Overview

While rich in natural resources, Appalachia remains a nationwide symbol of poverty. Ken Fones-Wolf deftly combines labor and business history to examine how a promising partnership between West Virginia and the glass industry failed to improve the state's political economy.  State leaders saw glass as a potential cornerstone industry that promised high wages, reinvestment in the local economy, and a complement to the state’s abundance of timber and fossil fuels. Fones-Wolf draws on case studies of three glass production hubs to analyze the impact of industry on local populations and the Belgian- and French-born craftsmen who took jobs in the area. Throughout, Fones-Wolf examines patterns of global industrial restructuring, the ways workers reshaped workplace culture and political action, and employer strategies for responding to global competition, unreliable markets, and growing labor costs at the end of the nineteenth century.  Incisive and rich in on-the-ground detail, Glass Towns examines an Appalachian pursuit of self-sustaining development.

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9780252073717

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Fones-Wolf blends histories of labor, immigration, politics, business, and technology with skill to produce a finely detailed and compelling portrait of an economic transformation that although ultimately unsuccessful nevertheless left the people and places involved much changed. Moreover, for all its localness, Glass Towers takes a transnational perspective that links European craft practices, shifts in global demand for glass products, technological innovations, and the subsequent local political consequences to offer a cautionary tale relevant to the promise and peril of our own contemporary faith in development. Jarod Roll, University of Sussex

Author Information

Ken Fones-Wolf is professor emeritus of history at West Virginia University. He is the coauthor of  Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie and author of Culture, Class, and Politics in Modern Appalachia.

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