West Virginia History Projects


Book Description

This unique book combines state-specific facts and 30 fun-to-do hands-on projects. The History Project Book includes creating a cartoon panel to describe how your state name may have come about, creating a fort replica, making a state history museum, dressing up as a famous explorer and recreating the main discovery, and more! Kids will have a blast and build essential knowledge skills including research, reading, writing, science and math. Great for students in K-8 grades and for displaying in the classroom, library or home.




The West Virginia Encyclopedia


Book Description




The Devil Is Here in These Hills


Book Description

“The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown. Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).




On Dark and Bloody Ground


Book Description

"Oral histories with participants in and observers of the Battle of Blair Mountain and other Appalachian mine wars of the 1920s and 1930s, supplemented with introductory material, maps, and photographs"--




Shinnston Tornado


Book Description

"John L. Finlayson collected and published photos and personal accounts of the people who lived through and responded to what became known as the Shinnston Tornado ... The storm system that created the tornado outbreak remained one of the most devastating storms in our nation's history for many decades."--Amazon.com.




Early Native Americans in West Virginia: The Fort Ancient Culture


Book Description

Once thought of as Indian hunting grounds with no permanent inhabitants, West Virginia is teeming with evidence of a thriving early native population. Today's farmers can hardly plow their fields without uncovering ancient artifacts, evidence of at least ten thousand years of occupation. Members of the Fort Ancient culture resided along the rich bottomlands of southern West Virginia during the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric periods. Lost to time and rediscovered in the 1880s, Fort Ancient sites dot the West Virginia landscape. This volume explores sixteen of these sites, including Buffalo, Logan and Orchard. Archaeologist Darla Spencer excavates the fascinating lives of some of the Mountain State's earliest inhabitants in search of who these people were, what languages they spoke and who their descendants may be.




The History of Upshur County, West Virginia


Book Description

As a body, these records are extracted from roughly 750 known Bibles and extend from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries, with the greatest concentration from the mid-19th century. Most of the entries refer to births, marriages, and deaths and in most cases indicate the name(s) of the principals, the date of the event, and, sometimes, such supplementary information as his/her age or address, the maiden name of a parent, etc. Each Bible record is identified by family name and followed by a reference to the Huguenot Society records where the original can be found. In all, the records refer to more than 2,500 main families named in the surname index at the back of the volume and embrace a staggering 25,000 individuals of Huguenot or possible Huguenot ancestry--connections and allied families that would otherwise be lost to us in the unpublished files of this august organization.










So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969-1979


Book Description

A richly produced, craft- and activist-centered celebration of radical DIY publishing, for readers of Appalachian Reckoning. In a remarkable act of recovery, So Much to Be Angry About conjures an influential but largely obscured strand in the nation's radical tradition--the "movement" printing presses and publishers of the late 1960s and 1970s, and specifically Appalachian Movement Press in Huntington, West Virginia, the only movement press in Appalachia. More than a history, this craft- and activist-centered book positions the frontline politics of the Appalachian Left within larger movements in the 1970s. As Appalachian Movement Press founder Tom Woodruff wrote: "Appalachians weren't sitting in the back row during this struggle, they were driving the bus." Emerging from the Students for a Democratic Society chapter at Marshall University, and working closely with organizer and poet Don West, Appalachian Movement Press made available an eclectic range of printed material, from books and pamphlets to children's literature and calendars. Many of its publications promoted the Appalachian identity movement and "internal colony" theory, both of which were cornerstones of the nascent discipline of Appalachian studies. One of its many influential publications was MAW, the first feminist magazine written by and for Appalachian women. So Much to Be Angry About combines complete reproductions of five of Appalachian Movement Press's most engaging publications, an essay by Shaun Slifer about his detective work resurrecting the press's history, and a contextual introduction to New Left movement publishing by Josh MacPhee. Amply illustrated in a richly produced package, the volume pays homage to the graphic sensibility of the region's 1970s social movements, while also celebrating the current renaissance of Appalachia's DIY culture--in many respects a legacy, Slifer suggests, of the movement publishing documented in his book.