This well-written, convincing historical examination of persistently poor rural communities continues the ground-breaking work done by James Brown in his Beech Creek studies. Using a longitudinal case study, Billings and Blee (Women of the Klan) examine the historic sociology of Clay County, KY, its pattern of economic crisis and migration, and poverty's racial and spatial dimensions. They argue that government programs like Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty failed because they targeted poverty's symptoms (like low income) and not its systemic roots. Along the way, they discuss the impact of political factionalism, the breakdown of the extended family, economic exploitation, slavery, the transition to waged work, and elitism while discounting generally accepted culture-of-poverty and dependence theories.