Appalachia: The place and its people have long inspired a special fascination among travelers and commentators. The rugged, ecologically rich mountains, at once forbidding and inviting, have provided a place of retreat and exploration for lovers of natural beauty and outdoor adventure, while the region's resources have long lured both capitalists intent on creating wealth and regular folks just looking for a steady wage. The inhabitants native to the region have often been held up as pure, strong, and self-sufficient on the one hand, and derided as primitive, backward, and exotic, on the other. Not quite south or north, east or west, the region continues to defy easy classification. Yet it emerges in Historic Photos of Appalachia as both distinct and as familiarly American. The nearly 200 photographs included here portray the region's land and people in all their distinctive and sometimes surprising specificity--including views of towns, houses, and farms; families at home and on the job; railroads, mining, and logging; and beautiful streams and mountain landscapes.

Appalachia: The place and its people have long inspired a special fascination among travelers and commentators. The rugged, ecologically rich mountains, at once forbidding and inviting, have provided a place of retreat and exploration for lovers of natural beauty and outdoor adventure, while the region’s resources have long lured both capitalists intent on creating wealth and regular folks just looking for a steady wage. The inhabitants native to the region have often been held up as pure, strong, and self-sufficient on the one hand, and derided as primitive, backward, and exotic, on the other.Not quite south or north, east or west, the region continues to defy easy classification. Yet it emerges in Historic Photos of Appalachia as both distinct and as familiarly American. The nearly 200 photographs included here portray the region’s land and people in all their distinctive and sometimes surprising specificity—including views of towns, houses, and farms; families at home and on the job; railroads, mining, and logging; and beautiful streams and mountain landscapes.

Photographs taken 1973-1997 in Perry, Letcher, Knott, Leslie, Floyd, and Breathitt Counties, Kentucky.

Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.

A collection of eighty photographs highlights the real Appalachia, distinguishing it from the popular mythology surrounding this impoverished region. By the author of Appalachian Portraits and Appalachian Legacy. (Social Science)

The Face of Appalachia: Portraits from the Mountain Farm is the culmination of over twenty years of work by acclaimed photographer Tim Barnwell. Combining beautiful landscapes with tender portraits, his remarkable black-and-white images provide a stunning record of a vanishing way of life on the remote mountain farms of rural Appalachia. Over one hundred photographs, printed here in elegant duotone reproductions, are combined with conversations with the subjects, to give us an insight into the daily lives, activities, and dreams of the hard working, proud, and resourceful men and women of this unique area of our country. Transcending their geographical origins, these photographs give us a look at how our forefathers lived, for generations, with seemingly little change, in the decades before modern industry, roads, and technology transformed the country from an agrarian to an industrial economy and then to the information age we live in today. The rugged and remote mountains of the southern Appalachian region have served to isolate and preserve the last vestiges of life as it once was throughout rural America. By documenting this disappearing way of life, Mr. Barnwell has captured the essence, beauty, and rugged character of the rural landscape and its people, for this and future generations.

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.

Upon entering the White House in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced an ailing economy in the throes of the Great Depression and rushed to transform the country through recovery programs and legislative reform. By 1934, he began to send professional photographers to the state of West Virginia to document living conditions and the effects of his New Deal programs. The photographs from the Farm Security Administration Project not only introduced “America to Americans,” exposing a continued need for government intervention, but also captured powerful images of life in rural and small town America.New Deal Photographs of West Virginia, 1934-1943 presents images of the state's northern and southern coalfields, the subsistence homestead projects of Arthurdale, Eleanor, and Tygart Valley, and various communities from Charleston to Clarksburg and Parkersburg to Elkins. With over one hundred and fifty images by ten FSA photographers, including Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, this collection is a remarkable proclamation of hardship, hope, endurance, and, above all, community. These photographs provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of West Virginians during the Great Depression and beyond.

Despite the promise of alternative energy, coal still powers most of our power plants and steel mills. The story of its extraction, and of the people who live, work, suffer, and endure in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, has been a source of fascination bordering on obsession for the photographer Builder Levy. For four decades, he has been witness to an industry that has changed from miners working underground with picks and shovels to draglines, mechanical earth movers that can tear apart mountain summits to expose veins of coal in massive, and massively destructive, quantities. He has witnessed strikes and picket lines, desperation and rage, hope and dignity, and the predictable natural disasters (and disasters waiting to happen) that are part of the territory.