The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia

by Dwight B. Billings, Kathleen M. Blee

Intended for social scientists, historians, and readers interested in social change and social poverty, this book examines the roots of entrenched poverty in Appalachia. It is both a social history of the creation of chronic poverty (and wealth) in Clay County, KY and an explication of how economic markets, cultural strategies, and the state interact to shape local society. By linking a longitudinal study of a single place to broader understandings of the historical development of the capitalist world system, this book contributes to policy discussions of the underlying causes of persistent rural poverty and reasons for the chronic failure of governmental programs to alleviate such poverty. In doing this study the authors have assembled probably the longest running set of longitudinal data currently available on an American rural population as well as the most extensive body of data available for a persistently poor community in the United States.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 2000

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

We talk quite a bit about poverty and economic disparity in the U.S., but this is one of the few books that takes an in-depth view of the problem. This book is unique in that it combines 100 years of longitudinal social science with the history of Clay County, Kentucky in order to paint a picture of the forces that have helped drive Appalachia's economic distress.

There are two elements to note: While the book is steeped in science, the writing is narrative. The authors do an excellent job of weaving the history of Clay County with the social science that backs up their findings.; and The book doesn't paint black-and-white portraits of the issues. Instead the authors explain how the forces at work against Appalachia have grown and shifted, and why those forces developed. This isn't a book that sets out with an agenda to vilify.

If you're interested in Appalachia, social science, American history, or poverty, this book will keep you enthralled.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a history book that really gets down to brass tacks on the poverty that appears to plague Appalachia. This is one of those books that instead of creating a narrative around the people, Instead, the book gives us the data to give us the facts of what can be known about that time and what it leads us to understand about how poverty became so pervasive. There’s a strong message around the Appalachia, apparently a narrative that can be found years and years before, that the reason the people of the Appalachia are poor is because of their culture.

I found this book both fascinating and honestly a little boring. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t find it worth reading, indeed, I think there is more than just history that can be taken from the text. As I was reading this, I was also listening to The Lies My Teacher Told Me in which he discussed how history could be taught, especially as many of the things that the history books teach to students is wrong, or at least not known for sure. So a lot of things that are fact, are instead in dispute. In this book, what the author does is draw our attention to things like census data, diaries, and merchant logs in order to extrapolate the situation of the people who live there.

While this is not the most engaging thing to read, it is much more helpful in continuing to support knowledge on how valuable original documentation is in actually understanding how a place or people came to be in the present situation. This book is also hard to get your hands on for a reasonable price for the moment. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend it, but I suggest knowing what you’re getting into before reading it.

[Gabby Tiesma]

super interesting— but a lot more in depth than I was looking for.

[phoebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

dense af