Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll

This book is clearly one of the most important books about Appalachia in recent years. The author is a formidable scholar who did his undergraduate work at Berkeley and received a master's and doctorate in history from Yale. He has taught throughout his career at Fordham. This is his fifth book from a major publisher.     In a nutshell, he takes Harriette Arnow’s thesis that 19th Century Appalachia was a land of relatively equal yeoman farmers and Wilma Dunaway’s antithesis that Appalachia has always been integrated into American capitalism and establishes a synthesis around his concept of a makeshift economy - small farmers who do some work for money but supply most of their own needs from gardening and gathering and crafts.  Importantly he expands upon the central concept of Kathryn Newfont’s Blue Ridge Commons emphasizing how important common ground is to sustaining smallholders, and how devastating the appropriation of common ground has been to freeholders throughout the world. Th