Steven Stoll. (2017). Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Steven Stoll. 2017. Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Steven Stoll. Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

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1. • value: Cultural Studies
2. • value: Economic Conditions
3. • value: Appalachian Mountains
4. • value: regional geography
5. • value: farmers
6. • value: economic history
7. • value: Economic Development
8. • value: Kentucky
9. • value: Regional Studies
10. • value: West Virginia
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15. • value: southern history
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17. • value: appalachian history
18. • value: appalachian people
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Stoll, Steven
   • bioText: Steven Stoll studies the ways that people think about resources, capital, and how the economy of exchange functions within the larger economy of Earth. He is an environmental historian, but his work is related to geography, social ecology, and the political theory of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Most of Stoll's writing concerns agrarian society in the United States. He is the author of U.S. Environmentalism Since 1945 and The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth. Stoll is a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine and teaches history at Fordham University.
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title

Ramp Hollow

fullDescription

How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia
Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common.

Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a "scramble for Appalachia" that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed.

Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Peter Lewis, Minneapolis Star Tribune
   • content:

     "The book is a masterpiece of panoramic history."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Steve Halvonik, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
   • content: "Mr. Stoll, a history professor at Fordham University, marshals his extensive knowledge of ancient and modern economic systems to present a compelling and persuasive argument . . . "Ramp Hollow" adds an eerie sense of déjà vu to the present-day arguments over what, if any, benefits Appalachian communities are reaping from Marcellus shale drilling."
3. • premium: False
   • source: J.D. Vance, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Meticulously researched . . . Those who associate 'academic' with 'dry' will be pleasantly surprised: the book's prose is light and readable . . . The book's great strength is that it acknowledges something our politics often fails to: that not everyone wants the same things or possesses the same preferences . . . Challenging, interesting and engrossing."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 4, 2017
     Reviewed by Sarah Jones
     Appalachia is many things, depending on whom you ask. Observers have at various points christened it the other America, the land outside time, and, more recently, Trump country. But for many of us, it is simply home, and we don’t recognize much of it from its media portrayals. We know it as an uneasy and lovely place, shaped by addiction and ecological degradation and a history of open class war. But these complications rarely make it into media coverage.
     Appalachia seems to matter little to outsiders unless it is an election year or time for one of Remote Area Medical’s free clinics, when photographers and journalists who otherwise never step foot in the area swarm to document the spectacle of its poverty. J.D. Vance’s popular Hillbilly Elegy only reinforced this image of Appalachia as a dysfunctional place, doomed by its own bloody intransigence.
     But poverty is not a cultural problem, in Appalachia and elsewhere. It is a problem of power, defined by who has it and who does not. Stoll (The Great Delusion), a professor of history at Fordham University, examines this issue exhaustively, fixing a genealogy of Appalachian poverty that places the problem in its proper political and historical context. Stoll identifies it, correctly, as a consequence of dispossession. By giving it a distinct pedigree, he helps readers understand why Appalachia became poor and why it has stayed that way for so long.
     “The way back to Appalachia leads through the history of capitalism in Great Britain,” Stoll writes. Capitalism is the specter haunting Appalachia. Stoll focuses specifically on the practice of enclosure, employed first by England’s feudal lords to establish the concept of private property. Victorian England’s moralists favored the practice and, later, so did American tycoons and corporations, who used it to gain access to Appalachia’s natural resources. The region’s coal and timber made it valuable. Now the free market is moving on, leaving an exsanguinated corpse behind.
     Stoll is not the first academic to attribute Appalachian poverty to the influence of external forces. But his work is distinct in its emphasis on the practice of enclosure and his decision to connect Appalachia’s dispossession to the material dispossessions whites inflicted on freed slaves and that empires and transnational conglomerates later inflicted on colonial and postcolonial nations. Though Appalachia’s “development” lacks the racialized aspect present in the latter two examples, a thread connects each: the idea that capitalism is a civilizing force.
     Stoll’s is an academic work, but that should not deter readers. He is an appealing writer. The book’s most significant flaw occurs late in its final third, when he veers sharply from analysis to commentary. Even so, it is a minor issue. Stoll’s insights on how Appalachia became what it is today are an important corrective to flawed commentary about a much-maligned place. (Nov.)
     Sarah Jones is a staff writer for the New Republic, where she covers politics and culture.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 15, 2017
     A searching economic and political history of a dispossessed, impoverished Appalachia that progress has long eluded.Alexis de Tocqueville may have insisted that there are no peasants in America, but Stoll (History/Fordham Univ.; The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth, 2008, etc.) finds the term "a perfectly good word to describe a country person." Moreover, as refugees from the enclosures of feudal and early modern Europe, the free "peasants" of Appalachia were able to find land--even if seized from others--and channel their own energies into whatever work they saw fit. That was early on, however. Following the incursions of the extractive industries of logging and mining, those free people suddenly were landless, essentially the property of the company. Stoll notes that the story of Appalachia is very much the story of world systems, with the region "fully part of an Atlantic and global expansion of capitalism." In that winner-take-all system, places like the titular Ramp Hollow, a hamlet outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, that hosted a once-profitable coal seam, are used up and then abandoned. So are their people, as the log cabins of mountain dwellers gave way to tar-paper shanties, "just as a free and robust set of subsistence practices gave way to impoverishing wage labor." Stoll's resonant critique of capitalism takes many turns, examining the corn economy here and the money economy there as well as the backyard company-town garden as a free ride for the company, the rise and fall of agrarianism, and many other topics. The author closes with a friendly but pointed critique of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy as blaming the victim for systemic failures, even as dispossession has served others "as an instrument of control, not a sign of progress." Which is better, cornfields or clean coal? Stoll's sharp book complicates our understanding of a much-misunderstood, much-maligned region that deserves better than it has received.

     COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 15, 2017
     

     Stoll (Fordham Univ., The Great Delusion) examines the journey of the residents of the southern Appalachian mountain region, from subsistence farmers to employees of mills and coal mines, who lost their land and their autonomy in the process. The author also looks at the story of Appalachia in the context of the larger histories of labor and industrialization, and presents a broad history of capitalism and dispossession, beginning with the enclosure of common land in England in the 18th century. In a wide-ranging narrative, this chronicle touches on many aspects of the region, including the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and even the origins of the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. Stoll closes with a recommendation, presenting a proposal for "Commons Communities" as a way of restoring areas ravaged by coal mining through communal farming and governance. This is not a regional history. Rather, Stoll uses selected examples from Appalachia's past to argue that the move from subsistence farming to wage work is one from independence to dependence, bringing not progress but despair. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in U.S. economic history or the history of labor.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

     Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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shortDescription

How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia
Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common.

Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a "scramble for Appalachia" that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into...

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   • description: History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
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