Broken friendships and strained relations have become a common story of today’s political divide. Millennials Anissa Coury and Jordan Ball offer a different perspective. Coury, 27, is a Republican who voted for Donald Trump. She is the executive director for the American Congress of Real Estate of Pittsburgh, and is […]
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Martin and Georgia West have been married 41 years and live in their native county of McDowell, in southern West Virginia. Martin West, 62, has worked in the mining industry, been the county magistrate and now serves as the county’s sheriff and treasurer. He’s also the pastor at the Pentecostal […]
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Suppose the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration wanted to finally update its decades-old rule on exposure to silica dust to help protect coal miners from the rising threat of deadly lung disease. Fine. As long as MSHA officials are ready to get rid of two other rules — like […]
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President Donald Trump won West Virginia and other Appalachian states by promising to bring back the kinds of jobs that once provided a middle class lifestyle. Those jobs were in coal mines, steel mills, chemical plants and manufacturing plants. For a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before […]
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Jimmy Pan, 27, is a first-year student at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine in Lewisburg, W. Va. He’s originally from Hong Kong, and now calls Charlotte, N.C. home. Pan says he’s voted in three presidential elections, but this time his pick was not the winner. He took a break […]
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Rural America is falling further behind. Farms don’t need farmers. Manufacturing moved offshore. And the rate of rural kids living in poverty is worse than it is in the inner cities. Here’s a solution. Let’s take in the Syrian refugees. Make them rural Americans. As many as we can feed. I […]
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