| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert S. Weise. Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850–1915. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 374. $40.00.

Upon graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Robert S. Weise, following a path well trod by northern college students, came to Appalachia to do good. Fascinated by his new home in Floyd County in eastern Kentucky but soon disenchanted with social work, he changed career tracks, entering graduate school to learn more about the county's history. His research led him to question why householders made the decisions they did as they coped with industrialization brought about by coal mining. Astutely teasing answers out of the complex connections among household economy, commercialization, industrialization, revolving debt, litigation, and gender relations, he casts new light on Appalachia's late nineteenth-century transition from agricultural self-sufficiency to industrial capitalism. 1

Weise argues that household localism is the key to understanding rural capitalist development at the beginning of Appalachia's industrialization. Employing Thomas Jefferson's yeoman ideal, he defines household localism as the overpowering desire of males in rural preindustrial society to achieve economic and political independence from outsiders within a system of household production based on ownership of land and patriarchal control over labor. . . .

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