West Virginia History: An Open Access Reader

Kevin Barksdale (Marshall University) and Ken Fones-Wolf (West Virginia University) assembled this collection of essays, mostly from the journal they edit, West Virginia History, to serve as a reader for courses on the Mountain State’s history. In selecting essays, they emphasized pieces that addressed themes from differing perspectives. For example, the first two essays examine the eighteenth-century frontier and Indian-white relations, one from the perspective of Europeans seeking to destroy Native Americans and the other from the vantage of the Cherokee hoping for some security. Among the other topics highlighted in these essays are: the coming of the Civil War, the efforts of women and blacks to negotiate citizenship during Reconstruction, the struggles of immigrants and African Americans during industrialization, the impact of the Cold War, and episodes that might be grouped as part of the culture wars. As such, they offer multiple opportunities for students to compare and contrast the experiences of varying groups of West Virginians throughout the state’s history.https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/dpi-textbooks/1002/thumbnail.jp

“Termites in the Temple”: Working-Class Faith and Spectacle in Postwar Appalachia

In April of 1946 thousands of individuals marched on the local Knoxville, Tennessee, radio station, WNOX, for its cancellation of Rev. J. Harold Smith’s popular Radio Bible Hour. During a fifteen-year career as an evangelist and radio preacher, Smith had gained an ignominious reputation as an arch-foe of organized labor, the liberal state, and modernist Christianity. Yet, the audience that flocked to Knoxville to march on the WNOX building was principally from the working class, as were the more than 44,000 individuals who wrote protesting the action of the radio station. Among them were individuals who had benefitted from wartime gains in industrialization, union growth, and government-mandated improvements in wages and working conditions. With the CIO’s ambitious Southern Organizing Campaign less than a month away, how can we explain the robust mobilization of individuals to a crusade to save the radio program of a man acknowledged to be one of the South’s most reactionary ministers? This paper will examine the social bases of support for J. Harold Smith and the factors that made the cancellation of his radio program the occasion for a working-class spectacle of faith in postwar Appalachia