Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction edited by Wess Harris

            The heart of this book is two articles that were published first in the Summer 2011 issue of Appalachian Heritage when I was serving as its editor. “Esau in the Coal Fields” by Michael Kline exposes a horrendous practice at the Whipple Company Store near Oak Hill, West Virginia. When a coal miner living in their company town would be killed in the mines, his family would be evicted from their home unless the widow agreed to work as a prostitute upstairs in the Company Store. “Victory on Blair Mountain” by Wess Harris argues that the militant miners who fought the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 in West Virginia against the coal operators and the local, state, and federal governments did gain significant victories then and there. Before I published each of these articles I carefully edited them, with the consent of the authors, to be sure that the content was unassailable and I checked with my supervisors at Berea College who publish Appalachian Heritage to make sure that p