WVU History Professor’s Book featured on Library Television Network
Morgantown, WV, June 26, 2007:Glass Towns, the most recent book by Dr. Ken Fones-Wolf, professor of History in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, will be featured in the program WV Author on the West Virginia Library Commission’s Library Television Network.
Dr. Fones-Wolf is interviewed about his most recent book, Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s, published in January by the University of Illinois Press.
The first show will air in the Charleston area on Thursday, June 28 at 9:30pm on Charter Communications Channel 17. The interview will then cycle three times a week in differing slots through the month of July. The Library Television Network, which serves more than 560,000 subscribers in West Virginia, is available in Morgantown on Adelphia Communications Channel 15.
In the featured book Glass Towns, Dr. Fones-Wolf explores the impact of industry on local populations and immigrant craftsmen through case studies of glass production hubs in Clarksburg, Moundsville and Fairmont, West Virginia. He examines the potential the glass industry had in the 19th Century to improve West Virginia’s political economy by establishing a base of value-added manufacturing to complement the state’s abundance of coal, oil, timber, and natural gas.
Dr. Fones-Wolf earned his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1986. He later taught at the University of Massachusetts and for the Institute for Labor Studies and Research at WVU before joining WVU’s Department of History in 2000. In addition to teaching American social and working-class history, he has authored or edited five books and numerous articles on the subject. Before Glass Towns, he wrote two chapters on Wheeling Germans in the Civil War era and Belgians in Clarksburg for Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Groups and Economic Change, 1840-1940, published by the West Virginia University Press in 2002.
Glass Towns: Industry, Labor and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s is a volume in the series The Working Class in American History, published by the University of Illinois Press. For more information, please contact Dr. Fones-Wolf at Kenneth.Fones-Wolf@mail.wvu.edu.
W-V-U