Editor’s Note

Reviewed by: The Industrialist and the Mountaineer: The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier by Ronald L. Lewis, and: No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell: The Stafford-Townsend Feud of Colorado County, Texas, 1871–1911 by James C. Kearney, Bill Stein, and James Smallwood Christopher Thrasher The Industrialist and the Mountaineer: The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier. By Ronald L. Lewis. West Virginia and Appalachia. ( Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 301. Paper, $26.99, ISBN 978–1-943665–51-8; cloth, $79.99, 978–1-943665–50-1.) No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell: The Stafford-Townsend Feud of Colorado County, Texas, 1871–1911. By James C. Kearney, Bill Stein, and James Smallwood. Texas Local Series. ( Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 287. $29.95, ISBN 978–1-57441–650-3.) The Industrialist and the Mountaineer: The Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia's Timber Frontier and No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell: The Stafford-Townsend Feud of Colorado County, Texas, 1871–1911 focus on the history of feuding during the Reconstruction era. In both works, the authors share thrilling stories of violence and economic conflict in an effort to reveal fundamental shifts in southern society in the years after the Civil War. While these are important similarities, the works grew from distinct methodologies and look at two areas at opposite ends of the region. Ronald L. Lewis is an expert on the history of working-class Appalachian people and is a professor emeritus of history at West Virginia University. He has spent many years teaching courses on the history of Appalachia and has written numerous books on this subject, including Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1998) and Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington, Ky., 1987). Lewis's newwork, The Industrialist and the Mountaineer, focuses on the conflict between timber tycoon Frank Elmer Thompson and small landowner Robert [End Page 195] Woodford Eastham. The dispute, which began as a fairly conventional conflict over money and land in West Virginia's timber country, spiraled out of control. Eastham murdered Thompson and was eventually tried for the crime. Lewis moves beyond the story of two men, arguing that the dispute provides insights into a greater cultural conflict that Richard Brown calls the "'Western Civil War of Incorporation,'" in which new market elites displaced traditional agrarian aristocrats (p. 7). To support his argument, Lewis paints Eastham—a member of an old Virginia family, an ardent Democrat, and a former member of Mosby's Rangers, one of the most notorious units in the Confederate army—as a traditionalist. In contrast, Lewis presents Thompson, a descendant of a wealthy New England family and a Republican who was too young to have served during the Civil War, as a member of the new elite. Lewis's goals are ambitious, and he is ultimately successful. James C. Kearney, Bill Stein, and James Smallwood formed an inadvertent partnership to write No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell. The project began with archivist Bill Stein'sresearchduringthe1990s.WhenSteinpassedawayin2008, his brother Chris Stein approached University of Texas professor and family friend James Kearney in hopes that he would complete the work. Kearney agreed and received assistance from James Smallwood, professor of history at Oklahoma State University. Smallwood envisioned a much broader study of violence in Texas, while Kearney hoped to focus more tightly on the Stafford and Townsend families at the heart of the feud. In 2013, Smallwood passed away, and Kearney completed the work with the more narrow focus that he and Bill Stein preferred. The book focuses on a series of conflicts in Colorado County, Texas, that took place between 1871 and 1911. Like Lewis, Kearney moves beyond the limited context of feuding to address broader shifts in southern society during Reconstruction. While many people were eventually drawn into the dispute, the conflict, at its core, was between the old money Stafford family and the prominent, new money Townsend family, who reached...

Reviewed by: A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia by Brent Tarter Randall S. Gooden A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia. By Brent Tarter. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. vii, 217.) Soon after the Second Wheeling Convention convened to organize a pro-Union Virginia government in 1861, the issue of Virginia’s antebellum debt and the Civil War’s effect upon it surfaced. As the summer and the first battles of the war passed, the issue pressed. “How is it to be settled?” Delegate Fountain Smith asked. “That, Sir, is to be left for yourself and other eminent gentlemen who will be in the future legislative assemblies to determine,” [End Page 78] Delegate John S. Carlile replied to a chorus of laughter. “It will be time enough to consider when the time for considering it arrives” (Lewis, How West Virginia Was Made, 121 and 246). The laughter soon faded as the issue of paying Virginia’s bondholders for the debt lingered for over half a century and festered in the politics and economies of both Virginia and West Virginia. Whether Carlile intended his remarks to defer the issue, as a prophecy, or as a curse, they proved accurate. Days of legislative debate and court deliberations and page after page of historical interpretation were devoted to the Virginia debt controversy. Brent Tarter, best known for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, has produced the latest work on the subject. In A Saga of the New South: Race, Law and Public Debt in Virginia, Tarter pays tribute in an admirable bibliographic essay to the works on the debt that came before his. He also explicitly maps out the history of Virginia’s internal struggle with the debt apart from the controversy with West Virginia over shares of the debt. Yet, the strength of Tarter’s own book is not its contribution of another treatment of the debt controversy—as thorough as it is. It is its coverage of Virginia’s political history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a different perspective. While Tarter covers the state’s transitional political events, he places those events in the context of the debt that hung over Virginia’s government and economy during the period. The politics of race, reconstruction, redemption, and the New South movement are present in the book, but Tarter shows that those issues—common to the states of the South—cannot be explored from state to state from a one-size-fits-all approach. History affected each southern state differently and for different reasons. In the case of Virginia, its antebellum debt became the dye that colored all of its historical threads. In laying out his history, Tarter, with an emphasis upon Virginia’s investment in railroad projects, traces the origins of the debt in antebellum times. Railroads held the promise of bringing Virginia into modern economic play. While he explains this, Tarter at the same time misses the chance to point out that the emphasis upon railroading contradicted the idea that Virginia’s economy was stereotypically plantation based. And the writer’s mention that Virginia stood behind only New York and Pennsylvania in antebellum debt loses some of its impact without discussion of the significance of this debt in light of the general fiscal conservatism of slaveholding states. In the same chapter in which he discusses the origin of the debt, Tarter writes about the origins of the debt crisis in the secession of Virginia, proclamation of a pro-Union state government in Wheeling, and the eventual separation of West Virginia from Virginia. Without the economic disruption and damage caused by the Civil War and the removal of the western counties from the state, Virginia would have faced no likely problem in repaying the debt. [End Page 79] The significance of these events begs a separate chapter with deeper treatments of the origins of both the debt and the debt crisis. However, Tarter covers these topics sufficiently if the book is a history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Virginia in the context of the debt and not merely a history of...

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Emily Masters (bio) Americans are less able than ever to tell the difference between real and fake," memoirist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman says. "And we are all suffering for it." This blunt observation about our current national moment strikes at the heart of her debut memoir, Sounds Like Titanic, which tells the story of her experience touring the United States as a violinist in an ensemble of musicians led by a man she calls The Composer. But there is a catch. [End Page 36] Unbeknownst to their audiences, the microphone is dead, and they are miming to a recording. As the strange, bewitching tale unfolds, Hindman grapples with what it means to be a woman, an Appalachian, an American, a writer, and a performer. After a recent reading at Berea College, Appalachian Heritage's Emily Masters caught up with Hindman to chat about translating music to the page, the blurred lines between reality and falsity, her views on the education system in Appalachia, and the prevailing notions of beauty and female bodies. ________ EMILY MASTERS: This is a fascinating memoir. You toured the country as a violinist in an ensemble that played along onstage with a dead microphone to a recording—and audiences across the country were completely fooled. When did you know you would have to write about this experience? JESSICA CHICCEHITTO HINDMAN: Thank you! By the time I went on the fifty-three city tour around America with The Composer in 2004, I knew that this would be an experience I would write about in some way. The experience was just so absurd that I knew it would make great writing material. EM: You grew up in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, which figures into the book at various points. In Sounds Like Titanic, you bring to light the lack of access to opportunity due to the topographical features of Appalachia. The picture you paint of education and [End Page 37] opportunity in the region is pretty dismal. Do you think much has changed since you were growing up and going to school in the region? JCH: Yes, it has changed, sadly for the worse. I grew up in two very small towns in the Appalachian region—one in West Virginia, the other just over the state line in Virginia. My family moved to the town in Virginia in 1990, when the West Virginia teachers went on strike and school was cancelled for some time. The differences between those towns were immense in 1990 and are even more immense now. In recent years, my town in West Virginia was hit very hard by the opioid crisis. Despite having around 2,000 people, the town has been featured in a lot of national news stories about heroin and painkiller addiction. The last time I visited, I noticed that even some of the most basic businesses, like the 7-Eleven gas station, were boarded up and abandoned. Meanwhile, my town in Virginia has been thriving, with lots of new businesses, beautification efforts, and expanded public services such as new parks and other community activities. My Virginia town has also been featured in national news stories about the opioid crisis, but it hasn't been annihilated by that problem the way that my West Virginia town has. It is both heartbreaking and fascinating to see how two towns separated by a single mountain range have had such a different trajectory. EM: You talk a lot about your experiences of inferiority when you left the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia due to your dialect and accent and how you felt like you had to be a spokesperson for the region as a whole while you were in college. How have you grappled with maintaining your identity as someone from the mountains [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Photo: Vanessa Borer [End Page 39] while trying to make outsiders understand the complexity of the region? Do you still feel the pressure to speak for the people from back home? JCH: When I first arrived in New York City, I felt a lot of pressure to explain to folks where I was from...

A is for Advocacy

To explore how endophthalmitis presented from 2009 to 2019 in a West Virginia population particularly affected by the national opioid crisis. The analysis explores the relationship between the type of endophthalmitis and mortality, accounting for factors including age, gender, type of organism, and intravenous drug use (IVDU). The electronic health record of West Virginia University (WVU) Medicine was queried for all patients managed for endophthalmitis from October 2009 to October 2019. For each of the included subjects, age, gender, history of IVDU, culture results, concomitant endocarditis, type of endophthalmitis, and the date of diagnosis were extracted. Mortality data were obtained from WVU's electronic medical record, the Social Security Death Index, and public obituaries. Mortality results were represented by a Kaplan-Meier Survival curve following each patient for one year from the date of diagnosis. Results were analyzed using unadjusted and adjusted Cox Proportional Hazard models. One-year mortality was 14 out of 113 endogenous cases (12.4%) compared to 6 out of 173 exogenous cases (3.5%). Endogenous endophthalmitis cases had significantly higher mortality than exogenous ones within one year of diagnosis (p = 0.0034). The unadjusted Cox proportional hazards model revealed that the type of endophthalmitis (endogenous vs. exogenous) was the only variable with a significant impact on 1-year mortality with a hazard ratio of 3.78 (p = 0.01). However, the hazard ratio for endogenous infections rose to 10.91 (CI 3.544-33.595) when the other variables of age, gender, organism, and IVDU were controlled (p < 0.01). The Cox proportional hazard ratios for age group, gender, organism type, and history of IVDU were not significantly different when adjusted for all other variables. Endogenous cases, which were significantly overrepresented in West Virginia, were associated with a significantly higher 1-year mortality rate than the exogenous ones. Age, gender, organism type, and history of IVDU have less, if any, modifying effect on mortality.

Reviewed by: Governor William E. Glasscock and Progressive Politics in West Virginia Jeffery B. Cook Governor William E. Glasscock and Progressive Politics in West Virginia. By Gary Jackson Tucker. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008. Pp. 216.) Gary Jackson Tucker has researched the life of West Virginia's thirteenth governor and his role as the state's leading progressive reformer. Not only did William E. Glasscock serve as the midwife who birthed numerous reform policies, but he also hastened the Republican political realignment that transpired following the demise of the Elkins political machine. Tucker grounds progressive-era politics in West Virginia within the larger national context, clearly demonstrating how national issues such as prohibition, income tax reform, and the direct election of senators played out in the Mountain State. By the turn of the twentieth century, the office of chief executive was becoming increasingly more progressive under the direction of Glasscock's Republican predecessors. Even with Tucker's emphasis upon continuity, it was under Glasscock when West Virginia's progressive movement came of age. In assessing Glasscock's performance as a reformer and his institutional legacy, Tucker stresses the complicated and changing political context in which the governor functioned and the obstacles he encountered. Tucker rightly makes clear that business was the central concern of both major political parties as best represented by Fairmont Coal Company's A. B. Fleming and Republican party boss Senator Stephen B. Elkins. Both men opposed any reforms that threatened West Virginia's investment potential or altered the relationship between government and business. The state's reform movement also spawned an intense struggle between conservatives and reformers within the Republican party. Intra-party strife contributed to the disastrous election of 1910, and the death of Stephen Elkins one year later afforded reformers the opportunity to gain control of the party just before the Great War halted the national reform movement. The chapters on the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strikes are perhaps the most interesting, and certainly of greatest interest to labor historians and students of West Virginia history. In 1912, when operators refused to renew the United Mine Workers' contract, a general strike followed. Some mine operators hired the notorious Baldwin Felts agents to protect private property, while the governor dispatched the West Virginia National Guard to maintain order. Glasscock demonstrated his timidity throughout the strike, and tried to placate all parties involved by searching for a compromise solution to the labor-management conflict. The author relegates the governor [End Page 97] to the status of a victim, since credit for ending the conflict was bestowed by contemporaries upon his successor, Governor Henry Hatfield. However, serious historians will quickly detect the weaknesses in this biography. Tucker's research is primarily limited to those sources that were available when his dissertation, upon which this work is based, was completed in the early 1970s. For example, a careful examination of the author's bibliography identified only four secondary sources that were published this decade. As such, Tucker failed to incorporate a number of recent dissertations and secondary works that one would expect to find when a dissertation undergoes revision for a university press. In short, Tucker's failure to consult all the resources at his disposal results in a dated publication, and one that will be of limited use to the academic community. Indeed, Governor William E. Glasscock was a fairly effective chief executive and a committed proponent of progressive reform. Readers will learn a great deal about state politics, and the relationships between Glasscock's ideas and the broader currents in American political thought during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As one of the state's most important governors, Glasscock was a reformer, blazing a path that was followed by many of his political successors. Jeffery B. Cook North Greenville University Copyright © 2010 West Virginia University Press

Herpetological studies in West Virginia began with Dr. A. M. Reese, a vertebrate zoologist at West Virginia University from 1907 to 1946. One of his students, Dr. N.B. Green, became the first curator of the state collection located at Marshall University. Other early herpetologists who contributed to our knowledge of herpetology in the state include Mr. M. Graham Netting, Mr. Neil D. Richmond, Professor Maurice Books, and Dr. Albert H. Wright. During the nearly 90 years of herpetological studies in West Virginia, numerous undergraduate and graduate students have contributed greatly to the state’s collection and our knowledge of amphibians and reptiles in the state. Presently, there are 49 species of amphibians and 41 species of reptiles known to occur in West Virginia. The atlas will contain information from approximately 70,000 records including those of the authors, Dr. N.B. Green, and others who search for and study amphibians and reptiles in the state. It will also include records from the state amphibian and reptile collection housed at Marshall University (nearly 15,000 specimens) and West Virginia specimens present in all major museums. In this presentation, we will discuss species with the least amount of data and areas of the state with the least number of records.

Reviewed by: A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country: The Selected Correspondence of John Rodgers Meigs Jonathan M. Berkey A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country: The Selected Correspondence of John Rodgers Meigs. Edited by Mary A. Giunta. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 352. Cloth $60.00.) Maps of Rockingham County, Virginia, produced shortly after the Civil War called the three-square-mile area surrounding the town of Dayton the "Burnt District." The name refers to the wartime destruction of local barns and homes by Union forces in retaliation for the controversial death of a Union staff officer. The unfortunate officer was John Rodgers Meigs, son of Union quartermaster general Montgomery C. Meigs. In A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country, Mary A. Giunta has collected correspondence pertaining to the younger Meigs's training at the U.S. Military Academy and his brief Civil War career. The West Point correspondence will strike a familiar chord with any parent who has sent a child to college. When he entered West Point in 1859, Meigs possessed the intelligence to be an exemplary student, but he continually struggled to master the academy's recitations. Letters from his family expressed disappointment with low subject rankings and urged him to reach his potential as a cadet. Everyone hoped that he would earn entry into the Corps of Engineers, which would provide more honor and potential than beginning his army career at a remote western fort. Family letters constantly reminded the young cadet that his performance at the academy would set the stage for a lifetime of success or failure. Cadet Meigs's performance at West Point would challenge even the most patient parents. By the fall of 1860, he had earned seventy-six demerits, only [End Page 322] twenty-four short of dismissal. While he avoided this fate, he came close again in May 1862, when he was arrested for a physical altercation with a cadet captain. Despite these close calls, he rallied to graduate at the top of his class in June 1863. After graduation, Meigs served in Maryland, West Virginia, and the Shenandoah Valley. He provided valuable service to the Union war effort by constructing and maintaining blockhouses to protect the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, building and rebuilding bridges, undertaking topographical surveys, and preparing maps. In August 1864, he became chief engineer and aide-de-camp for Philip H. Sheridan. While serving in this capacity, Meigs was ambushed by Confederate scouts conducting a mission behind Union lines. Witnesses to the event disagreed over whether Meigs had surrendered before he was killed. His father would devote much energy after the war to identify the men he believed murdered his son. Occasional questionable editorial choices weaken A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country. In letter after letter of the West Point correspondence, family members urged Cadet Meigs to buckle down and improve his performance for the honor of the family, but the correspondence falls silent regarding Meigs's altercation with his cadet captain, the incident that almost got him thrown out of the academy. Did Montgomery Meigs stop writing to his son out of disappointment, or is there simply a gap in the correspondence? Giunta offers no explanation. Perhaps most distracting is the use of a "glossary" to identify names and places at the end of the book rather than traditional footnotes. Beyond the inconvenience of constantly turning to the back of the book, there are times when this method is ineffective. For example, a January 1861 letter refers to a "Major Lee," but it is unclear which, if any, of the four Lees listed in the glossary is the major in question. The book offers limited material of interest to students of the Civil War. While Meigs comments on the hardening process endured by veteran soldiers and voices common opinions on military leaders and events, the bulk of the collection focuses on his West Point years. This collection will appeal to historians of nineteenth-century family relations and those interested in the cadet experience at West Point. [End Page 323] Jonathan M. Berkey Concord University Copyright © 2008 The Kent State University Press

*Departments of Ophthalmology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia 1Departments of Microbiology and Immunology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia

This study examines the clinical characteristics, outcomes and types of management in SARS-CoV-2 infected patients, in the hospitals affiliated with West Virginia University. We included patients from West Virginia with SARS-CoV-2 infection between 15 April to 30 December 2020. Descriptive analysis was performed to summarize the characteristics of patients. Regression analyses were performed to assess the association between baseline characteristics and outcomes. Of 1742 patients, the mean age was 47.5 years (±22.7) and 54% of patients were female. Only 459 patients (26.3%) reported at least one baseline symptom, of which shortness of breath was most common. More than half had at least one comorbidity, with hypertension being the most common. There were 131 severe cases (7.5%), and 84 patients (4.8%) died despite treatment. The mean overall length of hospital stay was 2.6 days (±6.9). Age, male sex, and comorbidities were independent predictors of outcomes. In this study of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection from West Virginia, older patients with underlying co-morbidities had poor outcomes, and the in-hospital mortality was similar to the national average.

Reviewed by: The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with Eleven U.S. Presidents by David A. Corbin Ronald L. Lewis The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with Eleven U.S. Presidents. By David A. Corbin. (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012, Pp. ix–xiv, 364.) For a politician as prominent as the late West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd, few know much about the man himself or his political accomplishments, mostly because the senator was a modest and private man. As an employee of the US Senate for twenty-six years, the last fifteen as an aide to Senator Byrd, [End Page 91] David Corbin is in a unique position to assess Byrd’s US Senate career, and the author’s revelations of the senator’s behind-the-scenes negotiations and the philosophical principles behind his votes are major contributions by an accomplished historian. Robert Byrd’s ascent from poverty to power is an oft-told story. The loss of his parents at an early age, his rearing by poor but proud relatives who treated him as their own son, his election to the West Virginia House of Delegates and then to the state senate, and his successful congressional elections first to the US House and then to the US Senate is embraced as an affirmation of the American myth of the self-made man. That Byrd would be elected to the Senate for nine full terms and serve fifty-two years in that august body, making him the longest serving senator in history; that he would cast more roll-call votes than any other senator in history; and that he would hold the most Senate leadership positions in history could not have been foreseen even by the senator himself, and certainly not by his detractors among the Washington elite. For years they failed to take him seriously and denounced him variously as racist hillbilly, country bumpkin, hillbilly Uriah Heep, rustic boob, and the king of pork. Academically an undereducated (he never earned a bachelor’s degree, but he did earn a law degree after ten years of night school while serving in the Senate), poor son of a West Virginia coal miner, they simply dismissed him as unqualified for high office. However, his rapid rise to powerful positions such as Senate whip, majority leader, and chair of the appropriations committee, along with his major legislative successes, forced them to eat crow. It should be emphasized that Byrd’s power base was not within the political establishment of West Virginia, but rather among the ordinary citizens across the length and breadth of his home state. Throughout his life he maintained the same values acquired while growing up in southern West Virginia and firmly rooted in his fundamentalist-protestant religion, what Corbin calls his hillbilly morality. He was convinced that God had “ordained this nation, and that this nation has responsibilities to perform under God” (43). His ultrapatriotism was neither chauvinistic nor militaristic but rather grounded in the belief that it was America’s God-appointed mission to bring liberty and peace to the world. The belief that “God had guided the hand of the Founding Fathers in the formation of American law—that is, the Constitution—the same as he presented Moses with the law for mankind” was the cornerstone of Byrd’s political philosophy (44). Therefore, the Constitution was holy writ and a law must be treated with reverence; any changes must preserve the checks and balances at the heart of the Constitution which were explained in the Federalist Papers. Byrd’s strict construction of the Constitution could cut both ways and was most obvious in the positions he took on civil rights. When he voted against [End Page 92] the 1960 civil rights bill to end the poll tax, the southern bloc applauded, and integrationists were outraged. He had been a member of the KKK very briefly in his youth, and both progressives and conservatives jumped to the wrong conclusions regarding his political motivations. To Byrd, the bill was unconstitutional because the Constitution gave states the power to establish election laws. He favored abolishing the poll tax, but it had to be done...

Reviewed by: Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle John C. Inscoe Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South. By Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 412.) From Robert Lively’s Fiction Fights the Civil War (1957) to Edmond Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962) and Stephen Cushman’s Belligerent Muse (2014), the literary legacy of the Civil War has long been a scholarly staple. Only within the last few years has similar scrutiny been applied to Reconstruction, with Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s aptly titled study appearing as the most recent and among the most substantive contributions. Through a series of case studies, each representing one of the five military districts into which the former Confederacy was divided at war’s end (a somewhat contrived framing device), she examines a literary output that dramatized the promise of the federal government’s Reconstruction agenda for a radical restructuring of southern society [End Page 84] in which freedmen and women exercised newly acquired rights and opportunities. Four of her five chapters focus on individual writers and usually a single novel by each. George Washington Cable of New Orleans, and the author of The Grandissimes (1880), is the only native white southerner in the mix. Three others were northern transplants to the postwar south: New England–born Constance Fenimore Woolson, who wintered in St. Augustine, Florida, through much of the 1870s and wrote a series of travel sketches and short stories promoting tourism in that most remote of Confederate states; Ohio carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, who became a judge in Greensboro, North Carolina, and wrote a series of novels based on his contentious experiences there, including his first, Toinette (1874); and the lesser-known Iowan Octave Thanet, who based her novel Expiation (1890) on her part-time residence on an Arkansas plantation in the 1880s. Kennedy-Nolle provides very close, insightful readings of these works, devoting much of her analysis to their African American or mixed-race characters (including Seminoles and Minorcans featured in Woolson’s sketches and both black and white Creoles in Cable’s novel), who emerged after the war as vital and vibrant parts of newly acculturated communities in both urban and rural settings. She is especially attuned to strong female characters, whose agency and influence in both private and public spheres these authors saw as integral in shaping this promising new social and political order. Breaking from this pattern of single writer case studies is a far more expansive fifth chapter that will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. In it, Kennedy-Nolle turns to Storer College, established in 1867 for newly freed African Americans in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, to examine more academic and journalistic contexts for this advocacy of a lasting Reconstruction legacy. She focuses on three individuals—Sarah Jane Foster, a white Baptist freedmen’s teacher who faced considerable harassment during her brief tenure there, and two former Storer students (then alumni), John Clifford and Coralie Franklin (curiously the only black writers featured in the book). Through Clifford’s The Pioneer Press, the era’s longest-running African American newspaper, and other outlets, the two urged Harper’s Ferry’s black community to defend their civil rights while also pushing an agenda of socioeconomic and cultural uplift. Throughout Kennedy-Nolle makes clear that the impact of these literary and journalistic moral imperatives was reliant on an expanding and diversifying American (and largely northern) print culture in the later nineteenth century. Yet their endeavors to inspire and sustain long-term commitments to the ideals of Reconstruction were ultimately overpowered by Lost Cause, Redemption, and Jim Crow imperatives, driven by even more effective rhetorical and literary forces, as chronicled by an equally valuable counternarrative to Kennedy-Nolle’s study, K. Stephen Prince’s Stories of the South: Race and the [End Page 85] Reconstruction of Southern Identity (2014). Despite such setbacks, she fully demonstrates that “in fashioning their stories into fictional test cases of the Reconstruction Amendments,” her writers “helped limn the nation’s future while reconstructing its past” (22). In making that case, she provides us...

Herb Parker Feels Like Dancing, and: Deposition Kathleen Flenniken (bio) Herb Parker Feels Like Dancing Mr. Parker’s Sunbeam is shiny as an atom He pulls up, disembarks with grace and makes his dance hall entrance. Perhaps you sense his English accent and pocket square. Women shy like ponies to one corner. He corrals one and trots her around the dance floor. Herb Parker rides a shapely 4/4. “That Old Black Magic,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Maybe it is, or maybe it’s blazing, unsafe to breathe tonight. [End Page 40] Her earrings are zircon daisies. A silver belt rings her slim waist. Herb Parker steers her toward his dark place. “Mr. Parker?” he hears somebody ask, like a tremble on a seismograph, but you can’treblame Herbert Parker for his appetites. He palms the tender center of her back. “Mr. Parker?” again. Perhaps it’s her voice, or her husband’s, or one of the voices in his head. He’s a Dutch boy with his fingers in the dike, a valvular, crepuscular figure. “Look out the window at that storm . . .” He takes the government’s calls and negotiates those devil’s bargains, how much of their order can he fill? You understand they say “product” and mean plutonium, they mean how many bombs can you afford to fuel?“Darling, down and down I go, round and round I go in a spin” . . . the river, and its sediments, the air, capricious with winds, the soil column, the ground water, the vase of wildflowers on Deputy Chief Gamertsfelder’s desk! Sagebrush and Russian thistle growing in Richland yards. The mosquitoes, for pity’s sake, the farm animals, the farmers living off the land, the water birds and the duck hunters, the bottom fish and the fishermen on Richland dock. Everything he thinks to test. . . good god, [End Page 41] the entire food chain contaminated. He’s basically a shy man with immeasurable power. A sultan coaxing his courtesan’s smile. She only shakes a little now. Don’t you understand? Someon must step forward and play God. How much better that the man can lead? hold you tight in his very good hands, and spin. The contamination referred to is documented in Michele Stenehjem Gerber’s book On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007). Deposition Richland Federal Building Auditorium February 4, 2000 I wasn’t there. I’d packed my car with houseplants years ago, confident my rawhide neighbors would change their campers’ oil, mow and edge their lawns like always, street after street of Hanford workers who’d moved 30 years ago from West Virginia or Pennsylvania or Tennessee for a job—no saying what it was—for a pre-fab landscaped with white rocks, for their kids grown up like me, for their wives, hair freshly done, comparing prices at Safeway. You know one [End Page 42] you know them all, I said at 25 and moved away, brushed off the dust and breathed in the liberal city. So I wasn’t there when one by one they rose, walked stiffly up the aisle in the Federal Building auditorium. And yet I see them clearly, the same bastards who grinned when schoolgirls strolled by, who flirted with John Birch, and hunted grouse, and owned their stools at the cinderblock taverns downtown. Whose sons and daughters would appear at school sometimes with bruises on their arms. Carolyn was there to testify and even she can’t explain how anybody there met anybody else’s eyes. It must have choked their throats like rotting meat, admitting to cancers of this and that and hothouse-flower blood diseases, each a different suffering. How did they stand on stage and say what nobody could say aloud? And the ones who came but couldn’t speak. It’s killing to think of even now. Every one of them ashamed for falling ill the way the anti-nuke fanatics said we would, who never knew shit about anything, who’ve never understood us and never will. [End Page 43] Kathleen Flenniken Kathleen Flenniken’s first collection of poetry...

Reviewed by: The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising John Paul O'Connor The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising. By Robert Shogan. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004. 271 pp. $26 hardcover. Robert Shogan ends his well-researched book, The Battle of Blair Mountain,with this one-paragraph conclusion: The rebellion of the West Virginia miners was defeated. But the example they set should help sustain all citizens, in and out of the labor movement, who believe that the principles the Red Bandanna Army fought for, economic fairness, political justice and human dignity, will, as Faulkner famously said of the spirit of mankind, not only endure but prevail. The sentiment is obviously hopeful, but one wonders from whence it comes, given the tragedy Shogan paints in his book. If anything, Blair Mountain shows more evidence of the futility of such struggle under our form of capitalist democracy than anything else. Indeed, Shogan diligently explains the broad and detailed circumstances of the time and geography that created the West Virginia Mine Wars and the seemingly inevitable defeat of the miner's union in that state. [End Page 111] Most people interested in the American labor movement have at least a small knowledge about this dramatic and exciting, though ultimately tragic, chapter in American history, many by way of John Sayles' 1987 movie, Matewan. Slogan picks up where Sayles finished and tells the rest of the story: how some 10,000 miners marched fully armed through the mountains of southern West Virginia to release their brother miners from a jail in the town of Logan. Shogan's chapters give us a picture of the backdrop of these events in order to explain why they unfold as they do. We see Woodrow Wilson's conservative-drifting government, his intolerance of dissidents beginning with those who spoke out against World War I, the "Red Scare" and the Palmer raids, and the change of governorship in West Virginia from a politician supported by the miner's union to one supported by the mine operators. A political chess game develops with all the queens and bishops on capital's side and only pawns on labor's. Much of the book turns on the decision whether or not to send troops to suppress the miners' march. In the end, powers in West Virginia's and the nation's capitals could not allow the possibility of a near insurrection by the miners and their supporters to sweep over the ruthless culture of the mine operators' enforcers, the Felts-Dobbs Detective Agency. The government was infuriated with Felts-Dobbs' lawlessness but sided with them when the battle became pitched between labor and capital. It causes one to search for instances when the government has ever interceded on the part of ordinary people struggling for justice. The heart and center of this dramatic story is that of a marshal of local justice, Sid Hatfield, the chief of police of Matewan, who challenges the Felts-Dobbs agents' legitimacy in a bloody gun battle that results temporarily in the defeat of the mine owners. But the only lesson the reader can draw from this book, if taken on its own, is that such victories are temporary and in the end, capital wins. We struggle on despite this knowledge, somehow finding inspiration within. That is what we call hope (with a small ingredient of faith) and why we do endure, if not prevail. John Paul O'Connor American Federation of Musicians Local 1000 Copyright © 2006 the West Virginia University Press, for the United Association for Labor Studies

Mark Ambler, BSN, MBA, RN, CCRN, CNML