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Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy. By Carol Mason. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. xii, 242 pp. Cloth, $69.95, isbn 978-0-8014-4728-0. Paper, $22.95, isbn 978-0-8014-7581-8.)
In the fall of 1974 thousands of students in Kanawha County, West Virginia, boycotted their public schools. Local coal miners went on strike in support of the protest. Several schools were bombed, gunshots rang out at picket sites, and fifteen sticks of dynamite damaged the offices of the county board of education. The cause? Textbooks, of course. As the most tangible embodiment of school policy, textbooks have long been a lightning rod for cultural contesrarion and conflict. But we have never witnessed a textbook dispute like the one in Kanawha County, where Americas culture war - an overused metaphor, to be sure - flared briefly into...