Appalachia first entered the American consciousness as a distinct region in the decades following the Civil War. The place and its people have long been seen as backwards and 'other' because of their perceived geographical, social, and economic isolation. These essays, by fourteen eminent historians and social scientists, illuminate important dimensions of early social life in diverse sections of the Appalachian mountains. The contributors seek to place the study of Appalachia within the context of comparative regional studies of the United States, maintaining that processes and patterns thought to make the region exceptional were not necessarily unique to the mountain South. The contributors are Mary K. Anglin, Alan Banks, Dwight B. Billings, Kathleen M. Blee, Wilma A. Dunaway, John R. Finger, John C. Inscoe, Ronald L. Lewis, Ralph Mann, Gordon B. McKinney, Mary Beth Pudup, Paul Salstrom, Altina L. Waller, and John Alexander Williams

In this collection, contributors reflect on scholarly, artistic, activist, educational, and practical endeavor known as Appalachian Studies. Following an introduction to the field, the writers discuss how Appalachian Studies illustrates the ways interdisciplinary studies emerge, organize, and institutionalize themselves, and how they engage with intellectual, political, and economic forces both locally and around the world. Essayists argue for Appalachian Studies' integration with kindred fields like African American studies, women's studies, and Southern studies, and they urge those involved in the field to globalize the perspective of Appalachian Studies; to commit to continued applied, participatory action, and community-based research; to embrace more fully the field's capacity for bringing about social justice; to advocate for a more accurate understanding of Appalachia and its people; and to understand and overcome the obstacles interdisciplinary studies face in the social and institutional construction of knowledge. Contributors: Chris Baker, Chad Berry, Donald Edward Davis, Amanda Fickey, Chris Green, Erica Abrams Locklear, Phillip J. Obermiller, Douglas Reichert Powell, Michael Samers, Shaunna L. Scott, and Barbara Ellen Smith.

This award-winning history examines the politics of progress in America through a close look at industrial development in Appalachia since WWII. Appalachia has played a complex role in the unfolding of American history. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of material production and technology decried what they saw as a the isolation and backwardness of the region and sought to “uplift” its people through education and industrialization. In Uneven Ground, Ronald D. Eller examines the politics of development in Appalachia while exploring the idea of progress as it has evolved in America. “Passionate, clear, concise, and at times profound,” this volume demonstrates that Appalachia's struggle to overcome poverty, to live in harmony with the land, and to respect the value of community is a truly American story (Chad Berry, author of Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles). Winner of the Appalachian Studies Association’s Weatherford Award and the Southern Political Science Association’s V.O. Key Award

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.

Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow’s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow’s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by “those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,” and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path, Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration.

How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.

Interweaving social, political, environmental, economic, and popular history, John Alexander Williams chronicles four and a half centuries of the Appalachian past. Along the way, he explores Appalachia's long-contested boundaries and the numerous, often contradictory images that have shaped perceptions of the region as both the essence of America and a place apart. Williams begins his story in the colonial era and describes the half-century of bloody warfare as migrants from Europe and their American-born offspring fought and eventually displaced Appalachia's Native American inhabitants. He depicts the evolution of a backwoods farm-and-forest society, its divided and unhappy fate during the Civil War, and the emergence of a new industrial order as railroads, towns, and extractive industries penetrated deeper and deeper into the mountains. Finally, he considers Appalachia's fate in the twentieth century, when it became the first American region to suffer widespread deindustrialization, and examines the partial renewal created by federal intervention and a small but significant wave of in-migration. Throughout the book, a wide range of Appalachian voices enlivens the analysis and reminds us of the importance of storytelling in the ways the people of Appalachia define themselves and their region.

“A significant contribution to the current understanding of southern Appalachia’s place within the South and the nation.” —The Journal of American History Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe’s essays consider a multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. Devoting attention to how truths from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations, he considers novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how their work has contributed much to either our understanding?or misunderstanding?of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination. “Each essay is a gem of historical and critical analysis that adds greatly to our understanding of the Appalachian past.” —Dwight Billings, coeditor of Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century