Department are very happy to be presenting a talk by steve, professor of history at florida university. The university. He works and teaches on environmental history, history of capitalism, agrarian studies and other topics interest objectsubjects. Hes a writer of other works including the lean earth soil Anand Society in 19th century 1y america, the great delusion, a mad inventor stuck in the tropics into the utopian origins of economic growth. Tonight, hes going to be talking to us about his new book that will be released on november 21, just in time for the holidays, so please mark your calendars. The book is of course the ordeal of appalachia as you can see by the picture of its lovely cover. And i am excited about the talk and thrilled to have him with us at the new school. Theres been a lot of talk obviously about the places left behind, the sort of poor rural communitiecommunity, the white s who voted for trump, you know, and th they sense that the Historical Context of the postindustrialization was something that we had to grapple with and understand and to understand those issues what he is showing in this case is a 400 year story of dispossession and dispossessindispossessing into f appalachia but needs to be understood by way of the particular relationship to the land and as i said several centuries of integration into global, historical forces. And the book i think is going to help us to deeply contextualize some of the political questions that we are looking at today to try to understand for those of us of course who live in urban environments and see these kinds of locations and populations as very far away from our own experiences as it may be the case here in new york city. Thank you very much to steven fostephenfor joining us, and pln me in welcoming him. which mac i just wanted to launch right into this. Its a book about culture and how the members hunted and gathered and farmed. We know something about appalachia. Its the region of parallel Mountain Range as and where people lived in small valleys called hollows often known as codes. If no one is actually a road outside of morgantown West Virginia where i went during the research of the book. And this is where i took a walk one day and felt that it was in some ways kind of symbolic of the story that i wanted to tell. But it isnt identical with its mountains. This is the Mountain Range itself which you can see goes from northern alabama all the way up into new england in some parts it is a geological region that is defined by the blue ridge back there and the entire atlantic plane leads right into it. There is a large plane from out of space that looks like tissue paper with all of these thousands of little towns and valleys and rivers and branches. Its more than that and we know that. It is a region that is defined more by its history and its geology. In other words the southern mountains may be geological, but appalachia is hard to define and there are many competing nations nobody really agrees. There isnt a great distinction in the culture, the language the people in the mountains and those who lived on the low lands of the south. We know of course that its where coal comes from. We know it as the location of the mountain top removal mining. We know it as that as a place e the rivers run and where the coal ash that come flooding into town and cause enormous havoc and it is a place of water contamination which happened just recently. So in the ones in, its about how certain parts of southern mountains became this region called appalachia. Asked the question when did the region by that name appear and what historicaup here andwith hd environmental relationships are the key to creating it and other questions what is progress is it certain people were designed as being incapable of it outside of it, whatever it is and how did capitalism shaped the sense of progress in how we use certain landscapes and human labor, how does this play out . I cant tell you about all of that this evening, but im going to try to give you a sense of the book as i looked more closely at one particular argument within it. And that is the industrial removal of the Forest County industrial extraction of taking lumber was a crucial event in the takeover of the mountains and across the creation of appalachia. That is the scheme of the book that i am going to take out for you. This is going to be a central image for the lecture and i will show it to you more than once. It is essential for the book itself. Its the document im going to try to make sense of by creating a rich context. It is just a map. Anybody that studies the sort of things planned in the United States and europe it is really no big deal. It is a spatial record of private property. But if we think about what its done that doesnt fit as well as what it does, then the math tells us all kinds of things about the history between the 1790s and the 20th century. So, the map includes coal deposits depicted here i think completely imaginary. That is theoretical but when you data down to the different places that you will reach these layers it tells you in its detail the distances of certain points in the mountains from baltimore, new york city, philadelphia and each of these has the name of a land owner written on it and in some cases the original land owner going back to the 1760s and 1770s. George washington is one of those names on the map. What struck me about it an thisd why i elevated it into the reason i am elevating it to you is that it is a twodimensional representation of the mountains from the point of view of the people who value it only in terms of the private property. The way that an investor looks at the southern mountains and their view is actually depicted on the map. But the way the residents look at it is like this. It is a twodimensional vision that doesnt match and threedimensional ecological reality, they are two different things. And in fact, we need the landowners here underneath their funny shapes but sometimes all the water forces and sometimes rises through the streets in which nothing is through the streets to this. Of those that found their way to the mountains in the 1750s and 1830s or so came up for a number of reason but many of them wanted to reproduce the world of Northern Europe. They were the legacies of scots, irish. They brought an economic culture that was entirely different from that of the logging and Mining Companies that came later in this coalition between the agrarian economy and the capitalist economy is the central conflict in the book. But let me back up. What exactly do i mean by an agrarian . I interpret the settlers as a part of a broad calvary. It is a term that includes peasant. One thing that struck me about writing the book. Yet we have a hard time finding the language. But its a much higher portion of the worlds population that lived just a century or two ago. And yet it is difficult to find and explain the way that i have to explain to students exactly what it is that i mean we have misconceptions. Its the main purpose of the agrarian house. They predate commodities and make all kinds of stuff and raise things for themselves to eat and consume, but that isnt all they do. They exchange all sorts of things. Whatever they produce but they dont need, the exchange. They loved exchange and money. The reason is baptized to cool stuff far away from where you live. It ties you to the greens that are not isolated. They are heavily engaged in markets and they sell a portion of it and then they go back and produce the same commodities a and. Even though they love money, the agrarian households do not organize themselves. It is an attribute of the household, but that is not its primary purpose. This is crucial, because as the money becomes the primary purpose, all other things change. You might say that money is a fantastic sleeve and a bad master and be understood that and kept it as an attribute. If the cash crops failed and if the merchant closeparen, they are fine. Money buys cool stuff, the stuff that you want, but you can live to some extent nowadays. All the stories are more complicated and i cant go into the complex of these. Households that begin to use money to some extent can become dependent but cant go into that. Most of all, for our purposes tonight, the most important thing i have to tell you about agrarian is they require the ecological resources that give them food and commodities without expecting anything from them except labor. In the area that they didnt know to some extent managed to gather so i break up the products and uses into these large categories of outfield and infield and what you see is what start with the infield. So you would grow Something Like rice, you could feed your animalit to youranimals and diso whiskey. The garden is for all of the delights, all the fruits and vegetables that you love each year trading with people near and far away that you have a sense of those like those known to the region and those that are very much beloved wristwatches. We are accustomed to looking at these species into saying that it is a farce. It is a farm. If you dont have that, something has to replace that. Now this is what i would call the outfield if you will, and that is for hunting and forage food so that is what the forest gets you. This requires very little labor and the payback is huge. Then you came back with large things. It wasnt the kind of poverty or. We would think of scavenging for those desperation. That is misunderstanding what it was. It looked for every single year they made all kinds of stews and they were consumed with eggs and i understand you can buy them in Brooklyn Today at the farmers market, so evidently you can package them in new york city which is remarkable. Heres the thing. There is always a market attribute. It is in a form that is nonperishable, stable value traded like i currency wherevert went. It is parallel in the woods and they walked to the market. Its money on a host. Did they consume some of the cattle and pigs yes they did but they turned it into money dealing with merchants say towards baltimore or in the other way towards the ohio river. Again, it gives including commodities for money without costing money. Nothing in the agrarian worker can cost money. Now, however, that would be very nice if they were all kind of neat like that, but it wasnt. There was a contradiction built into the ecological basis of and guess what, it wasnt really a commons. It was a property. It didnt really belong to them. Not as the state of virginia saw it and the state of West Virginia. It didnt belong to them. Beginning at the end of the french and indian war, the governors of virginia granted enormous chunks of land to people like George Washington and Robert Morris. There are two things that you should know about this land. First is the grantees themselves, George Washington, Robert Morris almost never took possession of the land. They didnt go there to live on it in some cases their entire lives they never even visited it. They were absentee landowners in the purest sense of the word. Second, when they did pay any attention to that land, George Washington had this piece of land on the river right near charleston West Virginia. The present town near so when they granted to him can be granted the land to washington over the mountains. He hired his own surveyor a guide by the name of crawford he sent him out of there and basically said i dont know what this is. I want you to survey only the flat land. And by the way, if you get caught crossing, we never even met. Because it was illegal for him to go there and do this after 1767. Crawford went and he made a survey from this crossover to the tree to the island down there and he voiced washingtons initial point of all things, the cherry tree. He came back and said there is your land and washington said it is flat. What does that mean . It leaves Everything Else but washington owned and notice all of those surrounding the piece of land today when i it comes at an elevation of 200 feet, but he didnt care about that at all. He didnt care about it or have it surveyed. It wasnt that. Nobody cared about this. So, if you are someone looking to get away from slaveholders, if you are someone looking for hunting as the least of your concerns, this is the ideal place for you to find a place to live. It was sort of a cloak of invisibility in the sense that you could go ou up into the mountains, take what he wanted to add someone like Robert Morris was George Washington who clearly didnt care if you were there, if they did they have no way to pry you out. The second thing i want to tell about this land is that it has no value. It is an extremely delicate sport and Robert Morris owned milliononmillions of acres in te southern mountains and died poor and in debt. He bought the land on speculation and its never increased in value. It was a gigantic wilderness liability. So, they held onto it. And i will get back to that. Where does this lead us flex by the 1790s, mountain households tended not to own the land they were on which was regarded as a vast commons by which they took everything they need. They wrote their own deeds as it belonged to them. Writing duties for the piec gooe of land that the state of virginia said they did not own. This became commonplace. But the thing is there was the semantic belief that was a part of the United States was represented by alexander hamilton. They wanted the backwoods to join the atlantic economy. Someone like hamilton had a very different notion about the United States and his rifle, thomas jefferson. But jefferson wanted to buy as much land as possible. Why the louisiana country when people would say that the united beats cant govern it. It is too drastic an area. He said that is exactly how i want it. We want a place where they can escape because what we want is the weakened Central Government even though the constitution has defined a strong way. He has an entirely different view. For alexander hamilton, the constitution needed to govern in every single square mile. He wanted the invention of the modern nationstate where every single space would be governed anwith the governedand the law y everywhere. As the unite United States as a territory and has an economy. So the way to get people to join the political entity and to find them together economically. He didnt like those pioneers and those people out there. They used the money on their terms when they had it and when they didnt. They made whiskey and sold it down the highway an and bought t they wanted and produced the other crops for subsistence. And he said and he believed that in time, they would evolve. It would follow the theory of stages, so popular among the Atlantic League success ultimately, they would get there. Id 1790s, they have not gotten there yehad not gottentha different idea. Hamilton proposed and enforced the whiskey tax. In large part to the worst people of the mountains to get money and use money. They said we do not have the money to pay the tax. He said if the tax must be paid in money you will get the money to pay the tax. He lost the fight. The same mountain folk found themselves in an increasingly difficult position. They one around number one from the elite, but the class was landing in the occupied nationstate and the land and labor produce surplus value, to have an exchange value, to be valued and many turn kind of came together as a kind of vice. It was tightened in the next generation. By the 1840s, and especially after the civil war, they confronted a formidable form of capitalism that was represented by George Washington and Robert Morris because rather than speculate in the mountain land, the next generation of capitalists were interested in the project industrial extraction. Steam engines, trust me, there was a demand. The demand side was there and that is why it had value. The title map is a sense of the investors in various stages of acquiring the land from, George Washington speeds, and selling it to the logging and Mining Companies. The names on the map in some cases are Mining Companies, but in many others it is a bank of individual investor. They have no interest in exploring the land themselves. That is when the speculation paid off. They turned around and sold it to the Mining Holding company of the hundreds of the mining corporations that were chartered by the state of West Virginia. This frantic rapid colonization of the mountains after the civil war called the scramble for appalachia which by the way was happening at the same time. So, thats fine, but the scramble wouldnt have been possible. It wouldnt have happened without the states. The state that i i am most interested in is West Virginia. West virginia was created and associated from virginia in 1863 during the civil war is the only state to be formed after seceding from the state. For our purposes, the reason of the formation and West Virginia is important to understand. The first thing is the state had the power to claim legal primacy over the governments. The state can claim to overrule that the county government sets if you are a cool company and you set up shop in the county and they say actually, we are not interested in having the development here. We declare it to be illegal. States can pass the laws that say you cant do that. The state decides Economic Activity and where it has been. This has a parallel which i will not go into. But the states when it the number of their clients in this way a corporation can deal with the governor and legislature and doesnt have to do with the people in other counties, because they dont matter. They cant stop it. Second, it has the power to create a judicial system where suddenly disputes. This is a world in