Overview

One of the central questions facing scholars of Appalachia concerns how a region so rich in natural resources could end up a symbol of poverty.  Typical culprits include absentee landowners, reactionary coal operators, stubborn mountaineers, and greedy politicians. In a deft combination of labor and business history, Glass Towns complicates these answers by examining the glass industry’s potential to improve West Virginia’s political economy by establishing a base of value-added manufacturing to complement the state’s abundance of coal, oil, timber, and natural gas.   Through case studies of glass production hubs in Clarksburg, Moundsville, and Fairmont (producing window, tableware, and bottle glass, respectively), Ken Fones-Wolf looks closely at the impact of industry on local populations and immigrant craftsmen. He also 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.

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9780252031311

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Reviews

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 a professor of history at West Virginia University. He is coeditor of Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840-1940 and author or editor of three other books.

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