Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller's African American Miners and Migrants documents the lives of Eastern Kentucky Social Club (EKSC) members, a group of black Appalachians who left the eastern Kentucky coalfields and their coal company hometowns in Harlan County.

Bound together by segregation, the inherent dangers of mining, and coal company paternalism, it might seem that black miners and mountaineers would be eager to forget their past. Instead, members of the EKSC have chosen to celebrate their Harlan County roots. African American Miners and Migrants uses historical and archival research and extensive personal interviews to explore their reasons and the ties that still bind them to eastern Kentucky. The book also examines life in the model coal towns of Benham and Lynch in the context of Progressive Era policies, the practice of welfare capitalism, and the contemporary national trend of building corporate towns and planned communities.

|Preface ix

1. Democracy Challenged: Demography, Technology, and Democratic Possibilities
Brian J. Gaines and Peter F. Nardulli 1

Part I: Social Heterogeneity and Democracy: Challenges and Opportunities
2. Problems of Democratic Transition in Divided Societies
Jack Snyder 11
3. Citizens, Identities and Democratic Dialogues: Opportunities and Challenges of Diverse Societies
Mark Q. Sawyer 33
4. Democracy, Diversity, and Leadership
Paul M. Sniderman 51
5. Electoral Engineering, Social Cleavages, and Democracy
Bernard Grofman and Jon Fraenkel 71

Part II: Technology and Democracy: Mass-Elite Linkages in the Twenty-first Century
6. Technological Advances and Individual Liberties: Privacy and the Reach of the State in the Twenty-first Century
Wayne V. McIntosh and Stephen A. Simon 105
7. Engineering Consent: The Persistence of a Problematic Communication Regime
W. Lance Bennett 131
8. The Internet and Political Fragmentation
Bruce Bimber 155

Contributors 171
Index 175|Thomas E. Wagner is University Professor Emeritus of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is coauthor (with Phillip J. Obermiller) of Valuing Our Past, Creating Our Future: The Founding of the Urban Appalachian Council and coeditor (with Obermiller and E. Bruce Tucker) of Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration.Phillip J. Obermiller is a visiting scholar at the University of Cincinnati's School of Planning, and a Center Fellow at the University of Kentucky's Appalachian Center. In addition to his work with Wagner, he is coeditor (with Kathryn M. Borman) of From Mountain to Metropolis: Appalachian Migrants in American Cities and of the fourth edition of Appalachia: Social Context Past and Present(with Michael E. Maloney). William H. Turner is a member of the EKSC, president of Turner Associates in Winston-Salem, N.C., a freelance writer, and interim president of Kentucky State University. He holds Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology and was research associate to Alex Haley for ten years.