Steven Stoll > Quotes

“The mountains made travel difficult much of the year and at times impossible. But industry had no trouble finding what it wanted and removing it. Corporations lay track into thousands of hollows and pulled billions of dollars in lumber and coal from the region over the following century. Still, those searching for the causes of poverty in Appalachia—throughout the twentieth century and even today—blame its isolation.”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“Tens of millions of people link their identities, the trajectory and meaning of their lives, to a social system with all sorts of destructive tendencies, associating it with the highest aims of society itself. But if the perpetuation of capital is the same thing as progress, where does that leave smallholders all over the world, up to their shins in muck day in and day out?”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“ALL AGRARIANS PRACTICE SOME VERSION of the same kind of economy. Anthropologists call it the household mode of production. It describes people who grow their own food and the ways they organize themselves to do so. A mode of production is not a particular way of making something. It is the making of something within all its social, environmental, and historical relationships.”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“Jacqueline Jones argues, “Race signifies neither a biological fact, nor a primal prejudice, and it lacks the coherence of a robust political ideology; rather, it is a collection of fluid, contingent mythologies borne of (among other imperatives) fighting a war, assembling a labor force, advancing the designs of demagogues, organizing a labor union, and preserving voting and public schooling as privileges reserved for some, rather than as rights shared by all.”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“They meant that a people who used common lands for common uses lived within a deviant economic culture.”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“My daddy was a coal miner, and I understand being out of work, okay? I’ve been down that road myself. And I know you’ve got to provide for your family. But I’m saying they’re only giving us two options. They’re saying, “Either starve—or destroy West Virginia.” And surely to God there must be another option.31”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“Hill-Billie was threatening for being free from hierarchy and unassimilated into Atlantic capitalism.”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

“Historical events never have simple or obvious implications. Some people thrived by using the very instruments intended to dispossess them.”
― Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia