Chapter 32 Further Reading: The Coal Economy's Collapse

Catte, Elizabeth. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018. A sharp, concise corrective to the narratives that dominated national media coverage of Appalachia in the 2010s. Catte challenges the framing of Appalachian poverty as cultural failure and insists on structural analysis — the extraction pattern, absentee ownership, and policy failures that produced the conditions outsiders then attributed to the people themselves. Essential reading for understanding why the story of coal's collapse is so often told wrong.

Gaventa, John. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Gaventa's landmark study of Clear Fork Valley in the Tennessee-Kentucky coalfields remains the definitive analysis of how the coal industry maintained control over Appalachian communities through multiple dimensions of power. His framework — distinguishing between overt power, agenda-setting power, and the shaping of consciousness — is essential for understanding why coalfield communities were unable to diversify their economies while coal was still dominant and helpless when it collapsed.

Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963. The book that introduced Appalachian coalfield poverty to a national audience in the 1960s. Caudill's angry, passionate, and sometimes problematic account of eastern Kentucky's exploitation by the coal industry remains a foundational text. Read alongside more recent work (especially Catte) that challenges some of Caudill's framing while building on his core argument about extraction and exploitation.

Stoll, Steven. Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. New York: Hill and Wang, 2017. A sweeping historical analysis that traces the dispossession of Appalachian communities from the enclosure of the commons in the nineteenth century through industrialization to the present. Stoll argues that the coal economy's collapse is the final chapter of a longer story of dispossession, and that understanding the present crisis requires understanding the centuries of structural change that preceded it.

Berea College, Appalachian Center. "The State of Economic Opportunity in Appalachia." Berea, KY: various dates. Reports and data publications from Berea College's Appalachian Center provide rigorous, up-to-date economic data on the Appalachian region, including employment statistics, poverty rates, educational attainment, and health outcomes. These publications are invaluable for grounding the narrative of coal's collapse in specific, current data.

Morrone, Michele, and Geoffrey L. Buckley, eds. Mountains of Injustice: Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. A collection of essays examining the intersection of environmental and social justice in Appalachia, including the environmental consequences of coal mining, the economic vulnerability of coalfield communities, and the grassroots movements working for change. Provides essential context for understanding coal's collapse as both an environmental and a social justice issue.

Berea, Meredith, dir. Blood on the Mountain. 2016. Documentary film. A documentary tracing the history of the coal industry in West Virginia from early exploitation through the present crisis, with particular attention to the labor struggles, environmental destruction, and political manipulation that have defined the industry's relationship with the communities it operated in. An accessible and powerful visual introduction to the themes of Chapter 32.

Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. The expanded book-length version of Case and Deaton's influential research on rising mortality among working-class Americans. Their analysis of how the destruction of economic opportunity, social institutions, and community cohesion drives rising rates of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism is directly applicable to the coalfield communities discussed in this chapter. Essential reading for Chapter 38 as well.

Appalachian Regional Commission. Investing in Appalachia's Future: The Appalachian Regional Commission, 1965-Present. Washington, DC: ARC, various dates. The ARC's own publications documenting its programs, investments, and impact assessments in the Appalachian region provide both data and insight into federal efforts to address economic transition in the coalfields. Available at arc.gov. Read with awareness that the ARC has institutional incentives to present its programs favorably.

Lewin, Philip G. "Coal Is Not Just a Job, It's a Way of Life: The Cultural Politics of Coal Production in Central Appalachia." Social Problems 66, no. 1 (2019): 51-68. An academic analysis of the cultural and identity dimensions of coal's decline — the argument, central to Chapter 32, that coal's collapse was not just an economic event but an existential one. Lewin examines how coal identity is constructed, maintained, and threatened, and how the "War on Coal" narrative drew its power from the fusion of economic grievance and cultural identity.

Loomis, Erik. A History of America in Ten Strikes. New York: The New Press, 2018. A history of American labor told through ten pivotal strikes, including the Brookside strike in Harlan County, Kentucky. Loomis's broader framing of American labor's decline provides context for understanding the loss of union culture in the coalfields — a dimension of coal's collapse that Chapter 32 identifies as particularly significant.

Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. The best single-volume history of modern Appalachia, covering the period from World War II through the early twenty-first century. Eller traces the economic, political, and cultural transformations of the region with scholarly rigor and genuine empathy. Essential context for understanding coal's collapse within the longer arc of post-war Appalachian history.