West Virginia University Studies In West Virginia History

West Virginia's championship teams at WVU and Marshall and athletic superstars like Jerry West and Mary Lou Retton are familiar to all, but few know the untold story of sports in the Mountain State. Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia chronicles the famous athletic triumphs and heart-breaking losses of local heroes and legendary teams, recording the titanic struggles of a small state competing alongside larger rivals. Hillside Fields provides a broad view of the development of sports in West Virginia, from one of the first golf clubs in America at Oakhurst Links to the Greenbrier Classic; from the first girls basketball championship in 1919 to post Title IX; from racially segregated sports to integrated teams; and from the days when West Virginia Wesleyan and Davis & Elkins beat the big boys in football to the championship teams at WVU, Marshall, West Virginia State and West Liberty. Hillside Fields explains how major national trends and events, as well as West Virginia's economic, political, and demographic conditions, influenced the development of sports in the state. The story of the growth of sports in West Virginia is also a story of the tribulations, hopes, values and triumphs of a proud people.

John Alexander Williams's West Virginia: A History is widely considered one of the finest books ever written about the state. In his clear, eminently readable style, Williams organizes the tangled strands of West Virginia's past around a few dramatic events—the battle of Point Pleasant, John Brown's insurrection in Harper's Ferry, the Paint Creek labor movement, the Hawk's Nest and Buffalo Creek disasters, and more. Williams uses these pivotal events as introductions to the larger issues of statehood, Civil War, unionism, and industrialization. Along the way, Williams conveys a true feel for the lives of common West Virginians, the personalities of the state's memorable characters, and the powerful influence of the land itself on its own history.

North Carolina has had more than its share of accomplished, influential women—women who have expanded their sphere of influence or broken through barriers that had long defined and circumscribed their lives, women such as Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, the widow and tavern owner who supported the American Revolution; Harriet Jacobs, runaway slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds, elite women who promoted women's equality. This collection of essays examines the lives and times of pathbreaking North Carolina women from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, offering important new insights into the variety of North Carolina women's experiences across time, place, race, and class, and conveys how women were able to expand their considerable influence during periods of political challenge and economic hardship, particularly over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These essays highlight North Carolina's progressive streak and its positive impact on women's education—for white and black alike— beginning in the antebellum period on through new opportunities that opened up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They explore the ways industrialization drew large numbers of women into the paid labor force for the first time and what the implications of this tremendous transition were; they also examine the women who challenged traditional gender roles, as political leaders and labor organizers, as runaways, and as widows. The volume is especially attuned to differences in region within North Carolina, delineating women's experiences in the eastern third of the state, the piedmont, and the western mountains.

"The West Virginia University Mountaineer isn't just a mascot: it's a symbol of West Virginia history and identity that's embraced throughout the state. Folklorist Rosemary Hathaway explores the figure's early history as a backwoods trickster, its deployment in emerging mass media, and finally its long and sometimes conflicted career-beginning officially in 1937-as the symbol of West Virginia University"--

How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class, shaped what people thought about the future and how they imagined it. Some Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions. Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the conflict. In this creative history, Jason Phillips explains how the expectations of a host of characters-generals, politicians, radicals, citizens, and slaves-affected how people understood the unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be short and glorious at the outset, a ninety-day affair full of fun and adventure. Much more than rational power games played by elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and darkened horizons that changed over time. Looming Civil War highlights how individuals approached an ominous future with feelings, thoughts, and perspectives different from our sensibilities and unconnected to our view of their world. Civil War Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil War changed more than America's future; it transformed how Americans imagined the future and how Americans have thought about the future ever since.