Böcker av Ronald L. Lewis

How Skilled Welsh Workers and Managers Helped Build the American Steel Industry

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 labours, from the antebellum railroad builders to the twentieth-century coal miners.

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis's book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.

Walter F. White joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918 and became its head in 1929, a position he maintained until his death in 1955. In this comprehensive biography, Zangrando and Lewis seek to provide a reassessment of White within the context of his own time, revising critical interpretations of his career.

In 1880, forest covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. This work explores the transformation in the mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. West Virginia provides a site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation.