Project MUSE®: West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2007) through current issueLatest Articles: West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional StudiesTWOProject MUSE®West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies1940-50570043-325XLatest articles in West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors’ Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974559
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This special issue on Appalachian Hungarians was Briane Turley’s idea. Turley began studying the social history of Appalachian Hungarians in 2020 when he had a fellowship with Corvinus University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest, Hungary. Turley’s work has also been supported by the US and Hungarian Fulbright Commissions. Together, these institutions made possible this project to uncover the hidden history of Hungarians in Appalachia and especially in West Virginia. Turley included some of what he discovered in his article in this issue.Briane reached out to me in 2020 because he read a blog post on AppalachianHistory.net that I had written about my family’s history. Appalachian environmental historian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallEditors’ Note2025-11-09text/htmlen-USEditors’ Note2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®71972026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09“Coal Dust Absorbs Our Tears”: The Life and Labor of Appalachian Hungarians, 1880–1936
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974560
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Shortly after midnight on March 13, 1884, at the Laurel Mine in Pocahontas, Virginia—a community that straddles the West Virginia state line—overnight shift foreman L. M. Hampton ordered an engineer to “slacken the speed” of the ventilation fan at the mine entry because of “the current of air being so strong in the mines that the men’s lamps became extinguished.” The open-flame lamps issued to the men who worked at Pocahontas by the Southwest Virginia Improvement Company were easily extinguished. At approximately one thirty, an explosion ripped through the mine shafts with such force that nearly all the shanties and stores within a few hundred meters of the mine entrance were demolished. Enormous pieces of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmall“Coal Dust Absorbs Our Tears”: The Life and Labor of Appalachian Hungarians, 1880–19362025-11-09text/htmlen-US“Coal Dust Absorbs Our Tears”: The Life and Labor of Appalachian Hungarians, 1880–19362025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®1210172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09Migrants, Miners, and Mountaineers: Immigrants in the Southern Coalfields
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974561
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Millions immigrated to the United States following the American Civil War. Factors causing this migration, which numbered nearly 20 million from 1880 until 1915, varied from group to group and person to person and are too numerous to discuss in detail in this article. In general, migration occurred because industrialization disrupted agricultural practices and other aspects of life for much of the world’s population, causing migration to the United States and other countries in North and South America. The migrants, most of whom hailed from southern and eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Asia, largely settled in northeastern, midwestern, or West Coast cities within the United States. Some, however, made their way
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallMigrants, Miners, and Mountaineers: Immigrants in the Southern Coalfields2025-11-09text/htmlen-USMigrants, Miners, and Mountaineers: Immigrants in the Southern Coalfields2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®1418272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09Appalachian Hungarian Heritage Project: Tracing the Linguistic Heritage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974562
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In this brief paper I situate my currently ongoing research and data collection for an investigation into the linguistic heritage of Appalachian Hungarians and provide a preliminary report. Hungarian language use in the United States has been described in several works over the past four decades, focusing on specific working-class immigrant communities of the formerly industrial region south of the Great Lakes, in South Bend, Indiana, Detroit, Michigan, and McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as well as in one comprehensive book chapter.1 While collecting data on Hungarian language use was possible in the traditional Hungarian communities dating back to the early years of the twentieth century up until the 1990s (cf. Bakó’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallAppalachian Hungarian Heritage Project: Tracing the Linguistic Heritage2025-11-09text/htmlen-USAppalachian Hungarian Heritage Project: Tracing the Linguistic Heritage2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®723302026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09The Himler Project: Preserving the History of the Town of Himlerville and the Man Who Founded It
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974563
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Members of the Himler family brought a manuscript to the Martin County Historical and Genealogical Society, Inc., in 2007. The manuscript was the autobiography of Martin Himler, a Hungarian immigrant who arrived in America in 1907, became a peddler after a short stint in a coal mine, started a newspaper (titled Magyar Bányászlap, or the Hungarian Miners’ Journal), founded an innovative coal company and the progressive town of Himlerville, and served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. I shared the manuscript with Doug Cantrell, a history professor at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College, who had published a scholarly article about the town titled “Himlerville: Hungarian Cooperative
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallThe Himler Project: Preserving the History of the Town of Himlerville and the Man Who Founded It2025-11-09text/htmlen-USThe Himler Project: Preserving the History of the Town of Himlerville and the Man Who Founded It2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®328742026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster by Raymond Thompson Jr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974564
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I’ve been sitting with this book for the better part of a year, watching it migrate from one stack of books on my desk to another. Each time, I carefully placed it at the top, because it demands to be there. Appalachian Ghost is not just a book—it’s an experience, a reckoning, and a hauntingly beautiful tribute that lingers and reminds. It belongs not only on your desk or shelf but in your consciousness, as it has taken residence in mine.Published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2024, as part of the Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices series, Appalachian Ghost brings to light one of the nation’s worst industrial disasters— one you’ve likely never heard of. In the 1930s, a 3.7-mile tunnel was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallAppalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster by Raymond Thompson Jr (review)2025-11-09text/htmlen-USAppalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster by Raymond Thompson Jr (review)2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®44272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas by Kevin W. Young (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974565
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Kevin Young’s The Violent World of Broadus Miller is a compelling and meticulously researched microhistory that reconstructs the life and death of a Black man, Broadus Miller, caught in the racialized and economically stratified tensions of the early twentieth-century Carolinas. Drawing on court records, newspapers, and oral histories, Young not only recounts the specifics of Broadus Miller’s experiences with racialized violence but also situates his story within broader historical frameworks that deepen our understanding of the Jim Crow South. This book makes an important contribution to Appalachian studies, the historiography of race relations in the New South, and the sociological study of small-town
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallThe Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas by Kevin W. Young (review)2025-11-09text/htmlen-USThe Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas by Kevin W. Young (review)2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®67332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09The Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania by Matthew George (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974566
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In The Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Matthew George Washington examines how segregation and discrimination manifested in one borough and details activists’ efforts to address racial inequalities, focusing on the period from the 1940s through the late 1960s. Washington situates his study in the growing body of literature on the Civil Rights Movement beyond the US South and beyond the classic 1954 to 1968 period. Past studies have emphasized the difference between the de jure, or legally mandated, Jim Crow of the South and the de facto, or not legally mandated but still existing, system of the North. Washington notes that recently historians have argued that such a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/408/image/coversmallThe Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania by Matthew George (review)2025-11-09text/htmlen-USThe Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania by Matthew George (review)2025-11-092025TWOProject MUSE®61052026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-11-09