Oil and Urbanization on the Pacific Coast tells the story of oilman Ralph Bramel Lloyd, a small business owner who drove the development of one of America’s largest oil fields. Lloyd invested his petroleum earnings in commercial real estate—much of it centered around automobiles and the fuel they require—in several western cities, notably Portland, Oregon. Putting the history of extractive industry in dialogue with the history of urban development, Michael R. Adamson shows how energy is woven into the fabric of modern life, and how the “energy capital” of Los Angeles exerted far-flung influence in the US West.
A contribution to the relatively understudied history of small businesses in the United States, Oil and Urbanization on the Pacific Coast explores issues of interest to multiple audiences, such as the competition for influence over urban development waged among local growth machines and outside corporate interests; the urban rivalries of a region; the importance of public capital in mobilizing the commercial real estate sector during the Great Depression and World War II; and the relationships among owners, architects, and contractors in the execution of commercial building projects.
A collection of creative writing and art about COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic by people from vulnerable populations.
Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices.
Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.
This 1910 study of sectionalism in Virginia illustrates how the east and west of Virginia were destined to separate into two states. Barbara Rasmussen, professor of Public History and Director of Cultural Resource Management at West Virginia University writes a new introduction to Sectionalism in Virginia, setting Ambler’s classic grand achievement into the context of its production by creating an historical process for studying West Virginia history.
Pigs are everywhere in United States history. They cleared frontiers and built cities (notably Cincinnati, once known as Porkopolis), served as an early form of welfare, and were at the center of two nineteenth-century “pig wars.” American pork fed the hemisphere; lard literally greased the wheels of capitalism.
J. L. Anderson has written an ambitious history of pigs and pig products from the Columbian exchange to the present, emphasizing critical stories of production, consumption, and waste in American history. He examines different cultural assumptions about pigs to provide a window into the nation’s regional, racial, and class fault lines, and maps where pigs are (and are not) to reveal a deep history of the American landscape. A contribution to American history, food studies, agricultural history, and animal studies, Capitalist Pigs is an accessible, deeply researched, and often surprising portrait of one of the planet’s most consequential interspecies relationships.
Appointed is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer, a long-running and well-regarded African American newspaper of the late nineteenth century. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, Saunders befriends his white employer’s son, Seth Stanley, and the two men form a lasting, cross-racial bond that leads them to travel together to the American South. On their journey, John shows Seth the harsh realities of American racism and instructs him in how he might take responsibility for alleviating the effects of racism in his own home and in the white world broadly.
As a coauthored novel of frustrated ambition, cross-racial friendship, and the tragedy of lynching, Appointed represents a unique contribution to African American literary history. This is the first scholarly edition of Appointed, and it includes a collection of writings from the Plaindealer, the authors’ short story “A Strange Freak of Fate,” and an introduction that locates Appointed and its authors within the journalistic and literary currents of the United States in the late nineteenth century.
Few know the name Anna Jarvis, yet on the second Sunday in May, we mail the card, buy the flowers, place the phone call, or make the brunch reservation to honor our mothers, all because of her.
Anna Jarvis organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in Grafton, West Virginia in 1908 and then spent decades promoting the holiday and defending it from commercialization. She designed her Mother’s Day celebration around a sentimental view of motherhood and domesticity, envisioning a day venerating the daily services and sacrifices of mothers within the home.
After Mother’s Day became a national holiday in 1914, many organizations sought to align the holiday’s meaning with changing perceptions of modern motherhood in the twentieth century. Instead of restricting a mother’s service and influence solely to the domestic sphere, they emphasized the power of mothers both within their homes and throughout their communities.
Jarvis refused to accept this changing interpretation, claiming both intellectual and legal ownership of Mother’s Day. Her obsession with protecting the purity of her vision sustained a war of verbal and legal assaults against rival holiday promoters, patriotic women’s organizations, charitable foundations, public health reformers, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The struggle for control of Mother’s Day ultimately threatened her livelihood, physical health, and emotional stability.
Memorializing Motherhood explores the complicated history of Anna Jarvis’s movement to establish and control Mother’s Day, as well as the powerful conceptualization of this day as both a holiday and a cultural representation of motherhood.
2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Named the BEST LGBTQ+ MEMOIR of 2022 by Book Riot
Named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022
Weatherford Award finalist, nonfiction
“Commands your attention from the first page to the last word.” —Morgan Jerkins
“I’m glad this memoir exists . . . and I’m especially glad it’s so good.” —Vauhini Vara, New York Magazine
When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.
Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.
In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21, a popular history now considered a classic. Among those the book influenced are Denise Giardina, author of Storming Heaven, and John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a lesser-known Mother Jones crusade in Kanawha County, West Virginia. His daughter Ginny Savage Ayers drew on his notes and files, as well as her own original research, to complete Never Justice, Never Peace—the first book-length account of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–13.
Savage and Ayers offer a narrative history of the strike that weaves together threads about organizer Mother Jones, the United Mine Workers union, politicians, coal companies, and Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency guards with the experiences of everyday men and women. The result is a compelling and in-depth treatment that brings to light an unjustly neglected—and notably violent—chapter of labor history. Introduced by historian Lou Martin, Never Justice, Never Peace provides an accessible glimpse into the lives and personalities of many participants in this critical struggle.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press