West Virginia University - News and Information Services
WVU history professor to appear on West Virginia Public Television
West Virginia University history professor Ken Fones-Wolf is scheduled to appear on the West Virginia Public Broadcasting show “Outlook” at 9 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, and 6 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7 (rebroadcast).
The weekly magazine show airs on PBS, local Channel 8.
Fones-Wolf is the author of “Glass Towns: Industry, Labor and Political Economy in Central Appalachia, 1890-1930s.” He was recently interviewed about the closing of Fenton Art Glass, the largest manufacturer of handmade colored glass in the United States. The company, located in Williamstown, is closing after 102 years of business.
“The closing of Fenton, which is perhaps best known in the country for making ‘carnival glass,’ reflects the convergence of a number of factors – declining specialty markets, product substitutes, foreign competition and skyrocketing health care costs – that have destroyed the state’s proud heritage of producing quality glass tableware,” said Fones-Wolf, who teaches in the Department of History in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. “West Virginia is losing an industry and its craftsmen, who were once the envy of industrial workers in the nation and the world.”
In his book, Fones-Wolf examines the political and economic climate of the early 20th century. He also explores how the glass industry had the potential to improve West Virginia’s political economy by establishing a base of value-added manufacturing to complement the state’s abundance of coal, oil, timber and natural gas.