"I am interested in how people get kicked off land," writes Fordham University history Prof. Steven Stoll in the preface to his "Ramp Hollow."
He's talking about dispossession — how a half-century ago an English peasant suffered the same fate as many dwellers on the land do today, in Africa, in India and in places such as Ramp Hollow, W. Va.
In "Ramp Hollow," on the turn of a dime, one loses the status of heroic settler, taming the wild for the sake of progress, to become the blot on the landscape sitting on top of a coal seam. Or the American Indians become heroic, an icon of the nation's history, once their land has been taken out from under them.
Stoll writes like he is taking a leisurely punt down the River Cam, but each sentence contains a little (or a great) item of value. He is a marginalian's nightmare.
The cruel river of dispossession guides the story. But Stoll poles off into side streams to explore entire ecosystems, always accompanied by the surrounding circumstances that make a space a place.
Or he gets into the intricacies of laws leading up to the Dawes and Homestead acts that robbed Indians of their treaty lands.
He is also interested in explaining the whole, grinding, centuries-long, place-specific, nonlinear movement from one mode of production and social relations to another. Here, that would be feudalism to capitalism. But it wasn't inevitable, no matter what David Hume, Adam Smith and Karl Marx tell us. Stoll himself favors "democratic socialism and a reinvention of the nation-state as a conduit for meeting human needs rather than for the accumulation of capital."
"Ramp Hollow" is a perfect example of a perfectly good mode of production: the household as a closed loop, the members growing and eating their own food, raising livestock for food and wool, plants for hemp and cotton, and surplus used to trade or sell for other necessities.
