Visiting historian Hal Gorby will present a lecture on the problem facing Appalachia and its ties to economic restructuring that began in the region in the 1950s at West Virginia University on Wednesday, March 9.

Co-hosted by WVU’s Royce J. and Caroline B. Watts Museum and Center for Service and Learning, Gorby’s lecture, “West Virginia’s Uneven Ground,” will be held at 7:30 p.m, in room G83 in the Engineering Sciences Building on the Evansdale Campus. Refreshments will be provided and the lecture is free and open to the public.

Gorby, a visiting assistant professor of history at WVU specializing in United States labor history and West Virginia and Appalachia, will discuss the roots of the state’s uneven political and economic transformations in the past 60 years. He will also highlight the attempts to address these issues during the war on poverty, and how concerns over the environment have been linked to current debates about economic change and development.

“West Virginia and much of central Appalachia seems trapped in a cycle of decline and desperation,” Gorby says, “but these are not recent problems. They are, rather, tied to long-term, structural flaws within the region’s wider political economy.”

As part of an alternative spring break program, a group of University of Richmond students will attend the lecture. Gorby’s talk will help familiarize these students with the issues facing West Virginia today before the group heads to McDowell County, for community service work.

-WVU-

en/03/03/16

CONTACT: Mary C. Dillon, Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
304.293.4086, Mary.Dillon@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.