Lou Martin is an associate professor of history at Chatham University and author of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia.
Out now, Volume 17, issue 1, of West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies is the first fully online issue of the journal, available through Project Muse. Kevin Barksdale served as editor, and I am proud to have authored one of the articles in this issue.
Titled “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” the article examines the concept of neoliberalism and argues that the social, economic, and political developments in the region over roughly the past four decades are best understood within the context of the rise of neoliberalism. The article opens with quotes from a 2017 column by Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman that relied heavily on deeply flawed assumptions about West Virginian voters and Appalachian culture. Reading that column when it was published, I concluded that historians in the state and the region needed to write more about the effects of political and economic changes on the ground. While national commentators will likely continue to rely on stereotypes and suppositions about Appalachian culture, historians could make sure that there are empirical studies of the effects of things like free trade, deindustrialization, the decline of unions, and defunding colleges and universities.
In “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” I hope to add another chapter to the historiography of the region. Important histories of the region seemingly portray the policies of mid-century liberalism as well-intentioned but sometimes misguided and almost always underfunded. The years that follow the War on Poverty then feel like the denouement of a story about hopes and dreams never fully realized. What I thought was missing was the rise of neoliberalism, an array of policy positions flowing from a faith in free market capitalism that were part of the undoing of Great Society programs as well as, I argue, the decline of the economic bases of many communities throughout the region.Read More »