Reading Appalachia from left to right : conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County textbook controversy /

In 1974, a controversy over public school textbook selection broke out in Kanawha County, home of West Virginia's capital, Charleston. It quickly involved the Ku Klux Klan, a miners strike, mob violence, and bombings. Competing explanations of the episode described it as class warfare, religious fundamentalism, racism, or some combination. Mason (English and women's studies, Oklahoma State Univ.) was a 10-year-old enrolled in a Kanawha County school at the time. She argues that although elements of each explanation were present, the controversy actually represented the combining of traditional ambiguities about what being Appalachian means with evolving forms of conservatism and right-wing action in the US. Mason is persuasive in drawing a sophisticated explanation from the many social changes that transformed Far Right movements during the 1970s and 1880s, including the Nazification of white racist ideology and the politicization of mothers into feminine, conservative, Christian activists against secular humanism. Perceiving the textbook controversy as a pivotal point in that rightward turn, Mason demonstrates how once again, Appalachia was reinvented by outsiders to serve their needs--this time, the Right's battle to push the US toward conservatism. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. H. T. Blethen Western Carolina University