Mill Town Research Articles

Being in Myth and Community: Resistance, Lived Existence, and Democracy in a North England Mill Town

‘Community’ has long been critiqued in academic circles as a social construct with the potential to subsume and exclude individuals under a determination of collectivity. In contrast, community continues to be posed as an ideal in urban policy, particularly in the United Kingdom. In this paper I employ Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of community as myth and as existential being to interrogate the thorny issue of how community is constructed and the effects of those constructions on being and living in a place. I explore the constitution of collectivities and their interruption by lived existence in an urban regeneration project in north England, where a proposal to demolish and renew housing was contested by local residents. I argue that a Nancian lens provides a nuanced view of how myth and being are entangled and requires one another to ensure a vibrant democratic politics rested on an openness to alterity.

Sorting Bodies: Race, Affect, and Everyday Multiculture in a Mill Town in Northern England

This paper examines how race might be understood differently when social interaction is taken as the starting point of analysis. I argue that dominant modes of theorising race as a biological construct or epistemological marker remain insufficient for understanding the multiple, contingent, and devious ways in which race takes form in, and gives shape to, encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Keighley—a former mill town in northern England—the paper assembles narrative fragments that reconstruct encounters with difference (that vary in intensity from the mundane to terror alerts). In each of these encounters I return to the question: what does race do? The paper offers a reconsideration of race and racism. I theorise race as a technology of differentiation that sorts human difference in ways that acknowledge the malleability of race and the more-than-human composition of social relations. I go on to outline an understanding of racism—a racism of assemblages—that recognises that the sorting of human difference is also accompanied by judgments that prefigure encounters. The racism of assemblages offers an opportunity to address the operation of race at the level of nonconscious thinking and the affective intensities through which the sorting and judging of human differences are performed. The work of gathering fragments to reconstruct encounters also generates insights into the microsociality of multicultural life in Keighley, disrupting narratives that argue that white and Asian communities lead ‘parallel lives’ in northern mill towns.

The Traitor of Zion

Ben Stroud the traitor of zion fiction 85 They had become something of a fascinationof mine: communes cut out of the interior, new societies where all were equal and either Jesus or Liberty reigned. Some days, after reading an account of a blind prophetess leading her followers to Illinois, or of a mill town where all shared labor and wealth equally, I yearned to give up my life and join them. I felt as if I lived in a hurtling age. It seemed all humanity stood on a precipice, that in the distance, beyond the coal smoke and the tangle of telegraph wires, could be spied a shining metro­ polis where men would be re-formed. But I spent my days stuck in my father’s shop—at twenty-three I was his peer in making the fiddles and other cheap instruments we sold to travelers embarking from the docks— and my nights in drink with friends. I need only walk the streets of my Baltimore, pass a slave carrying bricks on his crooked back or a rheumy-eyed sailor, ruined by the sea, begging alms and ale, to feel the rottenness in my soul. Men could not be changed, and I, one among millions, would never make it to any dream city. Even so, the yearning never left me. One night, during yet another of our regular debauches, I rose without a word and left my friends in a steaming oyster house. I had seen notices in the paper of a Hebronite meeting: their leader and revelator, Josiah Kershaw, was touring the East to summon new followers to the city he was raising on Peaine Island, a wilderness in the far northern reaches of Lake Michigan. All week the papers had mocked Kershaw. To them he was a gross fabricator —the great paradise he promised a myth, the prophecies on which he claimed his authority pure forgeries. But I was intrigued. His talk of harmony, of plain lives lived according to rule, stirred my hopes. I had passed the last weeks in a violent melancholy, pining for a woman who didn’t even know me, a ship captain’s young wife, and increasingly I had seen my future, bound by an invisible chain to the worktable, just like my father. And so, unsteady on my feet after five whiskeys, I searched for the inn where the meeting was to be held. By the time I found it my heart beat heavily and sweat dripped from my skin. My nerves were electric with anticipation. Eyes turned to look at me when I stumbled into the room. The meeting was already underway. At the front a graybeard clutched a Bible and kept his eyes shut as he recited a prayer. I sat in the back, gripping my knees to keep from swaying. The graybeard droned on. 86 ecotone People yawned and scratched their noses. After fifteen more minutes of this—the prayer was unending!—I could barely master myself. I was an imbecile. There was nothing for me here. I glanced at the door, but before I could rouse the courage to get back up, the graybeard sat and another man stood. “Those who walk in the way of the Lord will receive His blessings ,” he shouted, and with those words—and that marshal’s voice— I was seized. My drunkenness lifted from me. My eyes steadied, my mind ceased to yaw, my limbs stiffened with sober life. I recognized Kershaw from the newspaper illustrations. He was tall and spare, with a trimmed auburn beard and a high forehead seemingly shaped for the guarding of truths. His eyes glittered as if catching the wonders of his heavenly Guide. He paced before us, and something in him called to me. Without knowing why, I hungered for his blessing. Five years earlier, he told us, he had beenacoalshoveler in Chautauqua County. It was then that angels, and at last the Lord, had first shown themselves to him and revealed a golden scroll hidden in a cave. On this scroll he found descriptions of Peaine Island. It was the Lord’s chosen site for a holy city, a place where men would live in...

Flesh, Metal, Road: Tracing the Machinic Geographies of Race

By approaching the road as a contact zone, I develop novel insights into the turbulent multiculture of a northern mill town in England. Through a montage of encounters with taxis and ‘flash’ cars on the streets of Keighley, West Yorkshire, I illustrate how social differentiation is performed on the road as human difference is sorted and judged through assemblages of flesh, metal, and road. I develop recent debates on the social construction of race, arguing for a perspective that foregrounds what race does in social interaction. And so I offer a reconsideration of race as a technology of differentiation at work in interaction that is allied to what I call the ‘racism of assemblages’, which traces how loose racial summaries distributed across bodies, things, and spaces become the basis for perception, judgment, and action. In the process, I also assemble perspectives on multiculture from below, which disrupt talk of segregation and ‘parallel lives' in northern mill towns, and question arguments that more interaction and community cohesion are the answer to living with difference.

Hearts of Gold (review)

Reviewed by: Hearts of Gold Phyllis Wilson Moore (bio) J. McHenry Jones, Hearts of Gold. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2010. 306 pages. Trade paperback, $22.95. One of the earliest novels published in the United States and written in English by a male African American is Hearts of Gold: A Novel. Self-published in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1896, it has been reissued by West Virginia University Press, as part of the series Regeneration: African American Literature and Culture; a dynamic series instituted primarily to reprint significant African American texts now out of print. Jones, an erudite scholar and savvy, politically-inclined educator, created his cast of characters from the black middle class, a departure from the slave narratives and biographies common in the day. His characters came in many hues, but all are intelligent, prospering, professional, educated, cultured, Afro-Americans (Jones' term). Fond of quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, they use perfect grammar and diction and posses elaborate vocabularies. The Ohio-born Jones, then a young school principal in Wheeling, West Virginia, a state below the Mason-Dixon Line, took a risk by highlighting the severe problems faced by his people in these precarious times. The novel recognizes the post-Reconstruction Era weakening of civil rights laws, persistence of unpunished lynchings, proliferation of Jim Crow laws involving voting and transportation, false imprisonment of blacks, slavery-like conditions in the penal coal mine system, and sexual harassment. The four main characters are young members of a tightly-knit community of Afro-Americans living comfortable lives in the North in an Ohio-like location a few miles from Canada. At the beginning of the novel, they attend church, help the less fortunate, join lodges, worry about racial issues, enjoy lake cruises, and fall in love. Jones goes to great lengths to describe the various skin colors of his characters. Some could pass for white (but choose not to do so), one is a red head with skin "as free of pigment as an albino's," another is a transparent shade of brown produced from "a century of miscegenation of the best blood of the Caucasian." A frequent topic of their conversation is the "race outlook" and how to influence it in a positive way. They discuss the notion, popular with some, of Africa as a homeland. In the end they agree: they are Americans, and America is their home. The beautiful heroine, Regenia, is the orphaned daughter of a mulatto slave (who escaped to Canada) and a wealthy young white woman (who followed him). Raised by her wealthy white grandmother, Regenia holds [End Page 99] a Normal School teaching certificate and is proud of her Afro-American heritage. Circumstances force her to move to Irondale, a steel mill town in "Deep Dixie," to become a teacher. Dr. Lotus Stone, an admirer, relocates there to set up his practice. They grapple with the poverty of the formerly enslaved, the lack of health facilities, and lack of school supplies. Both face daily racial discrimination. Regenia faces sexual harassment from a villainous white physician, Dr. Leighton, who has Dr. Stone falsely imprisoned and leased to a coal mine owned by a millionaire senator. In this mine, foremen work the laborers to death as it is cheaper and easier to replace dead convicts than provide care, meals, housing, and clothing to prisoners. Prisoners too weak to work are suspended by their thumbs, beaten, and endure water poured down their throats until they pass out or die from the distention. Young Dr. Stone faces a brutal existence and certain death. In true melodrama style, the story twists and turns. With Regenia's help, Clement St. John, an albino-like young editor, uses personal connections, political savvy and the power of his own newspaper in his attempt to free Dr. Stone and incite public outrage regarding the evils of the prison leasing system. Upon its publication, Heart of Gold received few reviews, and there is no indication it caused much comment. After its publication, Jones' career as an educator and political activist, already impressive, gained momentum. He became a significant figure: lodge officer, national and international speaker, highly successful president of the college that is now...

Experiences of learning within a twentieth‐century radical experiment in education: Prestolee School, 1919–1952

Prestolee School, at Kearsley, near Bolton in Lancashire, UK, was the site of an experiment in education between 1919 and 1952 under the leadership of head teacher, Edward Francis O’Neill (1890–1975). The school attracted much national and international attention over three decades owing to the unorthodox methods practised by O’Neill and the extraordinarily rich learning environment set amidst the industrial poverty of this small mill town. However, we know very little about the experience of learning within such a radical experiment in education. This article examines the experiences of the pupils through two main sources: archive documents produced between 1925 and 1945 and oral testimony recorded in 2008. Consideration is given to the methodological challenges and opportunities of mixed method research—in this case, combining cross‐disciplinary enquiry with oral testimony and documentary analysis. Reading the school building as a text, the changes in the design of learning spaces over time are foregrounded. Neither a history of school architecture and design nor a social history rooted in memory and the documentary record, the article represents a methodological departure from architectural history and the social history of schooling.

A Shared or Multicultural Future? Community Cohesion and the (Im)possibilities of Hospitable Social Capital

Following the upheavals of 2001 in the northern England mill towns, there has been a renewed effort in policy circles to reconceptualise the terms of civic engagement between Britain's ethnic communities. Labelled ‘community cohesion’, the official agenda has drawn extensively from scholarly observations on social capital and, more recently, on an ‘ethics of hospitality’, to recommend a doctrine of social integration at a local scale. This paper suggests the ideals and ethos behind the development of such cohesion policies are incomplete and bear a productive contradiction, which promises an ethical reflection on the values at the intellectual core of New Labour's race relation policy.

“Eat It to Save It”: April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition

“Eat It to Save It”April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition Whitney E. Brown (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution April McGreger (here) dwells in vital, dynamic realms of southern food, past and present. As the proprietor of Farmer’s Daughter brand, she produces a wild array of goods. On any given Saturday at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, locals might find her version of her mother’s pear preserves perched beside hand-labeled jars of green tomato chutney in front of a mound of fresh, sticky “Sunshine Buns” (sweet potato cinnamon rolls with cardamom). Photograph courtesy of the author. [End Page 93] It’s not every woman who renders her own lard, or cries over Kentucky Wonder beans. April McGreger, however, dwells in vital, dynamic realms of southern food, past and present, and sees things differently than most. Her kitchen is home to a deep love and respect for the food and people that nurtured her as a child in tiny Vardaman, Mississippi, but it is also an increasingly cosmopolitan political space that houses strong commitments to season, environment, producer, and community. While those overt ideological commitments may seem new and progressive—even trendy, at this point—they stem directly from the past, perhaps skipping an industrial generation or two. McGreger is reclaiming a version of past and place where she sees value, functionality, pleasure, and dignity. It is a place where she sees community as the end goal. In a true community—one of interconnected, interdependent people—neighbors take care of each other, whether that means something local and specific like bringing over food when there is a death in the family (as neighbors have done for generations), or something larger and more anonymous like taking care of the planet on each other’s behalf when we grow our own organic vegetables. On a much greater scale, McGreger is recreating the sense of community she lost when she moved away from her small hometown and her entire family. She is creating the world in which she wants to live, and she is doing so through food. She is not alone. McGreger’s broad and sometimes conflicting allegiances exemplify the changes taking place among her generation of southerners, born in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, who gravitate toward places like Carrboro, North Carolina. A former mill town located a couple of miles west of the University of North Carolina, it is a place where southerners from across the region mingle with a large contingent of southerners from around the country and the globe, as well as a few Yankees exiled for jobs, school, or love. In Carrboro and other places like it, intricate webs of small-scale food production and consumption are thriving, thanks to a significant number of eaters, growers, purveyors, and restaurateurs who believe that eating well means eating locally and seasonally. Acts of consumption—specifically, choices of ingredients, suppliers, recipes, methods, cookware, dining companions and locations, stories, and even restaurants—are intimately tied to identity, place, and politics. These acts, however great or small, embody certain philosophies about food, life, community, and environment. Most importantly, they connect people to each other. In some of America’s most progressive communities, among which I include Carrboro, there is a visible contingent that seems to believe that newer is not always better, and that older, more traditional ways have their advantages. Whether “old” means a more sustainable way of doing things, a more personal one, or a way somehow more authentic and meaningful, many young people are turning to the past. For them, there lies the solution to environmental degradation and global [End Page 94] warming, an anonymous food system that appears increasingly irresponsible and unsafe, a corporate-dominated economy that does not value the homemade or the handmade, a disconnection from nature and seasons, the absence or decline of community, and more. If the abundance of organic, family-run farms and farm-to-table restaurants, as well as the presence of a thriving, nationally known farmers’ market, are any indication, one thing that ties together the people of Carrboro is a common love of good, fresh food. Much of the produce is local and seasonal, and...

Ethnomethodology and the Non‐representational: What Are Disaffected Young White Men Capable of?

AbstractThis short review draws together three research trajectories underway in contemporary human geography; ethnographic research with young white men living out changing urban contexts, non‐representational styles of thinking and experiments with ethnomethodological precepts and research practice. The article begins by examining the possibility of rapprochement between non‐representational and ethnomethodological thought. This unlikely meeting is applied to the possibility of an empirical engagement with young white men in Burnley, UK. In his report on the summer 2001 disturbances in Northern England's mill towns, Ted Cantle signals the political problem presented by ‘disaffected’ young white men. However, a generic concept of disaffection presents an obstacle to connecting those men, as capable individuals, to positive political futures. In response, this article speculates that studying the varied affective capacities behind disaffection will multiply the ways in which young white men may be recognised as capable political actors. The meeting of distinctive critiques of empiricism will enable an ethnographic approach well placed to generate understandings of how a variety of capacities to think, feel and act come to matter amid politically unsettled, post‐industrial urban environs.

CHLORINE SPILL OFFERS INSIGHTS

LESSONS ARE STILL being learned four years after a 2005 train crash spread a toxic plume of chlorine gas through the small mill town of Graniteville, S.C., killing nine people, injuring hundreds, a...

The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (review)

Reviewed by: The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City Steven High The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. By Cathy Stanton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2006. Cathy Stanton won the 2007 National Council for Public History's book prize for The Lowell Experiment, an empirically grounded study of public historians at work in a former Massachusetts textile mill town. The author situates the founding of Lowell National Historical Park (1978) in the context of the rise of public history and the emergence of the industrial heritage site out of the ruins of deindustrialization. She notes, rightly I think, that industrial museums "come to praise and to bury—to extol the workers whose labor created these places and frame that labor as something essentially finished." (xii) The sense of disconnection with the present, its pastness, is an integral part to the interpretation of industrial sites. Stanton asserts that this unwillingness to tackle present-day issues serves to depoliticize the message, even when the Lowell site is infused with social history. Conflict is almost always located safely in the distant past. Stanton uses the performance of the guided tour as an entry point into the Park Services' interpretation of the site. The "The Run of the Mill" tour, the most frequently offered, consisted of a trolley and boat journey into the early development of the industrial [End Page 143] city. Technology, waterpower and the "mill girl" labour force all loomed large in the official narrative. However, Stanton is attentive to the small opportunities for subversion of the official line. Yet there was virtually no contact with residents during the park's tour of the "Acre", a poor working-class district, and a narrative arc of upward mobility. Throughout these chapters, Stanton makes the crucial point that the "culture-led regeneration" of Lowell has produced few new jobs. It was more a matter of re-imaging the town, branding it post-industrial. The interpretative core of the book originates in Victor Turner's notion of rituals of reconnection. Based on her interviews, Stanton concludes that working-class memories serve as markers of how far middle-class public historians and visitors have come. The park reconnects them with the working-class pasts of their parents or grandparents. In effect, "The park's rituals of reconnection are designed to bridge personal distances—between visitors' and public historians' own family pasts and personal presents—while denying the social distances between these postindustrial workers and people less fortunately situated in the present day." (182) So far so good. Yet what perplexed me about Stanton's book was its refusal to engage meaningfully with Martha Norkunas' superb monograph, Monuments and Memory. Like Stanton, Norkunas examined the politics of remembering in post-industrial Lowell. But there the similarities end. For Stanton, the social actors are non-local public historians. In fact, local residents in Stanton's account are peripheral to the story being told and their interventions are belittled as the work of a handful of "local cultural activists," or as an "activist tribe." (192) Stanton clearly questions their moral authority to speak on behalf of local community. By contrast, Norkunas is more interested in the public and private remembering of city residents including her own family. The two books thus mirror the two "poles of discourse" that prevail in Lowell: "localness" and "outsiderhood." The park's "Working People" exhibition is put forward by Stanton as a warning to public historians who work with communities. The first half of the exhibit represents social history at its critical best. However, the second half of the exhibit on immigrants provides a celebratory narrative not unlike a scrapbook or photo album. The bifurcation of the exhibition was the result of a local representative playing the "blow-in card" to over-rule the objections of professional public historians. Stanton sides with her peers, throughout. Why is it that we only get to see the local "blow-in card" being played? What power cards did the institutional insiders in the National Park (the public historians) play? The unresolved tension between community collaboration and critical social history, so central to the work of Lowell's progressive public historians, is thus...

Lagniappe: Country Music in North Carolina: Pickin' in the Old North State

While all Southern states share historical connections in culture and geography, North Carolina is in many ways unique. From the Outer Banks to the industrial Piedmont to the High Country of the west, the state has a unique mix of regions and cultures. Music figures prominently in North Carolina, and its musicians reflect the diversity of the geography. The state’s earliest musicians were the Native Americans, especially the Cherokee, whose music has been recorded and studied in some detail. European-American music has flourishedsince colonial days: in Salem, the Moravian church has sponsored the development of sacred choral and instrumental music for over 200 years. In the early twentieth century a distinct African American blues style originated from the textile mill and tobacco towns of the Piedmont region.

Why Kendal? John Thelwall, Laker Poet?

In November, 1803, Citizen John Thelwall, the once-notorious Jacobin orator, stopped at Grasmere and Keswick on his way to Scotland to deliver elocutionary lectures. According to biographers, this visit marked the definitive end of Thelwall's friendship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of their radical years. Thelwall sank into obscurity as an elocutionist and pedagogue, and Wordsworth and Coleridge rose to become the foremost poet-critics of their generation. I have been working to fill in the blanks in Thelwall's virtually undocumented later career, a quest crowned by my discovery in 2004 of both his hidden hermitage in Llyswen, Wales, and a one-thousand-page manuscript of his complete poems, never known to have existed, in Derby. These discoveries prove that Thelwall's poetry is more ambitious and original than he has been given credit for, that his connections with the Wordsworth Circle are more extensive and long-lived, and that his 1803 visit to the District was not a chance event. Not merely passing through, Thelwall had recently settled his family in nearby Kendal, where they would remain for over a year, where he would return between lecture tours, and where he would write poetry that continues the formative dialogue with Wordsworth and Coleridge that began in 1796. (1) Not counting work towards his ambitious but unfinished epic The Hope of Albion, Thelwall wrote at least twenty-five poems between 1803 and 1805, most intended for the unpublished volume of Wordsworthian Poems, Chiefly Suggested by the Scenery of Nature that makes up the core of the Derby manuscript, and appears to originate at this time. (2) My paper draws on this manuscript (which I am editing) as well as research into Kendal social history (including evidence of the reception of Thelwall's lectures), to answer my title question. Why did Thelwall choose Kendal? What does his residence there mean for his own poetry, and that of the Lake School (which was tarred by Thelwall's brush with Jeffrey in Edinburgh)? What kind of poetry did he deliver to the citizens of Kendal, and how was he received? How does Romantic poetry look when viewed from the perspective of a market town on the dissenting margins of the District rather than a rustic cottage at its loyal shepherd's heart? If English Romanticism is forever associated with District, then Kendal like Thelwall is forever knocking on its door. This gateway to the Lakes (3) is a market town and transportation hub now famous not for literary but consumer landmarks, from mint cake to shoes. Two hundred years ago, Kendal was not so different: when the town is mentioned in the lives of the poets, it is as a place to catch the London coach, or to purchase books and commodities (like the famous 'black drop' opium) not available locally. In short, Kendal then as now was a place of mobility, sociability and commerce, a threshold or bridge between the pastoral tradition and tranquility that Wordsworth sought out and celebrated in his poetry, and the rapidly growing mill towns and mass markets that he wrote his poetry in opposition to, but still depended on, in that uneasy relationship between literary and popular culture that also defines Romanticism. Kendal was a threshold. in social structure as well. Unlike the mountain heart of the District, where the sturdy self-reliance of Wordsworth's idealized shepherds was rooted in a quasi-feudal deference to the high-and-mighty Lowther interest, Kendal was characterized by the political independence and class mobility that marked the emergent northern powerhouses of this industrial revolutionary age. According to social historians, Kendal's historical lack of resident gentry and nobility (Brown 3), along with its large number of skilled artisans and independent tradesmen, and the fact that its leading families were dissenters, Quakers and Methodists, all meant that Kendal was never an established county town (Dyhouse 4-5. …

Kannapolis: From Mill Town to Research-Based Economy

Kannapolis: From Mill Town to Research-Based Economy

The Pride and Prejudice of Don West

The Pride and Prejudice of Don West Jeff Biggers (bio) I spent several years obsessed with resurrecting the legacy of a largely dismissed Appalachian poet-activist. Not entirely dismissed: In 1946, Don West became a national literary phenomenon, managing to sell untold thousands of copies of a collection of quatrain folk ballads and labor poems, Clods of Southern Earth, which should have forever etched him a place in the literary canons of the region. Truth is, during the years I researched West’s wiles, interviewed associates, and collected his papers from the remote corners of the hills and hollows and urban back warrens—most of West’s personal papers had been lost in a series of mysterious fires—I was more in turmoil about how to deal with his hard times and its relevance today than his forgotten life. In the fall of 1999, seven years after Don had died, his books had gone out of print (and it grieved me that the generation of Appalachian scholars, activists, publishers, editors, and writers that came of age in his shadow had shamefully allowed his work to stay out of print for well over a decade), and his legacy had disappeared into the mountain fog; I embarked on a journey with one question: Does Don West still matter to Appalachia, and the nation? I first met West in the early summer of 1983. I was 19, a dropout from the University of California. I had just gone through a wild nine-month tour of duty in Berkeley’s corridors, spending more time in jail and at leftist political meetings than in classrooms. I failed to finish my last quarter. Returning from a stint in jail for a demonstration in central California, I was involved in a tragic car accident, which resulted in the death of a young woman. I was at the wheel. Still in a daze, I eventually took a Greyhound across the country, and then started hitching and hiking through the South, drifting into the Blue Ridge. I was angry, resentful, and adrift. I had lost faith in the power of education, politics, or even activism. Don West saved my life that summer. Here are his bona fides as I see them. Raised by sharecroppers from North Georgia, influenced as much by the self-reliant wisdom of his [End Page 11] mountaineer grandfather as the off-putting, patronizing education he received at the well-known Berry School, the dirt-poor but resourceful West put himself through Lincoln Memorial and Vanderbilt universities at the same time the Southern Agrarian literary movement took the stage in the late 1920s. But West was no backwards-looking antebellum sycophant; he wrote poetry as a way of giving voice to his own neglected heritage, traveled outside any academic comfort zone to face the violent strikes in coal camps and mill towns, earned a bachelor’s in divinity studies, journeyed around Scandinavia and Europe to examine the cooperative movement and adult folk schools, and returned to the South to launch his own revolution in the mountains. The youthful West was anything but artless, naïve, and malleable. He possessed a tremendous sense of place and self-confidence, at home among urban sophisticates in the United States and Europe, as much as he felt at ease among farmers and backwoods sawyers. Raised by radical Republicans in a part of Appalachia that had supported both the Union and Confederacy, West had rejected the emerging media hillbilly stereotypes for his proper place in the South’s progressive vanguard early in his life. Don West intended to make history, on his own terms, on his native ground. In 1932 he cofounded the Highlander Folk School, which became the training center for the Civil Rights Movement. As one of the lonely activists in the generation before the glorious Montgomery Bus Boycott, he went underground and defended a radical black (Communist) leader in Atlanta in the mid–1930s. Wanted dead or alive by the Atlanta authorities, he fled the state and became a union organizer for millworkers and miners in the Carolinas and Kentucky and was occasionally beaten and jailed, often forced to quietly return to work his farm in Georgia or...

Homestead—From Mill Town to Mall Town

Homestead—From Mill Town to Mall Town

Where Have All the Mill Towns Gone?

Yes, I wrote on this quite a few years ago, but I'm on the Chesapeake Bay fishing and running our crab pots near my home town. This was a proverbial mill town, so I am reminded of what we are missi...

Movies of Local People and a Usable Past: Mill Town Treasures and Transcendent Views, 1936–1942

Movies of Local People and a Usable Past: Mill Town Treasures and Transcendent Views, 1936–1942

‘The school without tears’: E. F. O’Neill of Prestolee

Between the years 1918 and 1953 a remarkable and sustained experiment in education occurred at an unremarkable village elementary school mid‐way between Manchester and Bolton in Lancashire, England. Prestolee School at the heart of the industrial mill town of Kearsley was transformed by the head teacher, Edward Frances O’Neill (1890–1975). O’Neill’s experiment to educate within an atmosphere of freedom is re‐examined in this article in the light of an archive of materials which were originally collected by the celebrated mathematics educator, W. W. Sawyer. This archive of photographs, letters, memos and children’s work has been explored alongside records of school inspections and other formal records of the school and its head teacher during these years.

JOHN FREDERICK EISENBERG: 1935–2003

Dr. John F. Eisenberg, scientist, teacher, and mentor of remarkable intellectual breadth, died Sunday, 6 July 2003, at his home in Bellingham, Washington. He was 68. John'S indefatigable spirit, contagious passion for knowledge, and sheer scientific brilliance earned him a reputation as one of the foremost mammalian biologists in the world. He lived his life with passion and a fierce sense of purpose, and was a remarkably colorful and unforgettable personality. John was a Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and the New York Zoological Society, as well as recipient of the C. Hart Merriam Award, the highest research honor bestowed by the American Society of Mammalogists. In 2001 he was the corecipient of the Archie F. Can-Medal award by the University of Florida for his contributions to wildlife conservation. Eisenberg wrote more than 150 major scientific publications on the ecology, behavior, and evolution of mammals. In biological circles, he was recognized as a “big picture” person. His ability to synthesize diverse knowledge culminated in the publication of The Mammalian Radiations: An Analysis of Adaptation, Ecology, and Behavior , a book published in 1982 by the University of Chicago Press. He completed the encyclopedic 3-volume Mammals of the Neotropics in 2000 with coauthor Kent Redford. John was born in Everett, Washington, the 1st of 2 sons of Otto and Bernice nee Sessions Eisenberg. It was a closnit family. Everett was then one of the great mill towns of the Northwest, and John was drawn to wildlife and fishing with his father, brother, and uncles Carl and Boots. If John wasn't born with a fierce sense of independence and individualism, he doubtless learned those qualities from his roving, adventurous uncles. He became a compulsive reader at a young age, and frequently visited Everett'S library anal its little zoo, a legacy from …