The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia

ISBN-13: 9780521655460 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 452 str.

Kathleen M. Blee; Dwight B. Billings

Opis

Intended for social scientists, historians, and readers interested in social change and social poverty, this book examines the roots of entrenched poverty in Appalachia. It is both a social history of the creation of chronic poverty (and wealth) in Clay County, KY and an explication of how economic markets, cultural strategies, and the state interact to shape local society. By linking a longitudinal study of a single place to broader understandings of the historical development of the capitalist world system, this book contributes to policy discussions of the underlying causes of persistent rural poverty and reasons for the chronic failure of governmental programs to alleviate such poverty. In doing this study the authors have assembled probably the longest running set of longitudinal data currently available on an American rural population as well as the most extensive body of data available for a persistently poor community in the United States.

Recenzje

'It is a book built on patient research and observation, which will reward the patient reading of scholars and activists elsewhere trying to build community alternatives to clientelism.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Spis treści

List of illustrations; List of tables; Preface and acknowledgments; Part I. Public Policy and Historical Sociology: 1. Introduction; Part II. Antebellum Capitalist Markets: 2. Fronier Kentucky in the capitalist world system; 3. Industry, commerce, and slaveholding; Part III. Antebellum State Coercion: 4. State making and the origins of elite conflict; Part IV. Cultural Strategies: 5. The patriarchal moral economy of agriculture; 6. Racial dynamics and the creation of poverty; Part V. Postbellum Capitalist Markets and the Local State: 7. From marginality to integration; 8. Feud violence; 9. Epilogue; Appendix; Notes; Index.