To get through pertaining to this event, so first we want to thank the city of charles bell as a sponsor for this conversation and for hosting us. This program is being broadcast on the citys government Access Channel on tv ten and streamed live on the Facebook Page so if anyone is listening or watching at home and wants to see it on facebook is Charlottesville City Hall is the handle. Because this is a recorded event, during the q a portion of the event, please raise your hand and a volunteer will come to you and give you a microphone before you ask your question. So, a couple more logistical issues. Please silence your cell phone at this point in time. However, we encourage you to tweet about the event using the hash tag vabook2018. So by all means, take the lessons youve received from the authors here and share them with people. You should have received program evaluations. Fill these out before you leave, please. They will be useful to help keep the festival free and open to the public. If you didnt get an evaluation or have to leave quickly, you can do this online at vabook. Org survey. Please support the authors today and those that you encounter throughout the festival as well as the local booksellers. There are books for sale that we can peruse after the event. One of our guests today actually is a local bookseller and i would expect she would encourage you to please do the same. Shop local. The authors will be available for a book signing after the program. Okay. Lets get started. So, introductions, Elizabeth Catte is the author of what they were getting wrong about appalachia. All three are lined up on the table in front. It took a story from east tennessee and coowner of the historical consultants and phd in public history from middle Tennessee State university and currently lives in stanton virginia. Steven stoll is the author of ramp hollow this one. He is a professor of history at the university and the author of the great delusion and learning the earth. His writings have appeared in harpers magazine, a quarterly at the new haven review. And we have wendy welch the author of fault or fly the story of foster care and adoption in appalachia. Shes also the author and editor of three previous books including the bookstore of Big Stone Gap and she runs a bookstore in southWest Virginia. I want to see the thought at the start of the event to thinking about some of the topics. In his essay, James Baldwin has some thoughts about how the stories of device or comfort ahead of the greater understanding and that can weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is in ourselves as we are. He concludes with a fought but i try to bear in mind when encountering the works of history and what they have reached back over hundreds of years or what we are doing with contemporary issues. All of these books give us history often by the difficult work. To get started, id like to ask everyone to share the stories for these three books. When and how do the concerns and the ideas of these books for us to take shape, and if we could start with elizabeth and then go to steven and then go to wendy. I moved to texas with my partner as the 2016 president ial election started up. I consumed every piece of media that i could about what was happening in appalachia during the election and how you put feeling into thgot thefeeling ao the predictions were. It reminded me of the phenomenon that happened during the story when the photographers went to mine missouri and so i wanted to study the phenomena from the ground up and the president ial election gave me that. But what was happening is as ive made small talk and i got to know people in the University Communities and Business Leaders and the kind of people he hoped would be my colleagues, everyone wanted to talk to me about hillbilly elegy. And they were not curious what i thought about it, they wanted me to answer for it. What is wrong with people, why did they vote against their own interest, why did they miss behave and why cant they get it together and that made me angry when i went on job interviews this book was in my face and when i opened up the newspaper, his face was in my face. [laughtetarted at ten or 12 yeas ago i was trying to understand american capitalism and wanted to write about people losing their land as an essential element of how capitalism develops and grows and what is essential to it. I could have written a book about American Indians were about the greatest dispossession in the history of north america. I went looking for a story people dont often think about an hour considered to think about capitalism and something i myself did not understand there were the southern mountains and a complicated story about how the white settler. Its considered heroic and lost its land, so i set out to write a painted case study and it took over my life as i dedicated years to try to understand it as very much an outsider. My book is about capitalism. I am an environmental historian at the political economy, so i was putting those two things together and so i hope you like the results. [applause] ibook was born out of kindness. Theres one that shall remain nameless, this was a lovely man who came to me about two years after the book was out and he set up a little bookstore if somebody sums it up in the radio the triumph of the human spirit so he came to me and said he can you do for Foster Parents with u2 for bookstores. I am like pardon . We need more Foster Parents and we are not getting them and its going to kill us all. Would you write about it, and im thinking self published center staple its an important story but its not going to be those inside of the sandbox because the other people dont want to hear it. How do you tell a story nobody wants to hear. So, we also got past the anonymous part of. If youre a Foster Parent who are already judged and the person talking to you has some you up. So, i said lets do this. He said thats fine. Remember this man is a pastor. Wwe set up the blog and i startd editing other peoples stories. They are holding their annual conference near my home and johnson tennessee. These people would feel a sense of accomplishment and mission. Theres a huge book of all these things that are going to happen. This woman says i know it was interesting your doing a blog on the stories of adoption and foster care. Is there a book associated in the project and i said no. She said would you like for there to be. I called the pastor and i said that was cheating, praying to get a book deal. [laughter] and that is how the book came about. [applause] im going to start off with a question from everyone. So each of these books exist directly or indirectly in a certain tension with other older accounts of appalachia in how those have affected the region and the people. There is a line where you write the dispersions of stupidity and volatility coincided in the environment these sorts of narratives and i is misleading the seizure. Sure. I would be happy to. People ask me what this book is about. People from the southern mountains kind of slid past. In effect, people who live close to the environment very often Administrative Authority call them savages. Even though it is the way that most people have lived over the last 10,000 years. In fact the very end are the largest class in human history. But its so easy for us to forget that and to forget in fact how to talk about them and how they actually lived. So, and i couldnt have shown you daniel boone going through Cumberland Gap with all the people behind him with that painting. I then said that this is the best image and the best kind of documentary image that i could find depicting these poor white folks. They are poor but they are sufficient. So, the remarkable thing is that if in 50 years and excuse me while i go through the entire thing if we get to this, we get to the georgia cranker. So i want to understand how this took shape and how it coincided with the rise of the extracted industry at the same time. And you can actually watch it as people begin to understand that there was a great deal of both to be pulled out of the appalachia. The role that those pioneers played with daniel boone was basically obscured. In other words, if there was a moment they coincided, they were dispossessed or. They were there to play that role and they were the pioneers and they were heroes. But just a few years later they became grotesque and the characteristics were just kind of grossly invented racialized. But if the group of poor whites in the United States could essentially become a separate race as a process on the way of having them be legitimized so they could be pulled out of those hollows and it could be given to coal and lumber companies so it was part of that. It wasnt like a conscious attempt. Like everybody was watching and seeing what was happening. By the way, the people were in their own ways off to recall that both. There are agriculture and their own way of life is impacted at the same time. Sure, great. Elizabeth touches on the same matter and for me one of the most effective moments is the writing of the seizure of land use for the National Park so when the process begins, writers, photographers, journalists, social scientists, im partially doing scare quotes here, so they all travel to Shenandoah Valley and document families are being misplaced and she writes about homophobic that is about the journalists and sociologists to and where this gets interesting and complicated she also brings in a photographer that goes into the same locations and takes pictures of. I wonder whether these people who are coming into these areas offer from outside. What do they see, what do they miss and how are the depictions in the photographs . How do they damage and what are the basic image of stol damage appalachia. Basically what happened in the 1930s and it matches very clearly the arc of the history which is the process of separating poor people from the richness of the land and that takes many shapes and it is the bestknown example, but the Natural Beauty and tourism is a part of the story is on the 1930s the power of the federal government thought it would be beneficial to the people of the region especially politicians and Business Owners if there is a natural park for the National Park was born. It was facilitated through the act through Eminent Domain and the removal of people from their home. In order to do that, the industry sprung up around them. Photographers and journalists, some employed in the government came to the valley to assess the people that were there at the university of chicago in the social sciences to come and document the condition of life in the valley and in the mountains. And almost most significantly to me the leaders of the movement were watching all of this unfold and celebrating with interest. It is the portraits that they were extracting from the region that is indeed what happened to them, many of them were children and they were taken from the land that they lived on and worked. It happened to be not in some isolated faraway land, but 2 miles away from one of the most wealthy resorts in the area but was eager to expand a. In order to make people that were wealthy even wealthier and that is the story so often. The subject that is very much a pressing contemporary issue is one that we discussed previously and there were not many newsrooms in america that have reporters that are assigned to cover up option fostering more the circumstances that really create the challenges that inform both the systems. One of the ways the depictions have been formed and have affected adoption and foster care. Okay. So this is ugly. What theyve been talking about in the stereotypes and the presumptions is very wellknown and very well held by the people it is aimed at. We are smart enough to know when we are being stereotyped. What is the awfu of the awful es the vengeance factor by people who enter it because it is layered and hard to set up. What is the most important industry how many of you are going to say coal. Its directed our past and rightly or wrongly i think elizabeth tackles this really well it is ingrained in some of the ways arguments play out. So, if you are suspicious of the government and the government is going to pay you to look after someone elses family, the worst thing you can be in central and global appalachia is best to your family. The worst thing you can be expanded to your family. Is bound to your family. So here is this government thats going to pay you to look after someone elses family. You have the moral high ground, economic background and Community High ground. It is absolutely hideous. The first time i was researching and i went back and explain it to some of the people he was talking to, you cant say that. It is not okay to say that. But the hideous thing that you are describing is what the people in the region are taking advantage of him holding the kids hostage. And at the first time they become Collateral Damage in the war between adult, we have all seen the divorce stories they now write it for the culture versus the government and the kids are in the middle. Western civilization is due, and it should be. One of the things with the research and writing is in the ability to kind of articulate something that has been overlooked or has been whitewashed by other cover for forces. So, i want to ask some questions about a breaking with previously published histories. With steven, early on as paul lo, he writes of hi that his bos predicated on the collision between the economy. Its invested in families and farms in agriculture itself. So, it is a basic unit for the agrarian communities. He writes it strikes the skills and traditions and it transmits to the vast ecological knowledge and catapults into adult hood. No other Human Institution does these things. Then so many pages later he talks about how there is no shorthand for how the material money moves through the household and there is a powerful moment where he writes this language seems that an artifact to eliminate all competing economic forums. Where im interested here is capitalism is also shaping our ability to tell other peoples stories. Its been shaping the language that they use to relay what we understand about past. This has huge ramifications for you as a writer in the history and a researcher, so can you tell me about the challenges of through the lens that isnt a capitalist one . That is really difficult. I mentioned this notion of savagery as closely associated with people who are called the koreans, they make agrarian. This money is an attribute to the household and isnt just the reason. It cant be organized around making money. But we have decided there is a hard time understanding we basically have two speeds. Theres the savage into the noble savage and i find one can be accused of either one. Anthropologists understand this. But in the general public either you are saying that this is a stage on the Human Evolution that think the us weve left behind because they were so poor and always starving, which of course is never true or you were accused of saying that this is a golden age where they have virtues that we have lost and there were giants in the past and they were happy insufficient and strong, and that wasnt true. Had we seen people for how they actually were and how they lived its the same problem. So what i tried to do is use it as much as possible especially economic anthropologists and write about them in a way that essentially described the sufficiency of a. No matter who they were, they drew upon the large area of Natural Resources that they didnt have to buy. And they didnt have to invest money because they could not. You can forage foods and these things cost money but they produce commodities that you then cant sell. So, just to come to the point what i found is when you attach people to their landscape and show how they lived on an actual tangible way its an effective way of teaching people what an agrarian is and to come back to the point, we kind of lost this language. The. Coming from the great plains or Something Like that it wasnt that long ago for us to. We are going to kind of jump forward in time to the. Of much of your book involves the episodes, voices that counter what you call the genre of journalism and i have a colleague that referred to a lot of the coverage of the 2016 elections and this term occurs over and over again in about of contemporary news coverage. Journalism is charged with creating pieces of the joint historical record. So, when does this leave out the contemporary history and what do we risk by those mentioned . The Trump Country narrative sort of reset the clock on appalachia in a way that is unfair and unethical. This is the history started in 2016. And that is all you need to know. Its existed for quite a long time. It hasnt always been called appellation that you read in the book people have always lived here. This is important for us to know to understand how we got to this place. Just to piggyback off of the subject of capitalism which is one of my favorite things to talk about as well, i think its important to understand whenever you see these narratives that rise to the top we have to understand theres a considerable amount of power and wealth. I dont think they are making bank off of writing down the stories but i think a publisher might be into the media conglomerate might be. Any time you see these powerful narratives come to us you have to think who is profiting from them. This is where our mind should be oriented. Who is making money off the narrative, its not the people on appalachia. Its no not the people that actually writing thebut actualle telling people to write them and who are advertising on the back of them and who benefit from them and get away by disguising their politics and giving the sleightofhand. But guess what is holding the country back, its always the poor people that decide, isnt the other way around. So that is my concern when i think about appalachia because it is the stories we tell ourselves to help make sense of the world and my place and y