Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.

Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith 's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.

In an increasingly globalized world, place matters more than ever. This concept especially holds true in Appalachian studies -- a field that brings scholars, activists, artists, and citizens together around the region to contest misappropriations of resources and power and to combat stereotypes of isolation and intolerance. In Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters, Dwight B. Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver assemble scholars and artists from a variety of disciplines to broaden the conversation and challenge the binary opposition between regionalism and globalism. In addition to theoretical explorations of place, some of the case studies examine foodways, depictions of gendered and racialized Appalachian identity in popular culture, the experiences of rural LGBTQ youth, and the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies. Drawing on ideas from cultural anthropology, sociology, and a variety of other fields, and interleaved with poems by bell hooks, this volume furthers the examination of new perspectives on one of America's most compelling and misunderstood regions.

Recent debates about globalism have usefully transformed the positioning and the cultural geography of studies of the American South. Once marked by tensions between the national and the regional, southern studies is now increasingly characterized by tensions between the local and the global. This special issue of American Literature features interdisciplinary and comparative work that focuses on the U.S. South in global contexts and attempts to reconceptualize the South from various theoretical, literary, and cultural perspectives. The new southern studies promises to be less preoccupied with patriarchal whiteness and rural idyll and more concerned with understanding the U.S. South as a construction of border crossings of every sort. Featured essays examine the political, economic, and social effects of globalization on the geopolitical locale and literary productions of the region. Each seeks to redefine the geographic and epistemological boundaries of the U.S. South by linking it to other "Souths" globally. The issue opens with a collection of manifestos given at the recent conference "The U.S. South in Global Context." These unique pieces offer variant perspectives on a common theme. Touching on history, community, migration, globalizing modernization, and even Wal-Mart, these sixteen briefs remind the reader that the American South is somewhere between the modern cosmopolitan and the historical rural spheres. One contributor examines how modernization has spread unevenly throughout the region and how it has affected recent immigrants to southern hybrid culture. Another engages in a comparative exercise between the U.S. South and Latin America, addressing questions of postcolonialism. Other contributors reflect on southern distinctiveness, southern literature, and southern colonial life. Included in the issue is a collection of original and review essays focused geographically on still lower latitudes: investigations of the Deep South and certain Caribbean cultures, and comparisons of the U.S. South to the underprivileged global South.