Peace in the Mountains

The popularity of studying student protest during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War has created a rich historiography and ample coverage of the importance of college-aged activism on the profound changes and unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. The scope of analysis leaves one to wonder how much more ground can be covered without proving redundant or bland. But Thomas Weyant's Peace in the Mountains demonstrates that careful research and keen analysis can still contribute new information about this pivotal era. Weyant moves beyond the examinations of elite public and private coastal universities or sites of major trauma to study three Appalachian universities: the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and West Virginia University. He argues that these students' engagement with current events developed under the auspice of an evolving sense of citizenship; they first experienced citizenship at the local level, such as within the university, and then expanded their understanding to national issues. Weyant's unique thesis moves beyond students reacting to one event after another, as if putting out brush fires, to seeing them as pondering a more holistic existence within their communities and in the nation. He traces, for example, how they often began with demanding campus changes, such as ending discriminatory visitation policies based on sex, moved to local concerns, in the case of Appalachia focused on poverty, and then came of age with activism once the U.S. war in Vietnam threatened compulsory military service. Weyant's analysis of the concern and fight against poverty in the student's own region is particularly transformative in reminding historians that one-size-fits-all approaches to studying an issue seldom tell the entire story. Economic plight first motivated these students, not race or foreign policy. Appalachian students did fit the typical pattern once the Vietnam War came into focus, with concern about their own draft status, questions about the nation's morality, and reactions to tumultuous events at home leading them down familiar paths. However, Weyant offers complete coverage by also including students who supported American military involvement in Southeast Asia

Citizenship · Elite · Historiography · Media studies · Militarization · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Unrest · Vietnam War · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Public Administration