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

by Dwight B. Billings , Kathleen M. Blee

• ISBN13: 9780521655460
• ISBN10: 0521655463
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings examine the social dynamics of persistently poor rural communities through the history of Clay County, an especially poor section of the Eastern Kentucky mountains in Appalachia. The authors uncover the systemic problems and patterns of low income by tracing its socio-cultural, economic, and political development of Clay County from its earliest non-native settlement and agricultural development, to the advent of the coal industry, to the present day. This study of the long-term, institutional basis of rural poverty contains some fascinating, new local historical detail, based upon the authors' meticulous archival research. 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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
List of Tables	ix
Preface and Acknowledgments	xi
I. Public Policy and Historical Sociology	1	(24)
Introduction	3	(22)
II. Antebellum Capitalist Markets	25	(78)
Frontier Kentucky in the Capitalist World System	27	(24)
Industry, Commerce, and Slaveholding	51	(52)
III. Antebellum State Coercion	103	(52)
State Making and the Origins of Elite Conflict	105	(50)
Photo Essay	137	(18)
IV. Cultural Strategies	155	(86)
The Patriarchal Moral Economy of Agriculture	157	(51)
Racial Dynamics and the Creation of Poverty	208	(33)
V. Postbellum Capitalist Markets and the Local State	241	(98)
From Marginality to Integration	243	(38)
Feud Violence	281	(35)
Pam Goldman
Sbaron Hardesty
Lee Hardesty
Epilogue	316	(23)
Appendix 1. Data and Methodology	339	(6)
Appendix 2. Genealogies	345	(2)
Notes	347	(80)
Index	427