Steven Stoll, Author at Public Seminar

Capitalism

A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill teaches us about the world industrialization made

September 28, 2021 • by Steven Stoll

A woman in a red jacket, lunch pail in hand and eyes forward, travels to work. She ascends a ramp leading from a meadow of wildflowers, over a millpond to a small water-powered textile factory. Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back fifty years to the first ...

Capitalism

Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation

On Working and Being in Modern Times

September 21, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

Modern Times, directed by Charlie Chaplin, was released in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression. It opens with a clock marking the beginning of the working day and a sentence: “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.” Stampeding sheep dissolve into men ...

Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation

History

A Monument to Dis-Union

The West Virginia Coal Miner statue ignores race, class, and history

July 16, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

During our present twilight of the statues, when citizens across the country force the removal of effigies that represent racism and colonialism, Jackson is an obvious target for removal. Yet I’ve been thinking of another statue just a few yards away from Jackson: The West Virginia Coal Miner, a monument ...

Feature

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

An excerpt from Steven Stoll’s latest book

November 30, 2017 • by Steven Stoll

— J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III (1782) This is an ordinary map of southern West Virginia, adorned with shapes representing private property. Some of the shapes adhere to watercourses. Others run ruler straight, throwing squares and trapezoids across innumerable hills and hollows. Distant investors ...