Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840-1940 (West Virginia and Appalachia, 1) - Hardcover

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9780937058671: Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840-1940 (West Virginia and Appalachia, 1)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 093705867X ISBN 13: 9780937058671

Publisher: West Virginia University Press, 2002

West Virginia is one of the most homogeneous states in the nation, with among the lowest ratios of foreign-born and minority populations among the states. But as this collection of historical studies demonstrates, this state was built by successive waves of immigrant labors, from the antebellum railroad builders to the twentieth-century coal miners. Transnational West Virginia offers a new understanding of how laborers and their communities shape a region's history. Transnational West Virginia includes essays and studies on immigrant networks, such as Irish workers along the B&O Railroad, Wheeling Germans in the Civil War era, Swiss immigration to West Virginia, and European Jews in Southern West Virginia. This work also covers Belgian glassworkers in West Virginia, black migration to Southern West Virginia, Italians in the Upper Kanawha Valley, Italian immigration to Marion County, Wheeling Iron and the Welsh, West Virginia and immigrant labor to 1920, Monongalia miners between the World Wars, and West Virginia rubber workers in Akron. Transnational West Virginia is the first volume in the West Virginia and Appalachia series, which is under the general editorship of West Virginia University Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair of History Ronald L. Lewis. Kenneth Fones-Wolf, Associate Professor of History at WVU, also helped edit this collection of essays by ten distinguished scholars.

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About the Author:

This series is edited by Ronald Lewis, the Stuart and Joyce Robbins chair in history at West Virginia University.

Review:

"... a truly worthy book."
George Brosi, Appalachian Heritage

"... a sophisticated analysis of an Appalachian region, one that carries on the work of rewriting regional history within larger interpretive arenas."
Robert Weise, Journal of Appalachian Studies

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.