Transnational West Virginia

by Fones-Wolf, Ken; Lewis, Ronald L.; Fones-Wolf, Ken; Lewis, Ronald L.

• ISBN13: 9780937058671
• ISBN10: 093705867X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: West Virginia Univ Pr

Summary

West Virginia is one of the most diverse states in the nation, built on the backs of immigrant laborers who flocked to the region during the mid-to-late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. From the antebellum heyday of railroads and iron into a new century marked by a voracious appetite for coal, Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change depicts, through a collection of twelve essays by ten distinguished scholars, how these immigrant laborers--from Europe, Scandinavia, Mexico, the Orient, Africa, Canada, and Central and South America--and their communities shaped the Mountain State's history.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	vii
Introduction: Networks Large and Small	ix
Section I: Antebellum Roots
``Paddy vs. Paddy: Labor Unrest and Provincial Identities along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 1849-1851''	03	(16)
Matthew Mason
``Caught between Revolutions: Wheeling Germans in the Civil War Era''	19	(32)
Ken Fones-Wolf
Section II: Niche Communities
``Swiss Immigration to West Virginia, 1864-1884: A Case Study''	51	(22)
Elizabeth Cometti
``From Shtetl to Coalfield: The Migration of East European Jews to Southern West Virginia''	73	(40)
Deborah R. Weiner
``Craft, Ethnicity, and Identity: Belgian Glassworkers in West Virginia, 1898-1940''	113	(24)
Ken Fones-Wolf
Section III: Immigrant Coal Miners
``Black Migration to Southern West Virginia''	137	(24)
Joe William Trotter Jr.
```Here Come the Boomer `Talys': Italian Immigrants and Industrial Conflict in the Upper Kanawha Valley, 1903-1917''	161	(30)
Frederick A. Barkey
``Uneven Americanization: Italian Immigration to Marion County, 1900-1925''	191	(26)
William B. Klaus
Section IV: Representations of Ethnic Work Communities
``Wheeling Iron and the Welsh: A Geographical Reading of Life in the Iron Mills''	217	(26)
Anne Kelly Knowles
``Strange Tongues: West Virginia and Immigrant Labor to 1920''	243	(18)
Kenneth R. Bailey
``Americanizing Immigrant Coal Miners in Northern West Virginia: Monongalia County between the World Wars''	261	(38)
Ronald L. Lewis
Epilogue: Leaving West Virginia
``West Virginia Rubber Workers in Akron''	299	(18)
Susan Johnson
About the Contributors	317	(2)
Index	319