In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 233 Acknowledgments Like mass production, big business, and railroads, history books often seem inevitable in retrospect. It’s hard to remember how improbable they were in the process of creation. Despite the shift from typewriting and typesetting to computers and laser printers, the bulk of writing takes place as it always has—in the archives and in the hard work of thinking things through. This book took shape slowly over the past several years in the context of a growing family and of intellectual communities, as well as my own efforts. This book has a history. A relatively long process of creation seems to me to require a relatively long essay of acknowledgment. This book felt all the more improbable to me because I wrote it amidst other urgent projects, all of which endangered it even as they enriched the final product. These urgent new projects included learning how to be a husband, a father, and a full member of my extended family. It included learning to become a teaching professor who was usefully self-aware, a full restart for the Kutztown University Honors Program, and various smaller writing projects. It included becoming more fully a part of my new communities here in the borough of Kutztown, Pennsylvania (population 5,000) and at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (population 10,000). On almost the same day that NYU Press decided to go forward with the production of this book, the Kutztown history department elected me as chair, and the Kutztown Community Partnership Board elected me as their president. The main thesis of the book is no accident: I do not have to look far to see a creative, continual process of cultural and organizational evolution , order and disorder. Completing this book has seldom been the most important or the most urgent item on my list of things to do. But it’s always been there. It’s slowly grown in scope over the past decade or more. When I first began work on this book several years ago, it was supposed to follow the development of a district of the United Mine Workers of America from the local organization of a single coal mine in a single town and county in 234 > 235 so penurious and precarious. (It would also eventually mean a lot to see friends Sarah Russell and Chuck Alley, and Mike and Chris Trotti live and thrive with babies in graduate school.) Graduate school can take a terrible toll on family life, in part because evidence suggests that one will spend years gathering debt without really showing progress toward any clearly definable goal. This is stressful. Nevertheless, Arabel and I married a month before I began graduate school. She experienced its ups and downs far more closely than is really fair. She listened on the days when it felt as if my research was going great, and on the days when it felt hopeless. Midway through the process she gave birth to our son Sam during a final exam period. (The professor for whom I was a teaching assistant delivered the exams for me to grade at our house at almost the same moment that the doctor delivered Sam at the hospital.) Arabel rightly contrasts the gestation period and the final product for baby and writing this book. Only a few years into the tenure evaluation process, our daughter Sophie joined us as well. Chapel Hill novelist Lee Smith once wrote: “Everybody I have ever known has lived on Stinson Street at one time or another. Stinson Street has constant parties, constant yard sales. . . . Oh no, I think. This is really my life, and I am really living it. Oh no. I remember thinking that then, on Stinson Street.” So did I. About halfway through graduate school we moved to Stinson Street and a wonderful, cheap, crooked, crumbly, dirt-brown, one-story duplex. It was a student neighborhood of small ranch-style houses on the last gravel road in Chapel Hill, just a few blocks from UNC’s campus. After a few months on Stinson Street Arabel and I got to know the landlords who owned the houses around us, and we convinced graduate school friends to move into the neighborhood. Mariola Espinosa, Fred Solt, Pam Lach, Ann Kaplan, Thomas Pegelew, and Brad Barker lived there. S. Parker Doig, Amanda McMillan and Stephen Pemberton were seldom far away. Gary Frost lived a block away. Sharon Kowalsky held Sam when he was only a few hours old, and many...

Share