Category: Essays

By Matty T In an observation attributed to everyone from the blues singer Big Bill Broonzy to Louis Armstrong to Johnny Cash, folk music has been defined as anything that folks sing. “It must be a folk song, I ain’t heard no horses sing it.” This definition, pithy as it may be, is not a […]

Whither Appalachia declares our support for Los Angeles’s striking teachers. As we noted in our analysis of last year’s West Virginia teachers’ strike, while not inherently revolutionary and certainly not the often dreamed-for return of the classical Workers’ Movement, the recent wave of class struggle among educational workers is a tantalizing glimpse of the possibility […]

“For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” – 2 Thessalonians 3:10 quoted by John Smith and Vladimir Lenin       Every prayer is a class prayer. Whether it is the “sigh of the oppressed creature” or a Sunday bourgeois chore, spirituality is […]

Since its first description centuries ago by European travelers, the site of the current-day village of Mingo Junction would not be a recognized settlement. In fact, a village would not be established there until after the American Civil War, and the “Junction” added to its name only some years after that. Curiously, the adoption of […]

     On February the 26th, 2018, West Virginia Governor Jim Justice traveled to Spring Mills High School in Berkeley County to discuss the statewide Teacher’s Strike which started just a few days earlier on the 22nd. As he walked into the gymnasium to sporadic applause, he said: “no one’s gonna shoot at me, are ya?” […]