Harlan County Research Articles

Flood Resilience Quantification Framework of Rural Communities: Case Study of Harlan County, Kentucky

Flood Resilience Quantification Framework of Rural Communities: Case Study of Harlan County, Kentucky

“Song Back”: Music/al Performance as Activism and Archive in Harlan County USA (1976)

“Song Back”: Music/al Performance as Activism and Archive in Harlan County USA (1976)

Behind the berms: comparing water quality and zooplankton communities between coves of varying connection to Harlan County Reservoir, Nebraska

Mason BE, Koupal KD, Wuellner MR, Kreitman JW. 2023. Behind the berms: comparing water quality and zooplankton communities between coves of varying connection to Harlan Country Reservoir, Nebraska. Lake Reserv Manage. 39:327–339.Coves are an important feature of reservoirs throughout the United States. Over time, sediment deposition and lateral drift can form a berm in the cove mouth that can restrict or eliminate exchange of surface water between the main reservoir and the coves. Little attention has been given to water quality and the zooplankton communities within these coves that provide unique habitats. This study compared several water quality parameters and the zooplankton communities between disconnected coves, connected coves, and the main reservoir of Harlan County Reservoir, Nebraska. Temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, dissolved nitrates, and dissolved phosphates were similar between both cove types and the main reservoir. Parameters indicating water clarity and productivity were significantly different among the 3 habitats; disconnected coves had the highest turbidity and chlorophyll a (Chl-a) readings, while the main reservoir had the lowest. Similarly, Secchi depth was also lowest within disconnected coves and highest within the main reservoir. Zooplankton densities were highest in disconnected coves compared to connected coves or the main reservoir. Zooplankton communities in disconnected coves were largely dominated by rotifers, Ostracoda, Cyclopoida, Bosmina, Leptodora, and Ceriodaphnia, while the main reservoir had higher densities of Harpacticoida, Calanoida, and Daphnia. Interestingly, zooplankton communities were largely similar between connected coves and the main reservoir, indicating an influence of surface water exchange in these coves. As reservoirs in the United States continue to age, cove isolation is likely to become more common. Results from this study can help predict the potential changes that may occur as coves become disconnected.

Assessing Habitat Availability in a Hydrodynamic Reservoir System

AbstractHabitats may become unavailable to fish in reservoirs at different water elevations. Coves are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss, as these peripheral zones may become isolated from the main reservoir. Quantifying habitat loss at different water elevation reductions and estimating the cost of replacing specific types of habitat or maintaining a target percentage of total habitat cover can help fisheries managers to plan for habitat restoration projects in reservoirs. We used side‐scan sonar to estimate areas of rock, tree, and brush habitat in one cove within Harlan County Reservoir, Nebraska, and used quotes for materials, placement, and personnel from recent habitat restoration projects to estimate replacement and maintenance costs. Materials included riprap rock, cedar trees, and those needed to construct Georgia cubes. Overall, rock, brush, and trees covered a total of 2% of the cove at conservation pool. Rock habitat covered 10 times more area than brush and 100 times more area than trees. All habitats became unavailable when water elevation decreased by 3.5–4.0 m. The cost to replace each habitat type increased as water elevation decreased, and the total cost to replace all habitat at 3.5 m of elevation loss was US$390,000. The cost to maintain the original area of habitat available in the cove (2% of the total cove area) increased for each type of habitat but only until water elevation decreased by 2.5 m. At this point, the total cost to maintain similar habitat coverage was $219,000. Climatic variability may lead to greater oscillations of water elevations in reservoirs, making the vertical distribution of available habitat even more relevant to management planning. The findings of this study serve as an example for how managers can identify the vertical distribution of available habitats and estimate costs for habitat restorations.

Resetting the Clock: How a Reconnection Event Reshaped Cove Fish Assemblages in a Nebraska Reservoir

AbstractCoves are part of the mosaic of fish habitats in many U.S. reservoirs, but over time these coves may be disconnected from the main reservoir for varying durations due to the buildup of sediment berms at the mouth that are higher than reservoir elevations. Our 4‐year study (2017–2020) of five coves in Harlan County Reservoir, Nebraska, across three seasons (spring, summer, and fall) provided an opportunity to compare fish communities between coves that have remained connected to the main body of the reservoir and coves that have been intermittently connected to or disconnected from the reservoir over the past 10 years. Further, we were able to evaluate fish community changes in coves following substantial flood events in 2019 that reconnected all disconnected coves to the main body of the reservoir. Taxonomic richness and diversity were lower in the intermittently connected and disconnected coves compared to the connected coves in 2017 and 2018. Only Common Carp Cyprinus carpio were found in the disconnected cove, and Black Bullheads Ameiurus melas were only found in intermittent coves. However, fish communities notably shifted in intermittently connected and disconnected coves after the reconnection event in 2019 and became more similar to those in connected coves. Most notably, species richness in the disconnected cove increased from 1 species preconnection to 18 species postconnection, and two new species (Flathead Catfish Pylodictis olivaris and Golden Shiner Notemigonus crysoleucas) were found in at least one cove type during the postflood period that had not been present in any coves prior to the connection. Results from this study underscore the importance of coves as habitats for some species and provide insights as to how fish communities may change when coves are reconnected, whether by human intervention or variations in reservoir elevation.

A comparison of fish communities between coves of varying connection to Harlan County Reservoir, Nebraska

Sediment berms of various heights have developed in the mouths of several coves within Harlan County Reservoir due to a combination of sediment deposition and lateral drift of eroded sediments. These berms can isolate coves from the main reservoir if the berm height is greater than the water elevation of the reservoir. Previous research in other reservoirs has shown that fish communities may differ in coves based on their connection histories. This study examines similarities and differences in fish assemblages between several disconnected coves and connected coves in Harlan County Reservoir. Connected coves had greater species richness and diversity compared to disconnected coves. Fish communities between cove types were relatively similar based on presence-absence data but notably different based on species abundance. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling ordination showed that fish communities were distinct between cove types. Eleven fish species were indicators of connected coves, and two species were indicators of disconnected coves. Disconnected coves had higher abundances of understudied native species rarely found in the main reservoir, such as Orangespotted Sunfish, Green Sunfish and Black Bullhead. Further research evaluating the influence of water quality, food availability, and duration of isolation is needed to understand the effect of cove disconnection on fish communities. Managers can use this information when planning cove renovations by weighing the costs and benefits of either maintaining ecologically distinct coves versus connecting coves and improving habitat accessibility for reservoir fishes.

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown

Reviewed by: Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown Kelli Johnson Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. By Karida L. Brown. (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 264.) Dr. Karida L. Brown's book is a thoughtful journey from the Deep South to the coalfields of Kentucky and beyond. Reading it feels like you are sitting on the porch with your grandparents and your aunts and uncles as they regale you with stories of their growing-up years as you sip on homemade sweet tea. In this volume, Dr. Brown explores the lived experiences of Black women and men who grew up in coal country. The tri-city area of Lynch, Benham, [End Page 56] and Cumberland is located in Harlan County, a mountainous region in the southeastern corner of the state of Kentucky. Both Lynch and Benham are coal company towns. Dr. Brown weaves together research with the voices of Lynch and Benham natives utilizing over 150 oral histories she gathered, which let the reader "hear" the true lived experiences of the Black residents of the towns during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Oral histories add a vibrancy and depth to most narratives, and Dr. Brown's use of these first-person accounts does not disappoint. This book provides a thoughtfully researched conversation on race, racial violence, de jure segregation, geographical racism, skin color, and class differences, all the while paying particular attention to detail. She takes the time to note the sartorial differences between Blacks and whites in a photo of men, Black and white, receiving their physical examinations to become coal miners. The first two chapters of the book set the stage for detailing the making of coal towns and the Black migration to those towns; or alternately, the Black man's escape from the Deep South. The subsequent chapters detail the lives and lifeworlds of the Black coal miner and his family in Lynch and Benham. We learn about home and the family. We learn about the children. We learn about pigmentocracy in the coal fields, as well as the spectrum of whiteness. We learn about that "moment in every black person's life when they discover what their blackness means to the world." We learn about the Black school as a place of pride and discovery and majesty. We learn how Blackness in the coalfields mirrored Blackness across the country, though covered in layers of coal dust and paid for in company script. Other books have been written about Appalachia and Appalachians that paint the area as monochromatic and destitute. Dr. Karida L. Brown's work helps fill the gaps that those narratives leave behind. Her thorough research, amplified and highlighted by the many oral histories she conducted, results in a highly readable, academically sound, and very enjoyable book about the lives of Black coal miners and their families. The stories of Affrilachians (this term was coined by Frank X. Walker) are finally being told. [End Page 57] Kelli Johnson Marshall University Copyright © 2022 West Virginia University Press

Holocene Records of Nebraska Mammals

A survey of the archeological and paleontological literature allowed a compilation of Holocene records of mammals in Nebraska. This survey identified Holocene records from 338 sites in 62 of the 93 Nebraska counties. These counties were located throughout state, but there was a concentration of sites in southwestern Nebraska where there were 27 fossil sites in Frontier County and 22 in Harlan County. Fossils sites were underrepresented in the Sand Hills region. Records of fossil mammals covered the entire Holocene period from 13,000 years ago until AD 1850. A minimum of 57 species (with eight additional species potentially present) representing six orders of mammals were represented in the compilation—four species of Lagomorpha, four species of Soricomorpha, 17 species of Carnivora (with three additional species potentially present), one species of Perissodactyla, six species of Artiodactyla, and 25 species of Rodentia (with five additional species potentially present). The remains of bison were found at 276 sites, which was more than for any other species in the state. Additional species that formed the main portion of the diet of Native Americans were the next most abundant in the fossil record—deer, pronghorn, and wapiti. That these food species dominated in the Holocene record was to be expected because fossils were recovered primarily from archeological sites.

Cumberland River Resource Stewardship and Protection: Managing the Cumberland River and the Land Between the Lakes Landscapes

Cumberland River formed on Cumberland Plateau by confluence of the Poor and Clover forks in Harlan county, Kentucky and loops south through northern Tennessee. It joints the Ohio River at Smithland, Kentucky. The Cumberland River is 1107 km long and has a drainage area of 46,830 km2. The Cumberland crosses a highland bench in Cumberland Plateau and flows in a gorge between 90 - 120 m cliffs. The Cumberland Falls is 20.7 m high. The river enters the central limestone basin of Tennessee, turning north, crosses the plain of western Kentucky to Ohio River at Smithland, Kentucky and at one point it is less than 3 km from Tennessee River. The Cumberland River had a long history of transporting furs, canoes, guns, armies, settlers, coal products and manufactured goods in the 1700s and 1800s. Three separate forks (Martin’s Fork, Clover Fork, and Poor Fork) flow out of the Appalachian Mountains in southeast Kentucky near the Virginia border to form the headwaters of the Cumberland River near Harlan, Kentucky. Steamboat traffic on the Cumberland River increased substantially in the 1800s as expanding coal fields, stone quarries and Tennessee produce began to be shipped throughout the region. The Cumberland River was surveyed during this period and between 1832 and 1838 Congress appropriated $155,000 for improving commercial navigation. With this infusion of money the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) could clear the river of snags and build wing dams to deepen the channel. A 1060 km Cumberland River regional trail system, similar to the Tennessee River regional trail system under development, is needed to promote recreational tourism and increase use of the Cumberland River and basin. The primary objectives are: 1) to document how the landscape and geological resources of the Cumberland River have contributed to the successful water resource and economic development of a historic region in North America, 2) to identify future risks to the natural and environmental resources, 3) create a regional trail system with community access points and 4) create generations of people who care about the environmental stewardship and protection of the river and landscape resources.

Protecting miners from coal bursts during development above historic mine workings in Harlan County, KY

In order to reach a large, untapped reserve of high-quality coal, D8 Cloverlick Mine proposed to mine a corridor nearly 600 m deep beneath the Benham Spur of Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak. D8 Cloverlick Mine was extracting the Owl seam, but the corridor’s route lay approximately 20 m above century-old mine workings in the C–(Darby) seam. Adding to the concern, three serious coal bursts had recently occurred in nearby Owl seam workings. Maps of the old workings seemed to indicate that the underlying C–seam had been fully extracted. However, two of the coal bursts had occurred above areas where the C–Seam was also shown as mined out. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) Technical Support therefore investigated the records of past mining to better understand the old mine maps. Underground conditions observed in current Owl seam workings were also compared with the maps of the old C–seam workings. The study concluded that the presence of hazardous underlying remnants could not be ruled out. To mitigate the burst risk, D8 Cloverlick Mine adopted a strategy of stress probe drilling. A self-propelled coal drill was used to auger 11.5-m-long, small diameter holes in advance of mining. As each hole was drilled, the cuttings were measured to detect the presence of highly stressed coal. Ultimately the crossing was successfully completed without incident.

Outtakes of ’68

If ’68 marks the emergence of seemingly new kinds of radical practices pursued by new revolutionary subjects, this essay asks how we might understand a strike undertaken by Appalachian coal miners in the early 1970s and its documentation in the film Harlan County, USA. Is this strike best understood apart from ’68, as a disconnected, outmoded activity pursued by retrograde subjects who, after ’68, can only be represented by and for nostalgic or reactionary political projects? In the strike’s abandonment of political and auterist representation, in the commitment not to any one endpoint but to the ongoing, performative reorganization of social life that the strike and its documentation come to entail, and finally, in the tenuous but still open connections between this strike and other radical practices in and beyond Appalachia, in and beyond ’68, this essay discerns another model for insurgency and for a history without subjects.

Precarious Politics: Friends of Coal, the UMWA, and the Affective Terrain of Energy Identification

Precarious Politics:Friends of Coal, the UMWA, and the Affective Terrain of Energy Identification Sylvia Ryerson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rocky Adkins, then Democratic House majority leader for the Kentucky House of Representatives, speaking at a pro-coal rally in 2012 (Tom Hansell, "The Narrative of Renewal: 'If We Can't Mine Coal, What Are We Going To Do?'"https://dailyyonder.com/the-narrative-of-renewal-if-we-cantmine-coal-what-are-we-going-to-do/2018/10/10/), Adkins is now senior adviser to the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear. Photograph by Tom Hansell / After Coal, 2012. In the iconic scene of Harlan County USA, Barbara Kopple's 1976 Academy Award–winning documentary film, shots are fired in the dark at striking miners and their wives, and Kopple's camera is knocked to the ground. The moment captures the violent escalation of the Brookside Strike of 1973–74, organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against Duke Power, the owner of the Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. In the early morning darkness, the battle lines are clear. The predominantly white UMWA miners and their wives on the picket line confront the company-hired [End Page 719] "gun thugs" working to bring in scabs and break up the strike. With an active membership of 213,113 and 1,329 local chapters nationwide, in 1973 the UMWA remained one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in the country, and the Appalachian coalfields had long played a central role in the union's history.1 The Brookside Strike gained symbolic significance and moral authority by contextualizing itself as a clear continuation of the Harlan County mine wars of the 1930s known as "Bloody Harlan," the nearly-decade-long battle that first established the UMWA in Eastern Kentucky. Kopple films a local UMWA rally during the Brookside Strike, where the songwriter Florence Reece comes to the podium. Her husband, Sam Reece, was a Harlan County miner and union organizer in the 1930s, and the retaliation they faced inspired Florence to pen the now-famous social justice anthem "Which Side Are You On?" As she sings her renowned verses to the 1970s crowd, Come all you poor workersGood news to you I'll tellHow the good ol' unionHas come in here to dwell Which side are you on?Which side are you on? If you go to Harlan CountyThere is no neutral thereYou'll either be a union manOr a thug for J. H. Blair Which side are you on?Which side are you on?2 Released some forty years later, the 2015 documentary film Overburden follows the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) in the Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia, and across the Central Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The drama climaxes at a 2009 anti-MTR rally held outside a Massey Energy–owned coal processing plant near Coal River Mountain, the site of an impending MTR job. The "anti-MTR" activists are met by dozens of "pro-coal" miners and supporters, in an emotional confrontation. As the anti-MTR activists demand that the state intervene to halt the blasting, pro-coal supporters shout back angrily "go home tree huggers!" and wave Massey Energy flags. Thirty-one arrests are made, as the anti-MTR protestors attempt to block the road to the plant.3 Again, the [End Page 720] battle lines are clear—but the political allegiances have completely changed. While the picketers of the Brookside Strike held signs reading "Duke Power Wants Rate Increases for Customers, Poverty for Coal Miners" and "Duke Power Co. Owns the Brookside Mine, But They Don't Own Us," the miners at the 2009 protests held signs reading "EPA = Equal Poverty for All" and "If You're Against Coal Then Turn Off Your Lights."4 In a stunning reconfiguration of roles, this scene played out over and over again in protests and rallies across the coalfields beginning in the early 2000s. The question "Which side are you on?" remained ever present in the coalfields, but the sides were redrawn: one was...

What Does it Mean to Be “Young” in the Mountains? Voices from the “Youth Activism in Different Generations in Appalachia” Oral History Project

What Does it Mean to Be “Young” in the Mountains? Voices from the “Youth Activism in Different Generations in Appalachia” Oral History Project Tammy Clemons (bio) Intergenerational Perspectives on Youth and Activism in Appalachia “How do you define the word ‘young’?” This was the first question I posed to participants in the Youth Activism in Different Generations in Appalachia Oral History Project (YAA). Based on existing knowledge from personal and professional relationships, I knew the role and impact of young people on the future of the Appalachian region was an important aspect of their work, some of which is consciously oriented around certain age sets or cohorts of youth, like Appalshop’s Appalachian Media Institute (AMI) and the Stay Together Appalachian Youth (STAY) Project.1 Youth is also used to signify broader ranges of chronological age and levels of experience in the region. For example, when I asked Alexia Ault how she defined “young,” she talked about when she was helping organize the “It’s Good to Be Young in the Mountains” (IG2BYITM) conference in [End Page 19] Harlan County and consciously being careful about defining “young people.” We met at the Harlan Center downtown in a large meeting room, which was strangely quiet and cavernous compared to the first IG2BYITM gathering that took place in the same space almost three years before. A lot of the work that I’ve done, we target it towards an audience that’s like “young” in quotations, so we leave that up to the participants to decide whether they fit in that category. It doesn’t have to be like strictly between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two or . . . whatever. So, one example is I was on the steering committee for the first “It’s Good to be Young in the Mountains” festival. I was the logistics coordinator for that and we were really careful with that festival. It did have the word “young” in the title, but there was a space on the website where we said . . . we define that term loosely. It’s aimed at more next-generation leadership, I think would be a more correct term. But that’s just so wordy (laughs) to be like, “Welcome next-generation leadership” . . . every time you’re talking to a big group. And so it’s not necessarily based on a number of years or experience or, you know, academic degrees or anything like that . . . I guess a lot of times when we’re talking to, quote, unquote, “young leaders,” we’re really talking to people who aren’t established. Like, they’re not established politicians. They don’t already have a lot of power than maybe a marginalized group, and really trying to work with those people to help them find their power.2 This loose definition of “young” as “next generation leadership” of people who are not necessarily established, regardless of age or experience, recognizes and challenges how young is defined and by whom as well as some of the power dynamics that affect representation, [End Page 20] inclusion, and access to knowledge, resources, decision-making, and results in Appalachian communities. It also characterizes much of the work by and for young people in the Appalachian region and illustrates how connections between youth generations are maintained over time through the organizations and networks that support that work. There are practical and philosophical ways to define who is young, what youth means, and what is possible for young people to imagine and enact. There are also political economic implications for categorizing youth generations, equating “youth” with the “future,” and determining to what extent and which young people are included in regional development and organizing efforts. With the most recent presidential election, much attention has focused on the economic classes and opportunities in Appalachia and young people today are experiencing and navigating a new moment that deserves documentation. The YAA project documents intergenerational experiences of and reflections on youth, gender, civic engagement, and activism, and regional development in Appalachia. The YAA project also explores comparative perspectives on what it means to be young at different times and in different social contexts, and what people think is possible for people in the region...

I Was Bigfoot's Love Slave!

I Was Bigfoot's Love Slave! Julia Thacker (bio) –Weekly World News We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plumswhen he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.He stripped me and I flew up, a wood moth on birch eyeing the girl below,her limbs spread five-point star. After, he offered jackrabbit on a spit, tinctures.I covered myself with fir branches. Mostly I was alone.I gave up counting the days, hair wilding on my legs, arm pits forested.Gagged on my own sour smell. While he sloshed through creeksand villages, I crawled along the thick moss floor, picked snow-capped mushrooms,pigweed, prickly lettuce. Tongue furry, teeth velveted, I learned to suck spearmint.In snow, he hollowed a deer, laid me inside the carcass.My dreams tasted of iron; antlers, a crown I wore lit with fire.Sometimes he took me along miles of hemlock and sequoia.Evenings, we crouched at wood's edge, spied the far lights. Later I was offered a heart-shaped swimming pool for my story.Did he make you do things? My throat clogged with birdsong. My mind, with leaves. [End Page 36] Julia Thacker Julia Thacker is the granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in AGNI, Little Star, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and others. She has held fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has taught creative writing at Radcliffe Seminars and Tufts University. Her book-length manuscript, The Winter Comb, was a runner-up for the 2019 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

In deep: the boom and bust of the coal mining industry through the eyes of Black Appalachians

ABSTRACTThis review discusses Gone Home by Karida Brown as a project about the boom and bust of the coal mining through the eyes of Black Appalachians. Attention is paid to how the boundary-making projects of Blacks in Harlan County, Kentucky were ultimately made against the backdrop of seismic structural changes that built and then ruined the coal industry. This boom–bust cycle is told through the eyes of second-generation coal miners – that is, the children of the coal miners who migrated from the Birmingham, Alabama region. These children experience their childhood in eastern Kentucky but then are shipped off to the North, West, and East because by the time they come of age, the coal industry is kneeling to mechanization technologies. Brown presents a compelling narrative that introduces a “new” story of the Deep South and the African American Great Migration, one well worth reading.

Comorbid coal: Fýlð and desaise from thirteenth-century England to contemporary Appalachia

This study unites disparate historical, poetic, encyclopedic, and filmic sources by their shared project to situate coal on a continuum of forces ranging from life-ending to life-sustaining: on one hand, filth and disease; on the other, energy and employment. When burned sea coal gained popularity as a fuel source in thirteenth-century England, it catalyzed a stream of opposition to its pollution. Chroniclers, poets, encyclopedists, and physicians in medieval and early modern England and France identified its danger to humans as an agent of and metaphor for disease, race, and socio-economic position. These notions of coal as a trans-corporeal link between humanity and the environment in turn illuminate its identification of disease, racial alterity, and socio-economic exploitation in Barbara Kopple’s (1976) documentary, Harlan County, USA. Kopple presents a neomedieval view of coal as the quintessential ecological other, one which makes and unmakes bodies, communities, and environments.

Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown

Reviewed by: Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown Selena Sanderfer Doss Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia. By Karida L. Brown. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [xii], 252. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4703-6.) For much of the twentieth century, the study of Appalachia has been marred by voyeurism, geographic determinism, and charges of cultural pathology. Recent studies have begun to challenge this trend, emphasizing instead the region's history of liberalism, environmentalism, and organized labor. Karida L. Brown's work continues to complicate Appalachian history by surveying the lived experiences of black residents in Harlan County, Kentucky. She places her work solidly within the literature on identity and migration, while seeking to deconstruct "what it was like to grow up as a black person in a company-owned town in Appalachia in the era of Jim Crow segregation, and then to transform into an entirely new type of citizen by coming of age at the height of the civil rights movement and the African American Great Migration" (p. 6). Using the snowball method, the author conducted more than 150 interviews. Each chapter begins with a short literature review on a particular topic such as education or family life before interrogating the oral histories. Chapters 1 and 2 serve as introductions to the region's industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century and detail the wave of black southerners, mostly from the [End Page 725] coal-producing regions of Alabama, who migrated to Appalachia's coal towns before World War II. The vitality of black life, despite the limitations placed on these communities by Jim Crow, is assessed in chapters 3 and 4. Coal companies followed the South's racial order and supported segregated schools, housing, and community centers for both white and black employees. Not succumbing to the degradation embedded in these racial barriers, black residents found solace in nurturing family life, lively social organizations, and participation in cultural rituals such as separate Independence Day celebrations that cultivated racial solidarity and pride. Chapters 5 and 6 describe segregated education in the towns of Benham and Lynch, Kentucky. Brown finds that black students in Appalachia were given inferior textbooks and underfunded facilities compared with their white counterparts. However, she also finds a community that valued learning and encouraged its children to pursue higher education. Marked feelings of nostalgia for the loss of community schools and the cultural sanctuaries that they provided before desegregation are present in many interviewees' sentiments. In the last chapter, Brown, whose own family hails from Lynch, poignantly recognizes the declining number of black residents since the 1950s and interprets this departure as part of a larger story where the progeny of first-generation immigrants move in search of greater educational and employment opportunities. Claiming great affinity for Appalachia, the author concedes that the region "belongs to no one" and laments that somehow black families knew that "it was never really theirs" (p. 161). In chapter 2, "The Great Migration Escape," Brown characterizes black relocation to Appalachia as escape and, in doing so, overlooks the literature that grounds black migrations as organized movements. Recounting stories of impulsivity ignores the forethought, planning, and deliberateness of those choosing to migrate. This one portrayal, however, is a quibble. The personal stories of black Appalachians provide useful data for seasoned researchers. The author has deposited the interviews in their entirety in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A monumental contribution to black southern history, the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project's collection of interviews, ephemera, and photos is currently available to researchers wishing to conduct detailed investigations of black Appalachian life. Selena Sanderfer Doss Western Kentucky University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Estimating the number of recreational anglers for a given waterbody

Knowing how many anglers use a given body of water is paramount for understanding components of a fishery related to angling pressure and harvest, yet no study has attempted to provide an estimate of the population size of anglers for a given waterbody. Here, we use information from creel surveys in a removal-sampling framework to estimate total numbers of anglers using six reservoirs in Nebraska, USA, and we examine the influence of the duration of sampling period on those estimates. Population estimates (N±SE) of unique anglers were 2050±45 for Branched Oak Lake, 1992±29 for Calamus Reservoir, 929±10 for Harlan County Reservoir, 985±24 for Lake McConaughy, 1277±24 for Merritt Reservoir, and 916±18 for Pawnee Lake during April–October 2015. Shortening the sampling period by one or more months generally resulted in a greater effect on estimates of precision than on estimates of overall abundance. No relationship existed between abundances of unique anglers and angling pressures across reservoirs and sampling duration, indicative of a decoupling of angler abundance and angling pressure. The approach outlined herein has potential to provide defendable answers to “how many are there?”, questions we ask when subjects cannot be marked, which should provide new insights about angler populations and subpopulations.