Lou Martin, Ph.D.
Hometown: New Cumberland, WV
Joined Chatham: 2008
ACADEMIC AREAS OF INTEREST
U.S. history, labor and working-class history, and Latin American history.
BIOGRAPHY
Lou Martin, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of History at Chatham University. He offers courses in US and Latin American history, labor and working-class history, oral history, and environmental history. His research interests include labor, working-class politics, Appalachian history and culture, and twentieth-century political economy. He has researched workers in the steel, pottery, and coal industries of Appalachia with a special focus on West Virginia. He is currently co-editor of West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies and serves on the editorial board of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. He is also one of the founders of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in the town of Matewan and is an honorary member of United Mine Workers of America, Local 1440.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D., West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV), 2008
- M.A., Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), 2001
- B.A., West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV), 1994
AWARDS
- Outstanding Alumni Award, West Virginia University, 2018
- Buhl Professor, Chatham University, 2016
- William D. Barnes Award, West Virginia University, 2008.
- Labor and Working Class History Association Travel Grant, October 2006.
- Henry and Rebecca Thornburg Award, West Virginia University, 2006.
- Wesley M. Bagby Award, West Virginia University, 2005.
- Robert and Winona Wilkins Award, West Virginia University, 1999.
ORGANIZATIONS
- Appalachian Studies Association
- Labor and Working-Class History Association
ACHIEVEMENTS
- Dissertation Fellowship, Department of History, West Virginia University, Fall 2007.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies 17, 1 (Spring 2023).
- “Public Memory and the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum,” in eds. Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti, Where are the Workers?: Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022).
- “‘So Nobly Struggling for Their Manhood’: Masculinity and Violence among Steelworkers in the Wheeling District, 1880-1910,” Labor History 60, 5 (2019): 415-428.
- (Co-authored with Katie Cruger) “Laughably Disingenuous, Brazenly Bogus, Extreme Green ‘Lawfare’: The Framing of Environmentalist Actors in Coal Age Magazine,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 25 (Fall 2019).
- “West Virginia Mine Wars,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (online; February 2019).
- Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
- “Factory Workers in the Hills of West Virginia: The Values and Politics of Rural Industrial Workers in Hancock County, 1930-1965,” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 7 (Fall 2010).
- (co-edited) Culture, Class, and Politics in Modern Appalachia, (forthcoming) West Virginia University Press.
- “Tin Plate Towns, 1890-1910: Local Labor Movements and Workers’ Responses to the Crisis in the Steelworkers’ Union,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 74 (2007).
- Hancock County: Images of America. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006.
- “The 1936 Portsmouth Steel Strike: ‘As Portsmouth Goes So Goes the Steel Industry,’” Parts 1 and 2, Portsmouth Free Press, Vol. 2, No. 2 and No. 3.
- “The Pine Bank Bridge and Its Changing Meaning Through the Years,” Western Pennsylvania History. Vol. 89, No. 2 (Summer 2006), 26-33.