Smokestacks in the Hills

""Lucidly written with equal attention to the big picture and the small, demographic/economic statistics and the diverse voices of workers recounting their experiences and what they make of them, Smokestacks in the Hills is both an elegy for a brief moment of rural industrial stability and a cogent analysis of the strengths and limits of a working-class culture of 'making do.' A wonderful book--a sad story that somehow heartens.""--Jack Metzgar, author of Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered ""Martin's wonderful book alerts all twentieth-century U.S. labor historians that we are telling only half the story if we ignore rural industrial workers and their local orientations forged through connections to land, place, family, and community.""--Lisa M. Fine, author of The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. ""An interesting explanation for the conservatism and occasionally antiunion sentiments of a group of industrial workers that contrasts with the philosophies and sentiments most commonly chronicled among urban workers.""--Brooks Blevins, author of Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South ""Lou Martin has produced a deeply researched and expertly crafted history of rural workers in an Appalachian county, a study that reveals how experiences on the countryside shaped class identities and social relations in industrial workplaces. Martin's sensitive portrait of West Virginia potters and steel workers goes a long way toward correcting the big city bias in our labor and industrial history, and it helps us understand why values like independence and self help shaped how rural folk asserted their own preferences when faced with national forces in the form of corporate welfare programs, CIO unions, New Deal programs, and the impacts of deindustrialization. Smokestacks in the Hills is a pathbreaking book.""--James Green, author of The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom