The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia - Hardcover

Billings, Dwight B.; Blee, Kathleen M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521652294 ISBN 13: 9780521652292

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Intended for social scientists, historians, and readers interested in social change and social poverty, this book examines the roots of entrenched poverty in Appalachia. It is both a social history of the creation of chronic poverty (and wealth) in Clay County, KY and an explication of how economic markets, cultural strategies, and the state interact to shape local society. By linking a longitudinal study of a single place to broader understandings of the historical development of the capitalist world system, this book contributes to policy discussions of the underlying causes of persistent rural poverty and reasons for the chronic failure of governmental programs to alleviate such poverty. In doing this study the authors have assembled probably the longest running set of longitudinal data currently available on an American rural population as well as the most extensive body of data available for a persistently poor community in the United States.

About this title

Book Description

Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings examine the social dynamics of persistently poor rural communities through the history of Clay County, an especially po or section of the Eastern Kentucky mountains in Appalachia. This book makes an important contribution to basic research on inequality pointing to the shortcomings of treating symptomatic problems of low income, while failing to address systemic ones at a time when American policymakers are struggling to design and implement effective programs to move people from welfare to work.

From Kirkus Reviews

paper 0-521-65546-3 With rural poverty remaining a persistent problem in the US, sociologists Billings (Univ. of Kentucky; Planters and the Making of a ``New South,'' not reviewed) and Blee (Univ. of Pittsburgh; Women of the Klan, not reviewed) offer an ambitious history of an Appalachian county in order to understand ``how places grow poor.'' Culture-of-poverty theory explains Appalachian economic backwardness as a result of cultural backwardness; ``internal colonialism'' views Appalachia as a region exploited for its natural resources, especially coal, by outside economic forces. While acknowledging the merits of both approaches and utilizing them, the authors also find both wanting in that Appalachia is presented as a place without a history. Yet how did a culture of poverty develop; what made it possible for Appalachia to become an internal colony? To answer these questions, Billings and Blee develop a remarkably detailed history of an impoverished county in Appalachian Kentucky from 1850 to 1910. Building on the research of James S. Brown and using everything from census records to court documents, the authors show how economics, culture, and politics interacted to create patterns of poverty that persist to this day. Early industrialization based on slave labor allowed for the creation in the county of a powerful elite whose influence was maintained through labyrinthine kinship ties and through the hegemonic control of local politics. Most of the rest of the white population engaged in subsistence farming, which became ever more precarious as population pressure came to bear on a limited amount of land. Here, too, kinship ties developed as means of survival and at times resistance to elite domination. Too often, however, elite dominance kept the poor in a dependent situation. Feuds, for instance, usually thought of as typically backward Appalachian behavior, were actually elite conflicts in which the poor were enlisted to fight. In brief, then, the complex and dynamic interaction of diverse forces prepared Appalachia for chronic poverty long before the present era. Skilled history from which interested readers and policy makers can learn much. (20 b&w photos, 3 maps) (For a firsthand account of life in Appalachian Kentucky, see Linda Scott DeRosier, Creeker, p. 1367.) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0521652294
• ISBN 13: 9780521652292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448