He delivers a painstaking history of how public land became real estate, and how hundreds if not thousands of people were pushed aside by one or two barons. Steal a little and they throw you in jail, as the Bob Dylan lyric has it; steal a lot and they make you king.

Image Steven Stoll Credit... Tom Stoelker

Stoll lingers on England in the 16th century, when lords for the first time began to turn the countryside into real estate though a process of enclosure, eliminating common land used for hunting and herding and planting. He draws a line between these lords and those who divvied up Appalachia’s land from afar.

“Ramp Hollow” suggests a litany of villains. Early ones included Alexander Hamilton, who as secretary of the Treasury tried to tax the many Appalachians who made alcohol, leading to the Whiskey Rebellion. (Stoll renames this the Rye Rebellion, by the way, a decision that will surely lead to some 90-proof think pieces from this country’s drinks pundits.)

Hamilton, like many who came after him, wished to modernize Appalachians and drag them by their stringy beards into the circuit of capital. Stoll argues they were mostly better left alone. These people were not poor by their own standards; they simply made do for themselves, and often made do quite well.

Stoll takes his time building this story for a reason. “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.” Those that preyed on Appalachians, he writes, turned them into “the horrifying hillbillies that lowlanders had always assumed them to be.”

Stoll clings to a different vision of what the United States could be. His book becomes a withering indictment of rapacious capitalism. We behave as if capitalism itself were “nailed to the roof of heaven,” he writes, and few dare to question its assumptions.

He is aghast that so many Appalachians vote against their own interests. (West Virginia went heavily for Donald Trump.) He posits that jobs versus health is a false choice. He suggests a way forward that includes reparations, the creation of new kinds of communities, free college tuition and other remedies.