Taylor Talk with Author Steven Stoll
To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, says Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history.
That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers, but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.
In his new book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017), Stoll visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wages-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.
“I wanted to write a book about notions of progress and why we think of certain people as being in its way,” he said.
“How is it that we refer to billions of people in the world as backward and primitive, as being either incapable of what we consider to be progress or in need of some kind of transformation in order to be part of the ‘modern world?’ I see all of these characterizations as fictions.”
Stoll has studied the reasons why people get kicked off their land, and in Ramp Hollow, he interprets it through the characteristics of capitalism as it originated in seventeenth-century England and the way it organizes life in the United States. In that system, land and labor have to become commodities, and both need to be free from any traditional claims on them. The process is known as “enclosure.”