Transnational West Virginia:

Jacket Description/Back: West Virginia is one of the most homogeneous states in the nation, with among the lowest ratios of foreign-born and minority populations among the states. But as this collection of historical studies demonstrates, this state was built by successive waves of immigrant labors, from the antebellum railroad builders to the twentieth-century coal miners. "Transnational West Virginia" offers a new understanding of how laborers and their communities shape a region's history. "Transnational West Virginia" includes essays and studies on immigrant networks, such as Irish workers along the B&O Railroad, Wheeling Germans in the Civil War era, Swiss immigration to West Virginia, and European Jews in Southern West Virginia. This work also covers Belgian glassworkers in West Virginia, black migration to Southern West Virginia, Italians in the Upper Kanawha Valley, Italian immigration to Marion County, Wheeling Iron and the Welsh, West Virginia and immigrant labor to 1920, Monongalia miners between the World Wars, and West Virginia rubber workers in Akron. "Transnational West Virginia" is the first volume in the West Virginia and Appalachia series, which is under the general editorship of West Virginia University Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair of History Ronald L. Lewis. Kenneth Fones-Wolf, Associate Professor of History at WVU, also helped edit this collection of essays by ten distinguished scholars.

Contributor Bio:  Fones-Wolf, Kenneth History professor at West Virginia University. Contributor Bio:  Lewis, Ronald L Ronald L. Lewis is Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair and Professor of History Emeritus at West Virginia University. He is author or editor of fourteen books, including "Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920" (from the University of North Carolina Press). Contributor Bio:  Fones-Wolf, Ken Ken Fones-Wolf is a professor of history at West Virginia University. He is coeditor of Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840-1940 and author or editor of three other books.