The teachers’ strike in West Virginia, that has tenatively ended, has a lot of outsiders scratching their heads. How can it be, they wonder, that a state so politically red that it voted 70 percent for Donald Trump in 2016, and that has a Republican coal baron governor and a […]
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All photos by the author. When I returned home from overseas, leaving a marriage behind, I settled with my mom and stepfather until I could figure out what to do. They live in Dallas, West Virginia, a tiny, unincorporated town that sits atop a ridge in Marshall County. Not long […]
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It isn’t news that Appalachia is struggling economically. If you’ve followed the boom-bust cycle of the coal industry, you know that we’ve been here before. Coal production in Appalachia fell by almost half between 2005 and 2015. During the same years, coal industry employment fell by around 27 percent, and […]
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Independent grocery stores, which tend to be more prevalent in rural areas, had a tougher time dealing with the Great Recession than chain grocery stores, suffered worse during the Great Recession than chain stores, are a bigger share of the market in rural areas, While the number of chain grocery […]
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After the Valentine’s Day mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the 18th this year, the United States had to grapple with the aftermath once again. Appalachia experienced a high school shooting in January in Benton, Kentucky, mourning a loss of two students. Given recent events, one could, sadly, concur with […]
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For young Carter G. Woodson, West Virginia shimmered in the distance, a not-so-far-off land of opportunity. Of his decision to set off for this frontier as a teenager in the 1890s, the future “father of Black History Month” wrote that his home state of Virginia, “like most of the worn-out […]
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