As the COVID-19 virus swept across the nation in spring 2020, infection and hospitalization rates in states like West Virginia remained relatively low. By that July, each of Appalachia's 423 counties had recorded confirmed cases. The coronavirus pandemic has taken an enormous toll on the health of individuals and institutions throughout the region—a stark reminder that even isolated rural populations are subject to historical, biological, ecological, and geographical factors that have continually created epidemics over the past millennia. In Appalachian Epidemics: From Smallpox to COVID-19, scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds assess two centuries of public health emergencies and the subsequent responses. This volume peers into the trans–Appalachian South's experience with illness, challenging the misconception that rurality provides protection against maladies. In addition to surveying the impact of influenza, polio, and Lyme disease outbreaks, Appalachian Epidemics addresses the less-understood social determinants of health. The effects of the opioid crisis and industrial coal mining complicate the definition of disease and illuminate avenues for responding to future public health threats. From the significance of regional stereotypes to the spread of misinformation and the impact of racism and poverty on public health policy, Appalachian Epidemics makes clear that many of the natural, political, and socioeconomic forces currently shaping the region's experiences with COVID-19 and other crises have historical antecedents.

These nine essays originally appeared in the Georgia Historical Quarterly and range in subject from a group of Arcadians expelled from Nova Scotia that settled in colonial Georgia to the origins of the University of Georgia. Other essays examine the Woolfolk murder case that attracted national attention; Henry M. Turner, a black legislator during the Reconstruction; and John Howard Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home."

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history—and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people. Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history—but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts,” and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1870.

In the spring of 1849 young Philadelphia physician S. W. Woodhouse, an avid ornithologist, was appointed surgeon-naturalist of two expeditions, one in 1849 and another in 1850, to survey the Creek-Cherokee boundary in Indian Territory. A keen observer of frontier life and society, Woodhouse wrote down in three journals detailed entries on his travels, including information on the flora and fauna as well as his impressions of the places he passed and their people, notably early Indian Territory personalities such as the McIntoshes and the Perrymans of the Creek Indians; Elijah Hicks of the Cherokees; Tallee and Clermont III of the Osages; and Oh-ha-wah-kee of the Comanches. To aid the modern reader, editors John S. Tomer and Michael J. Brodhead have supplied a detailed introduction and extensive, clarifying notes.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.