Appalachia faces overwhelming challenges that plague many rural areas across the country, including poorly funded schools, stagnant economic development, corrupt political systems, poverty, and drug abuse. Its citizens, in turn, have often been the target of unkind characterizations depicting them as illiterate or backward. Despite entrenched social and economic disadvantages, the region is also known for its strong sense of culture, language, and community. In this innovative volume, a multidisciplinary team of both established and rising scholars challenge Appalachian stereotypes through an examination of language and rhetoric. Together, the contributors offer a new perspective on Appalachia and its literacy, hoping to counteract essentialist or class-based arguments about the region's people, and reexamine past research in the context of researcher bias. Featuring a mix of traditional scholarship and personal narratives, Rereading Appalachia assesses a number of pressing topics, including the struggles of first-generation college students and the pressure to leave the area in search of higher-quality jobs, prejudice toward the LGBT community, and the emergence of Appalachian and Affrilachian art in urban communities. The volume also offers rich historical perspectives on issues such as the intended and unintended consequences of education activist Cora Wilson Stewart's campaign to promote literacy at the Kentucky Moonlight Schools. A call to arms for those studying the heritage and culture of Appalachia, this timely collection provides fresh perspectives on the region, its people, and their literacy beliefs and practices.

After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as "Trump Country," decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile. These stereotypes ultimately ward off potential investments in the region's educational system and skew how students understand themselves and the place they call home. Attacking these misrepresentations head on, Literacy in the Mountains: Community, Newspapers, and Writing in Appalachia reclaims the long history of literacy in the Appalachian region. Focusing on five Kentucky newspapers printed between 1885 and 1920, Samantha NeCamp explores the complex ways readers in the mountains negotiated their local and national circumstances through editorials, advertisements, and correspondence. In local newspapers, community action groups announced meeting times and philanthropists raised funds for a network of hitherto unknown private schools. Preserved in print, these stories and others reveal an engaged citizenry specifically concerned with education. Combining literacy and journalism studies, NeCamp demonstrates that Appalachians are not—and never have been—an illiterate, isolated people.

Inclusive campus-community collaborations provide critical opportunities to build community capacity—defined as a community's ability to jointly respond to challenges and opportunities—and sustainability. Through case studies from across all three subregions of Appalachia from Georgia to Pennsylvania, Engaging Appalachia: A Guidebook for Building Capacity and Sustainability offers diverse perspectives and guidance for promoting social change through campus-community relationships from faculty, community members, and student contributors. This volume explores strategies for creating more inclusive and sustainable partnerships through the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In representing diverse areas, environments, and issues, three relatable themes emerge within a practice viewpoint that is scalable to communities beyond Appalachia: fostering student leadership, asset-building, and needs fulfillment within community engagement. Engaging Appalachia presents collaborative approaches to regional community engagement and offers important lessons in place-based methods for achieving sustainable and just development. Written with practicality in mind, this guidebook embraces hard-earned experiences from decades of work in Appalachia and sets forth new models for building community resilience in a changing world.

Front cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Revisiting Appalachia, Revisiting Self -- 2 Carolina Chocolate Drops -- 3 Beyond a Wife's Perspective on Politics -- 4 Intersections of Appalachian Identity -- 5 Appalachia Beyond the Mountains -- 6 Digital Rhetorics of Appalachia and the Cultural Studies Classroom -- 7 Continuity and Change of English Consonants in Appalachia -- 8 Frackonomics -- 9 Revisiting Appalachian Icons in the Production and Consumption of Tourist Art -- 10 From the Coal Mine to the Prison Yard -- 11 Walking the Fence Line of The Crooked Road -- 12 "No One's Ever Talked to Us Before" -- 13 Strength in Numbers -- 14 When Collaboration Leads to Action -- 15 Participation and Transformation in Twenty-First-Century Appalachian Scholarship -- (Re)introduction -- Appendix -- Contributors -- Index.

In an increasingly globalized world, place matters more than ever. This concept especially holds true in Appalachian studies—a field that brings scholars, activists, artists, and citizens together around the region to contest misappropriations of resources and power and to combat stereotypes of isolation and intolerance. In Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters, Dwight B. Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver assemble scholars and artists from a variety of disciplines to broaden the conversation and challenge the binary opposition between regionalism and globalism. In addition to theoretical explorations of place, some of the case studies examine foodways, depictions of gendered and racialized Appalachian identity in popular culture, the experiences of rural LGBTQ youth, and the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies. Drawing on ideas from cultural anthropology, sociology, and a variety of other fields, and interleaved with poems by bell hooks, this volume furthers the examination of new perspectives on one of America's most compelling and misunderstood regions.

In the last fifty years, the Appalachian Mountains have suffered permanent and profound change due to the expansion of surface coal mining. The irrevocable devastation caused by this practice has forced local citizens to redefine their identities, their connections to global economic forces, their pasts, and their futures. Religion is a key factor in the fierce debate over mountaintop removal; some argue that it violates a divine mandate to protect the earth, while others contend that coal mining is a God-given gift to ensure human prosperity and comfort. In Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Joseph D. Witt examines how religious and environmental ethics foster resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, teachers, preachers, and community leaders, Witt's research offers a fresh analysis of an important and dynamic topic. His study reflects a diversity of denominational perspectives, exploring Catholic and mainline Protestant views of social and environmental justice, evangelical Christian readings of biblical ethics, and Native and nontraditional spiritual traditions. By placing Appalachian resistance to mountaintop removal in a comparative international context, Witt's work also provides new outlooks on the future of the region and its inhabitants. His timely study enhances, challenges, and advances conversations not only about the region, but also about the relationship between religion and environmental activism.

This book argues that democratic classroom management is not a stand-alone issue but is deeply intertwined with classroom climate and requires a thoughtful, grounded understanding of classroom authority. Contributors explore the sources, nature, and extent of teacher authority, as they distinguish authority from authoritarianism, and describe how classroom authority is ultimately a shared endeavor between teachers and students. By drawing on a variety of contexts and perspectives, chapters in this volume contend with the complexities inherent in classroom authority through the lenses of gender, urban versus rural contexts, and within elementary and secondary classrooms.

Although Sidney Saylor Farr is renowned in the field of Appalachian studies, her own fascinating personal history has been little known until now. My Appalachia is Farr's story of growing up in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, where her devotion to her family led her to accept crushing responsibilities that steered her away from her own goals. Her intense determination, however, compelled her to find her own path in life and gave her the strength to become one of the most influential figures in her discipline. At the age of twelve, Farr was forced to leave school to care for her ailing mother and several younger siblings. Given the responsibilities of adulthood early in life, she pushed herself through countless challenges, including poverty, discrimination, and personal loss. Yet she managed to thrive -- she educated herself, raised two sons, and became a voice for her family, community, and culture. In My Appalachia, Farr shares the stories of her struggles and triumphs to create a vivid picture of a culture as enduring as the mountains. Composed of a rich mix of folklore, family history, and spiritual and intellectual exploration, My Appalachia reveals the beauty at the heart of life in Appalachia.

Much criticism has been directed at negative stereotypes of Appalachia perpetuated by movies, television shows, and news media. Books, on the other hand, often draw enthusiastic praise for their celebration of the simplicity and authenticity of the Appalachian region. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 employs the innovative new strategy of examining fan mail, reviews, and readers’ geographic affiliations to understand how readers have imagined the region and what purposes these imagined geographies have served for them. As Emily Satterwhite traces the changing visions of Appalachia across the decades, from the Gilded Age (1865–1895) to the present, she finds that every generation has produced an audience hungry for a romantic version of Appalachia. According to Satterwhite, best-selling fiction has portrayed Appalachia as a distinctive place apart from the mainstream United States, has offered cosmopolitan white readers a sense of identity and community, and has engendered feelings of national and cultural pride. Thanks in part to readers’ faith in authors as authentic representatives of the regions they write about, Satterwhite argues, regional fiction often plays a role in creating and affirming regional identity. By mapping the geographic locations of fans, Dear Appalachia demonstrates that mobile white readers in particular, including regional elites, have idealized Appalachia as rooted, static, and protected from commercial society in order to reassure themselves that there remains an “authentic” America untouched by global currents. Investigating texts such as John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954), James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Dear Appalachia moves beyond traditional studies of regional fiction to document the functions of these narratives in the lives of readers, revealing not only what people have thought about Appalachia, but why.

Rural life and culture hold a practical and symbolic importance in American society. A central tenet of the survival of our cherished values—and of ourselves as a species—is the stewardship of cultural diversity and the places that foster it, like rural America. These may be the places that teach us to use land to make a living and to make a life, to forge and carry on our identities, and to feel history. They may yield a harvest of policies for managing an environmental balancing act that will preserve essential resources for America's children's children. Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land examines the ongoing culture wars that pit conservation against economic progress. For author Melinda Bollar Wagner, what began as a study of Appalachia's long-standing and continuing status as an energy sacrifice zone evolved into a twenty-four-year research project that sheds new light on the physical and emotional parameters of cultural attachment to land. Drawing on interviews with more than 220 residents from ten communities in five Appalachian counties, Power and Place gives voice to rural citizens whose place at the table is far from assured with regard to critical energy, environmental, and infrastructure decisions.