property taxes. do you know what average possession this? when you move onto a piece of land that is neglect it. perhaps no one has been there for 20 years. maybe no one has paid taxes in 20 years. if you move onto the land and pay taxes come you can go to accord and say i now own this land is sometimes the judge will say you're right, you do. it works today.

sometimes it's kind 11, 12 or 21. so the people who live people who live down there, they likely knew what they were doing. when robert morris died, people thought there was going to be a bonanza. but the state of virginia basically brief recess all of his era like land in 1830 come in the 1820s or 30s, a member families moved into the area. they might as leave if they laid staked to a portion of robert morris' state that they could claim as their own. it didn't actually work that way. if you did have a farm in you started to pay taxes in the county and you recorded it, you begin to accumulate rights. the state of west virginia upheld a lot of these deals and said they have a perfect right to it. they did x,y and z and they win the investor in new york city who came along whose grandfather

never paid the taxes on it, you lose. that absolutely happened. as time went on it happens less. >> i'm curious. i'm assuming runaway slaves would be ill to go to court and lay claim to land until well into the 20th century. so where would they go or what would they do? >> runaway slaves tended to be squatters. everyone we talk about here is a spider and probably know or even if they don't know is private property. runaway slaves definitely do that and as stephen hahn showed very famously in the roots of southern populism, there were other things from a plane tuesday make it impossible to make him with especially african-americans. even if they were poor whites to force them to her in ages. they tended to be much more

pervasive in the mountains of virginia, south airliner, north carolina. but not as many in west virginia. they found the environment more hostile socially. >> i had another question about the hillbilly highway. he talk about michigan. you go to detroit and flint today, there are these whole communities they've built around appalachians and then even as evil tokyo quarter techie it may have an accent. i was wondering if you could talk more about the way that these immigrants try to re-create appalachian culture in an incredibly different community with none of the same resources they had before. >> i can't really. i really don't know anything about that. in all honesty it's fascinating there are people who know much more about that like pete danielle. what i would say is that they

maintain in this gets something the last the connection that people moved back and forth. so when the great depression, when the coal mine shut, everybody -- let me do this differently. in the 1920s there was a movement in manufacturing. in the great depression and the factory shack, people went back to the mountains to the list can because you can have a garden and hound. you move back for the subsistence and they went back and forth depending on opportunity. they maintained ties with the people back home. the two others in ohio and illinois and michigan they were just poor whites. they became branded a month altogether even if they as communities saw themselves as distinct because they are going back for holidays in case they needed retrenchment they would go back home to the home place.

so it wasn't a one-way transfer is what i want to say. thank you so much. [applause] i really appreciate it. [applause] >> .tv is on twitter and facebook group we want to hear from you. twitter.com/booktv or post a comment on her face but page, facebook.com/booktv. [inaudible conversations] >> hello. welcome. i'm bradley graham, co-owner of politics & prose was lisa muscatine and on behalf of the entire staff from the thank you very much for coming. well, survival. that is the big topic that we are here to talk about this evening as mankind looks to the