BiblioVault - Books about Warren County

Buck Fever

The Deer Hunting Tradition in Pennsylvania

Mike Sajna

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990

Every fall close to one million hunters enter Pennsylvania’s forests and mountains in quest of the white-tailed deer. Some are seeking sport and companionship; others are stocking their larders for winter; many are conservationists who regard hunting as the most humane way of reducing overpopulated deer herds. They all face the increasing activism of animal rights advocates who are opposed to hunting in principle and who frequently picket and harass hunters.

This controversial subject is explored in depth by Mike Sajna, the outdoors columnist for Pittsburgh Magazine and a twenty-year veteran of Pennsylvania’s “pumpkin army,” the orange-clad throng that invades the woods every season. To explain the ethos and traditions of hunting he takes the reader to a typical deer camp in Warren County, in the rugged terrain of the Allegheny High Plateau. Starting with the trek north from their homes around Pittsburgh, he captures the sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings of three generations of hunters. With humor, affection, and insight he recounts the hunting lore, the camaraderie, the physical testing that make deer camp a unique experience.

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Roots of Disorder

Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80

Christopher Waldrep

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Every white southerner understoodwhat keeping African Americans "down" meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching. Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi,Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law todefine blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts. Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism.

"Delivers what no other study has yet attempted. . . . Waldrep's book is one of the first systematically to use local trial data to explore questions of society and culture." -- Vernon Burton, author of "A Gentleman and an Officer": A Social and Military History of James B. Griffin's Civil War

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Transforming Environmentalism

Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice

McGurty, Eileen

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Contemporary public policy circles are quick to acknowledge that environmental factors contribute to ill health and pose a particular threat to poor and minority communities. But public officials rarely examined the distribution of environmental hazards such as polluted air and contaminated water. In the 1980s, as toxic waste facilities proliferated, the environmental justice movement demanded that impoverished communities no longer be burdened by excessive environmental risks.
In Transforming Environmentalism, Eileen McGurty explores a moment central to the emergence of the environmental justice movement. In 1978, residents of predominantly African American Warren County, North Carolina, were horrified to learn that the state planned to build a landfill in their county to hold forty thousand cubic yards of soil that was contaminated with PCBs from illegal dumping. They responded to the state's plans with a four-year resistance, ending in a month of protests with over 500 arrests from civil disobedience and disruptive actions.McGurty traces the evolving approaches that residents took to contest "environmental racism" in their community and shows how activism in Warren County spurred greater political debate and became a model for communities across the nation. Transforming Environmentalism explores how the specific circumstances of the Warren County events shaped the formation of the environmental justice movement and influenced contemporary environmentalism.

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