Check out this piece on a train song I wrote, which touches on a series of tragedies along the Western NC RR and bridges my 1st and 2nd (forthcoming) @uncpress.bsky.social books. All part of a band w/friends that really cohered in the aftermath of Helene: uncpressblog.com/2025/10/30/o...

How does one recover from and process a generational storm like Helene? For UNC Press author @shuffard.bsky.social and his friends, the answer was through music. Learn about the making of their band Spell of Leaves and their new single Old Fort Loops ⤵️ uncpressblog.com/2025/10/30/o...

today in Appalachian history: discussing a reading (War Trails of the Blue Ridge) from the guy whose historic marker I almost hit every time I back up my car

a student missed class today because they “fell in the river” which to be fair, is something that’s possible to do in this campus

thank you Victoria 3 for reminding me about my book project (and also thanks for having this event appropriately boost the labor movement)

troubling that octoberfest beers are hitting the shelves before I’ve even started working on my fall syllabi

Fust = a perfect soundtrack to a summertime post-thunderstorm cruise through the NC Piedmont on I-40

talking trains (specifically the Western NC Railroad and what its history tells us about the complicated cultural history of southern railroads) over in Johnson City today: 6 pm at the Johnson City Railroad Experience!

@shuffard.bsky.social wrote about striking workers and their relationship with railroads and capitalism in the late 19th century and beyond.

today in history of southern Appalachia I think I irrevocably damaged YouTube’s auto-closed captioning function by using it on an Alan Lomax interview with Ray Hicks

today a student told me she’s listened to a song I played in class - Steeleye Span’s Blackleg Miner - 30 times so yea I feel like I’ve done my job here

lecturing on TVA dams in the morning and 1920s/30s southern textile strikes in the afternoon - not a bad day of class at all (even if students were not impressed when I told them I wanted to make a playlist of songs about dams)

not my sweet summer child students walking to class in t-shirts and shorts when we're about to get whacked by a cold front (and get 1-3 inches of snow this afternoon)

I showed my students the NWS forecasted rainfall map the Wednesday before Helene destroyed my school/town and some later thanked me for preparing them for the nightmare to come. Why slash and cut an extremely effective government service at the behest of a billionaire?

don’t even bother inviting me to the hangout if the vibes aren’t in the realm of Dwight Yoakam’s video for A Thousand Miles To Nowhere (1993)

trying to get work done while my car is being serviced and I severely underestimated the amount of chatty old men at the car dealership in Boone (I really should be used to this by now)

I’d like to thank whoever drew a large-breasted mothman on my class’s whiteboard for reminding us of the always-flexible nature of Appalachian folklore traditions

today in history of southern appalachia - lecturing on the construction of railroads that Helene destroyed :(

tourists currently leaning over Helene-smashed fences to feed bojangles biscuits to some mangy looking deer = not exactly a healthy ecosystem here on beech mtn

hard to have more depressing weather in a ski town than a February full of rain, thunderstorms, warmth, and mud

covering the whiskey rebellion in Appalachian history (w/heavy inspiration from Ramp Hollow) today. Not only do I get to ramble on about rye whiskey, I also get to ruin Alexander Hamilton for all the theater kids

what do exploding oil trains, the Las Vegas sphere, teenage mutant ninja turtles, Billy Strings, precision scheduled railroading, Gillian Welch, and a tornado outbreak in western Kentucky have in common? All are making appearances in the epilogue of my Casey Jones book...

after I said I was a history prof, the guy next to me on the ski lift asked for fun facts about Daniel Boone...just out here doing my part to engage with the public

the good news is crews are (finally) clearing Helene debris from my mountain town…the bad news is the trucks hauling debris keep crashing on the road down the mountain

as evidence that the Irish menace has long threatened the peace and prosperity of the good people in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I’d remind you all that the state had to occupy the anthracite coal fields during the Civil War due to restive Irish miners

today I’m thinking about my catholic-schooled, freshman year roommate at Penn State, whose deep-seated loathing of Notre Dame taught me what true sports hatred looks like

Steelers vs eagles…finally a chance for Pittsburgh to avenge the abuses committed by Philadelphia militiamen during the Great Strikes of 1877

horror movie inclined historians out there need to watch The Devil’s Bath. One of the darkest films I’ve ever seen and a bleak reminder that sometimes real history (in this case gender norms in small 18th century Austrian villages) can be more horrific than the supernatural

talked to a former student who’s spending all winter in a cabin snowed in at a California ghost town so yea I guess assigning Edward Abbey worked as intended

dense fog on the drive in and a largely abandoned pre-thanksgiving campus has me feeling like I'm teaching at Silent Hill College this am

working on final exam study guides and reviewing what all we've been able to cover in my classes...and it turns out having a hurricane destroy your school/moving all classes to asynchronous online formats for 5 weeks mid-semester isn't exactly conducive to student learning

teaching the monday and tuesday of Thanksgiving break...always the most rigorous and well-attended of my classes 🙃

got a decent dump of light powdery snow here at 4500 ft

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looking at these projected CFB playoff matchups…and Georgia at Penn State has the potential to be the biggest north - south sectional clash in PA since Gettysburg

so much to mourn re: Helene, though I've been particularly bummed by the destruction on the Virginia Creeper Trail. I've always loved biking up and down the Damascus to Whitetop section. 18 out of 31 trestles wiped out and a huge blow to communities reliant on trail tourism: vacreepertrail.us/2024/

drove up a nearby ridge (btw Banner Elk and Newland) today on an errand and it’s quite stunning how much worse the Helene tree damage is on eastern facing slopes (as opposed to the western facing slope I’m on, which was still quite a mess)

watching Paul Finebaum instead of cable news and now I’m fully convinced the real civil war threat comes not from the election but from SEC fans angry at the playoff rankings of Big Ten teams

don’t mind me, I’m just out here listening to a million different jam band covers of “City of New Orleans” to get in the zone for editing my book’s chapter on the 1970s 🚂🚂

my lecture on the benefits and environmental problems associated with TVA dam-building got a little more relevant this year given how crucial some TVA dams were in staving off worse devastation during Helene

some scenes from a walk around my neighborhood (Beech Mountain) 6 weeks after Helene. We fared better than many towns in the area but WNC is still in recovery mode (and will be for a long time)

best sign that my college is inching back to relative normalcy post-Helene? A student had to miss class today due to an owl-related injury (we have a very huge wildlife rehab program)

Hunkering down at 4500 fr on Beech Mtn. Roads are already washing out, NWS is issuing appropriately dire warnings, a county curfew kicks in at 8, heavy rain continues to pour down, and Helene will make her grand entrance in the wee hours of the morning...should be a wild night

heading to Chattanooga tomorrow for what should be a busy southern labor studies association conference. Moderating a discussion on RR brotherhoods in Texas and presenting a paper on scientific management, shopman's strikes, speed-ups, and the origins of Joe Hill's parody version of Casey Jones

favorite running subplot on the local neighborhood Facebook group is people posting pictures of coyotes or foxes and asking if anyones’s lost their dog

howling winds/tropical rains and wolves in the throne room providing impeccable vibes to prep this morning's lecture on romanticism and American wilderness (in which I tell students I have Thomas Cole's The Oxbow hanging in my bedroom and they look at me like I'm insane)

gravel cycling is an excellent way to grasp the ever-shifting terra firma of the South - Saluda County SC adds in a nice mix of red clay and sand to the dirt and gravel I’m used to riding on in the blue ridge

14+ inches of snow, power outages most of the night, vehicles stranded all over the roads, wind chill warnings for today...yep winter has most definitely arrived to Beech Mountain

syllabus prep is never fun but at least I've got some classes squarely in the proverbial wheelhouse this semester (a few sections of history of southern Appalachia and Civil War and Reconstruction for my HIS majors

someone managed to pick up a finals week injury (I stepped on an open pen)