Unearthing the roots of rural defiance
In his new book, “Hillbilly Hellraisers,” History alumnus J. Blake Perkins (PhD, 2014) searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks. He focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people as they interacted with government in the late 19th and 20th centuries, uncovering the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people over time.
Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers’ conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levels of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials and Midwestern immigrants arose from the region’s new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern anti-government conservatism bore little resemblance to the backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.
Exploring uncharted waterscapes
Lowell Duckert, associate professor in the Department of English, explains that humans are not as separate from the environment and elements as they may think.
In his new book, “For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes,” Duckert demonstrates that when playwrights, travel authors and other early modern writers visited bodies of water, they composed “hydrographies,” or narratives written with the elements they encountered.
Believing the lives of both humans and waterscapes can be improved simultaneously through direct engagement, Duckert strives to dissolve boundaries between humans and the environment to inform political activism, policymaking and environmental justice.
Religion vs. Science
What do religious Americans really think about science? A new book from Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and West Virginia University sociologist Christopher Scheitle explores and debunks widespread and consequential myths about the intersection of science and religion. They seek to understand the relationship between science and religion in American culture and provide practical suggestions and ideas for collaboration between science communities and faith communities.
Abusive Endings
Walter DeKeseredy, the Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and director of the Research Center on Violence at WVU, and his co-authors explore one of the most significant threats to the health and well-being of women today – abuse at the hands of their male partners. The authors provide a moving description of why and how men abuse women in myriad ways during and after a separation or divorce. The material is punctuated with the stories and voices of both perpetrators and survivors of abuse, as told to the authors over many years of fieldwork.