| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850–1915. By Robert S. Weise. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. xii, 374 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-57233-112-7.)

Appalachia has inspired another first-rate rural case study, and it is enlivened by bold theorizing on a high wire above a small net, as has become de rigueur from that region. (The field of Appalachian studies grew out of 1960s activism, and it retains a flair for 1960s-style rhetoric.) 1

First and foremost, Robert S. Weise shows that the "transition to capitalism" in Floyd County, Kentucky, occurred through efforts made by small landowners to perpetuate their treasured economic independence and patriarchal authority—personal assets, however, that capitalism gradually eroded until local males were reduced to low-paid coal mining. That transition to capitalism began back in the mid-1800s with local would-be entrepreneurs going into debt to finance labor-intensive extraction of local resources (mainly virgin timber). Then came debt-driven sales of timber and mineral rights to local compradors of outside investors (a process in which wielding control over the local county court proved strategic). Finally in the early 1900s came localism's coup de grâce as the foremost outside investors financed railroad lines and huge shaft mines to profit from the nation's voracious appetite for coal. . . .

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