Physician. Historian.
Today is an important holiday. On this day in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Texas finally learned they were free. West Virginia broke away from the state of Virginia during the Civil War in a show of loyalty to the Union. However, many West Virginians (including numerous members of my family)…
Memes of Resistance Over the past couple weeks, I have seen a lot of posting on social media about the historical roots of Appalachian protesting. Specifically, the posts mention that to protest injustice is a key part of our Appalachian identity and heritage. The most common example that I see is that of the Mine…
Three Babies, Three Decades This was a difficult post to write. I’m a mother of a 2 year old little girl, and it made my heart ache and my chest tight to think of losing her like so many Appalachian women lost their babies before me. It’s a difficult post to read. I’ve dispersed adorable…
History On View The West Virginia and Regional History Center, at West Virginia University, is a wonderful space for historical research. It’s currently closed to everyone because of COVID, but in the absence of a pandemic it’s open to anyone who is interested. I do a lot of my research there. One of my favorite…
I love going to yard sales, flea markets, and antique malls. Of course, as a historian I am always on the lookout for an amazing they-didn’t-know-they-had-this, paradigm shifting find. Maybe some day I’ll find a box of important letters, or a diary like that of Martha Ballard. Most of the time, I don’t find much…
Why Epidemics? I’ve been mulling over what I would write next for a couple months now. When COVID19 hit, I was in the middle of a series on Appalachian women. However, COVID has made me think about other diseases our society has faced. Diseases strike Appalachia hard. We tend to start out already being pummeled…
Sara Lee Kaznoski, Mary Kay Rogers, Mary Matish, and Norma Snyder all kissed their husbands goodbye on November 19th, 1968. It was not a particularly remarkable day for them. Their husbands had been miners for years. Sara’s husband, Pete, had first went into the mines at the age of 14. All three of the men…
On this day in 1969, 2000 miners marched on the West Virginia State Capitol to demand recognition of black lung disease. Eight days before, on February 18th, the mines in the southern West Virginia coalfields emptied as miners walked off the job. This “wildcat” strike was not authorized or endorsed by the miners’ union, the…
Ollie Combs was the sort of tough Appalachian woman that all of us who live here can recognize. She was born in 1904, in Knott County, deep in the Kentucky coalfields. We know little about her early life, but we can speculate. Like other women born in the Appalachian coalfields in that time, she witnessed…
Harriet B. Jones was born in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania in 1856. However, her family later moved to Terra Alta, West Virginia, where she was raised. At the age of 12, her father enrolled her in the Wheeling Female College. The school’s aim was to provide women with a liberal arts education, not to mimic the presumably…