Description

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The Appalachian community of Hollybush, first settled in 1881, grew to a population of some 150 people on thirty farm sites. Charles Martin shows that its abandonment in 1960 resulted from technological change, which brought social upheaval manifested in the region's now-vanished architecture. Martin's analysis makes innovative use of the techniques of oral history and material culture. The essential data incorporated within the building survey document the physical displacement that occurred in the community as it attempted to switch from an agrarian to an industrial system. The author assesses the resulting social conflict, showing how coal provided the catalyst for change to which residents so profoundly reacted. In the experience of Hollybush the author discovers a paradigm of the social changes wrought by industrialism elsewhere in America.