Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s (Working Class in American History)

One of the central questions facing scholars of Appalachia concerns how a region so rich in natural resources could end up a symbol of poverty.  Typical culprits include absentee landowners, reactionary coal operators, stubborn mountaineers, and greedy politicians. In a deft combination of labor and business history, Glass Towns complicates these answers by examining the glass industry’s potential to improve West Virginia’s political economy by establishing a base of value-added manufacturing to complement the state’s abundance of coal, oil, timber, and natural gas.   Through case studies of glass production hubs in Clarksburg, Moundsville, and Fairmont (producing window, tableware, and bottle glass, respectively), Ken Fones-Wolf looks closely at the impact of industry on local populations and immigrant craftsmen. He also examines patterns of global industrial restructuring, the ways workers reshaped workplace culture and political action, and employer strategies for responding to global competition, unreliable markets, and growing labor costs at the end of the nineteenth century.

Business & Money

FONES-WOLF, KEN

Economics

University of Illinois Press

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Working Class in American History)

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A.

One of the central questions facing scholars of Appalachia concerns how a region so rich in natural resources could end up a symbol of poverty.  Typical culprits include absentee landowners, reactionary coal operators, stubborn mountaineers, and greedy politicians. In a deft combination of labor and business history, Glass Towns complicates these answers by examining the glass industry’s potential to improve West Virginia’s political economy by establishing a base of value-added manufacturing to complement the state’s abundance of coal, oil, timber, and natural gas.Through case studies of glass production hubs in Clarksburg, Moundsville, and Fairmont (producing window, tableware, and bottle glass, respectively), Ken Fones-Wolf looks closely at the impact of industry on local populations and immigrant craftsmen. He also examines patterns of global industrial restructuring, the ways workers reshaped workplace culture and political action, and employer strategies for responding to global competition, unreliable markets, and growing labor costs at the end of the nineteenth century.

This study traces the interaction of religion and the labor movement in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Exploring the ways that Protestantism mediated between the dominant and working-class versions of American society, Ken Fones-Wolf examines the ambiguity of Christianity as a social force in class conflict. Using Philadelphia as a case study, he shows that aspects of working-class culture and trade union activism were rooted in Protestantism and that religious feeling was a significant factor of working-class life. While religious values complemented a broad spectrum of political and class positions and helped people adjust to social change, Christianity itself was a dynamic force that adapted to emerging ideas of social responsibility and the jarring disjunctions between old beliefs and new realities. Author note: Ken Fones-Wolf heads the archives and teaches labor history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was formerly Manuscripts Curator at the Urban Archives Center of Temple University.

Trade Union Gospel (American Civilization)

Temple University Press

West Virginia is one of the most homogeneous states in the nation, with among the lowest ratios of foreign-born and minority populations among the states. But as this collection of historical studies demonstrates, this state was built by successive waves of immigrant labors, from the antebellum railroad builders to the twentieth-century coal miners. Transnational West Virginia offers a new understanding of how laborers and their communities shape a region's history. Transnational West Virginia includes essays and studies on immigrant networks, such as Irish workers along the B&amp;O Railroad, Wheeling Germans in the Civil War era, Swiss immigration to West Virginia, and European Jews in Southern West Virginia. This work also covers Belgian glassworkers in West Virginia, black migration to Southern West Virginia, Italians in the Upper Kanawha Valley, Italian immigration to Marion County, Wheeling Iron and the Welsh, West Virginia and immigrant labor to 1920, Monongalia miners between the World Wars, and West Virginia rubber workers in Akron. Transnational West Virginia is the first volume in the West Virginia and Appalachia series, which is under the general editorship of West Virginia University Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair of History Ronald L. Lewis. Kenneth Fones-Wolf, Associate Professor of History at WVU, also helped edit this collection of essays by ten distinguished scholars.

TRANSNATIONAL WEST VIRGINIA: "ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AND ECONOMIC CHANGE, 1840-1940" (WEST VIRGINIA & APPALACHIA)

History

LEWIS, RONALD L.

Americas

West Virginia University Press

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Books by FONES-WOLF, KEN

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by FONES-WOLF, KEN. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s (Working Class in American History)

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Working Class in American History)

Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s (Working Class in American History)

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Working Class in American History)

Trade Union Gospel (American Civilization)

TRANSNATIONAL WEST VIRGINIA: "ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AND ECONOMIC CHANGE, 1840-1940" (WEST VIRGINIA & APPALACHIA)