The Southern Appalachian Region is the largest American "problem area"—an area whose participation in the economic growth of the nation has not been sufficient to relieve the chronic poverty of its people. The existence of the problem was recognized a generation ago, but in the past decade the resistance of such areas to economic advance has acquired a more urgent significance in American thought. In 1958, a group of scholars undertook to make a new survey of the Southern Appalachian Region. Aided by grants from the Ford Foundation ultimately amounting to $250,000, they set out to analyze the direction and extent of the changes which had taken place since the last survey (in1935), to define the problem in terms of the present situation, and—if possible—to arrive at recommendations for action which might enable the leaders of the Region and the nation to attack the problem with practical measures. In this volume are presented their comprehensive reports on the Region's population, its economy, its institutions, and its culture. The problems defined by this survey are a challenge to the whole nation, for the consequences of success or failure in solving them will not be limited to the Southern Appalachian Region.

Appalachia is a region in trouble. Even in the more remote coves and hollows, major social and economic changes are disturbing the traditional ways of life. The conditions which have made it a pocket of poverty cannot be easily eradicated; and the rapid changes of recent years have added further severe problems of adjustment which deeply affect the family, church life, education, the folk sub­culture, and, above all, the individual. Out­migration, psychological dislocation, and cultural alienation are the result. The nine contributing scholars have lived and worked in Appalachia; they know the people and their customs, their problems and their needs. They are thoroughly familiar with the programs now in operation, and are well qualified to evaluate their success or failure in terms of those needs. Furthermore, their findings can be applied to other regions and nations, wherever an isolated group has been abruptly incorporated into the mainstream of society while many of its peculiar problems remain unsolved. Rural Appalachia may in fact be considered a microcosm of the underdeveloped nations of the world; the issues raised here far transcend the importance of a regional study. The essays are grouped according to four general areas of research. The first part deals with the individual in his society; the second with six social institutions—economy, government, family, religion, education, and power structure; the third with methods and objectives of change; and the fourth with the aims of change agencies, particularly the Extension Service of the future. As the tangle of problems, strains, and tensions is explored, the focus remains steadily upon immediate and long­term effects on the individual. The book is dedicated to "the professional field workers in programs of directed change . . . struggling on the one hand with ideas, theories, and conceptual innovations, and on the other hand with the immediate realities of the local situations."

The largely untold story of the great migration of white southerners to the industrial Midwest and its profound and enduring political and social consequences Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway, Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture—from the modern industrial labor movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives. The book draws on a diverse range of sources—from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music—to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalization, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest—bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present. The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century.

This bibliography has been compiled as a companion volume to the Bibliography on Land Settlement issued in 1934 by the United States Department of Agriculture as Miscellaneous Publication 172. It contains selected references to the literature on the economic aspects of land utilization and land policy in the United States and in foreign countries, published for the most part during the period 1918-36.

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.

Salstrom argues that economic adversity has resulted from three types of disadvantages: natural, market, and political. The overall context in which Appalachia's economic life unfolded was one of expanding United States markets and, after the Civil War, of expanding capitalist relations.