Analysis Of The Book ' The Face Of Decline ' Essay

My grandparents have owned a lake cottage in Piedmont, Ohio since before I was born. Ever since I was baby I have traveled the one and a half hour drive to our cottage. As I grew older, I took in the scenery and the little towns along the way. One sleepy little farm town in particular we drive through, seventeen minutes away from the lake, is called Cadiz; also known as the town that hosts the Hopedale Mining Coal Company. Yet, I never even knew until eighteen years later that a coal mining operation is stationed there.

The bioregion of the Slate Belt is in the northeastern most corner of Northampton County Pennsylvania. This bioregion is unique to others in the region due to the Martinsville Shale deposits. These deposits contain high quality slate that when quarried and sold on the market, lead the industry in the United State for over 100 years. The industry in the south valley consists of cement plants due to rich limestone deposits and abandoned iron mines in the west for the now defunct Bethlehem Steel. To the north of the Slate Belt lie anthracite coalmines from other geological deposits. To the east lie small quasi-fertile farmlands and great swaths of deciduous forest. Further, the Slate Belt bioregion is easily defined by three major geomorphs: the Kittatinny Ridge/Blue Mountain to the north, the Delaware River to the east and south and the Bushkill Creek to the west. These landforms easily demark the bioregion. The people of Welsh and Italian ancestry of the local population that quarries the slate has created a culture that is filled with the pride. All of these unique attributes contribute to formation of a bioregion that can with effort and proper management become independent and self-sustaining.

Coal became the fuel that fired the furnaces of the nation, transforming the Appalachian region socially and economically. Unfortunately mountain people didn't realize the implications of their mineral wealth. Many sold their land and mineral rights for pennies an acre to outlanders. Appalachians became laborers rather than entrepreneurs. Coal became a major industry which was extremely sensitive to outside fluctuations in the economy, leading to boom and bust cycles. The industry was controlled by interests outside the region, so that little of the profit remained or was reinvested.

The borough of Centralia was once a community that had enough coal to make it a lively, industrial area. It was a small community, but a prosperous town, operating its own school district. Centralia once had 5 hotels, 7 churches, 27 saloons, 2 theaters, a bank, a post office, and 14 stores. The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania had veins full of anthracite, the richest and purest coal of all. There is just one problem: It is difficult to ignite anthracite, but once it is lit, it is very hard to put out. No one really knows what happened but one theory suggests that in the spring of 1962, five volunteer firefighters were burning excess garbage in a landfill behind Odd Fellows Cemetery. They unknowingly picked a spot where anthracite was near the

Loss affects every relationship differently. Sometimes it brings people together, and sometimes it tears people apart. The novel “Past the Shallows”, written by Favel Parrett, is an excellent example of this, as it focuses on less vocalised subjects that most people in our society see as taboo. The aspects of society mentioned are points such as child abuse, alcohol addiction, pain, loss, and change, but most obviously the family centred in all this drama and the dysfunctional relationships formed between them. The story follows Miles, Harry, Joe, and their father, living on the south coast of Tasmania, and the struggles in their life. The themes of familial relationships, and loss feature throughout the novel, and will be discussed within this essay.

In the U.S society, there is a distinguishment between the different classification of employment. Those categories of employment are either classified as “blue-collar” or “white-collar”. Blue-collar jobs are referred to the line of employment that require manual labor such as factory workers and truck drivers, as for the white-collar jobs require high skills and higher education such as doctors and lawyers (Chambliss and Eglitis 159). Although, the professions are labeled as blue or white collar through its needs, the different labels indicates one’s position in the ranks. Each rank is often associated with characteristic that either make them upper class or lower class. Furthermore, “people’s life experience and opportunities are powerfully influenced by how their social category is ranked”(Chambliss and Eglitis 159). Therefore, one’s lifestyle depends on which category they fall into within the rank. That being the case, journalist Alfred Lubrano wrote the book, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, which describes the cultural conflict experienced by white-collar professionals that grew up in blue-collar homes. It tells readers how the white-collar professionals found it difficult to apply to their blue-collar families, due to the fact, that they often held values and engaged in behaviors that apply to the upper-class. As in order to fit in within the groups, they would have to adapt to the upper class life. So the transition from a blue-collar life to a

Arguing flaws in the expansion of Appalachia’s postwar economy, Eller responds this led to “growth without development”. With the coal industry flourishing

Burns, Shirley Stewart. Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia Communities, 1970-2004. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007. Print.

The book opens with a squad of soldiers running a tactical control point just outside of a village called Yusufiyah. They are approached when a man Abu Muhammad had found his cousins family brutally murdered not too far off. Sgt. Tony Yribe and 3 others went to go investigate it. Although it was a terrible scene Sgt. Yribe had just assumed that it was like most other situations in Iraq in that the family was a victim of Iraqis attacking other Iraqis. The one thing that bothered him was that there was a shotgun shell and Iraqis do not normally use shotguns.

Living in a Coal Mine community had its disadvantages, specifically during the earlier times when towns were first being established, as well as during the great depression. The madams of the valley, most notably, Fanny Ramsley and Mary Roper, were often referred to us the welfare providers of the valley because of their great generosity to families during difficult times. When they heard a miner was injured, a woman was widowed, or a family had become ill, they would send a taxi full of food, medical supplies including medicine and anything else that the family might need but couldn’t afford themselves.

Pictures two and six most relate to railroads in Indian Territory. In picture two It shows employees in Edmond, Ok working from a coal station around 1883 that was stationed by the railroads to easily sell coal to trains. This relates to the railroads in Indian territory because coal stations were the only thing that flourished by the railroad, this was because they were making money off of the coal and then they sold it to the stations to fuel the trains. In picture six it shows employees stacking buffalo hide in dodge city preparing to sell them. In picture six we can see how it relates to railroads in Indian Territory because when trains were moving on the railroads a lot of times they would crash into the

In his book Member of the Club, Lawrence Otis Graham details the struggles of living as a black student at Princeton University. The chapter “The Underside of Paradise” opens up with a quote by Paul Robeson that compared living in Princeton to living in a southern plantation. Despite Graham attending Princeton three decades later, he found the quote to be accurate in describing his own student experience at the esteemed college where subtle but real racial segregation divided the campus. Through an analysis with the functionalist perspective, the tension and division between the white and black students can be understood as a result of organic solidarity. Ultimately, the two groups of people are part of an interconnected society. However, they are separated by issues of civil rights. Black students are able to relate to the injustices that take place in the world. However, white students are often unable to do so and remain indifferent and separated from the issues. An example can be seen when Graham participated in the antiapartheid movement and his roommate Steve confronted Graham and asked, “Please don’t get offended by this, but do blacks really think Americans are so terrible, and that things are so racist and unfair in the United States?” (Graham, 1995, p. 204). In a sense, the racial segregation could also be seen as a mechanism to prevent conflict between the two groups. As Emile Durkheim (1972) states, “The closer functions approach one-another, however, the more

The Early Phase of Europe’s Industrial Revolution shows the iron and coal fields, major industrial areas, and the railroad system. The Industrial United States in 1900 shows the coal, iron, copper, silver, gold, and oil fields, major manufacturing cities, iron and steel mills, and points of industrial conflict. These maps indicate how in both Europe and the United States, major industrial areas tend to emerge around abundant supplies of coal, while conflicts seem to arise around the rarer resources of silver, gold, and the extremely useful iron. These maps help indicate where industrialization is likely to occur and why both Europe and America saw mass industrialization.

For over half a century the Pittsburgh region was the largest concentration of steel making in the world. Its collapse was spectacular. The mill towns strung along the Monongahela Valley have now suffered forty years of decline. Much of their shabby infrastructure and buildings (at best homely even in their prime) has decayed, most of their population has fled to the metropolitan suburbs or left the region, and those that remain, for the most part poor, struggle or live off memories. Regeneration is a continuing problem for public policy makers as the mill towns struggle on life-support systems — public welfare for individual households; funding from federal, state and local agencies for public services, projects and a plethora of

For decades poverty, mining companies, and mining practices have ravaged Appalachia. The mountains and rivers have been destroyed through mountain top removal and the pollution associated with that process. Communities broken apart by coal and the poverty of modern mining techniques. With the new ban on coal this process will only continue, unless something is done about it. While limited economic opportunities exist in the status quo, the manufacturing, construction, and upkeep of a large wind network across Eastern Kentucky would provide a large increase in job opportunities for those in Appalachia. The SFA mandates job training for former miners and this large production network would certainly open up new jobs across Kentucky. Placing an emphasis on economic development needs to be coupled with a program of social justice in order to be successful. Government must set the tone