Beyond the Mountains

Beyond the Mountains PDF Author: Drew A. Swanson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book

Book Description
Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

Beyond the Mountains

Beyond the Mountains PDF Author: Drew A. Swanson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book

Book Description
Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

Beyond Hill and Hollow

Beyond Hill and Hollow PDF Author: Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche Engelhardt
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821415778
Category : Appalachian Region
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book

Book Description
Annotation "The first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia's women, Beyond Hill and Hollow: Original Readings in Appalachian Women's Studies is a pathbreaking collection that firmly establishes the field of Appalachian women's studies. Bringing together the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, social workers, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women." "Appropriate both as a reference and as a classroom text, Beyond Hill and Hollow expands our understanding of Appalachian women's lives."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Hill Women

Hill Women PDF Author: Cassie Chambers
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 1984818937
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book

Book Description
After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “Poverty is enmeshed with pride in these stories of survival.”—Associated Press Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is one of the poorest counties in both Kentucky and the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Cassie Chambers grew up in these hollers and, through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Despite her poverty, she wouldn’t hesitate to give the last bite of pie or vegetables from her garden to a struggling neighbor. Her two daughters took very different paths: strong-willed Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while spirited Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school, then moved an hour away for college. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish school. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated her from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County, both while Wilma was in college and after. With her “hill women” values guiding her, Cassie went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her knowledge and opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved back home to help her fellow rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues that are all too common: domestic violence, the opioid crisis, a world that seems more divided by the day. But they are also community leaders, keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers uses these women’s stories paired with her own journey to break down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminate a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.

The Unforeseen Wilderness

The Unforeseen Wilderness PDF Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
ISBN: 9781593760922
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 111

Get Book

Book Description
A celebratory collection of essays and photographs, originally published as part of an effort to preserve Red River Gorge from plans to build a dam and a man-made lake, shares the T. S. Eliot Award-winning writer's perspectives on the gorge's wild beauty and the nature of rivers. Reprint.

Appalachia and Beyond

Appalachia and Beyond PDF Author: James Stanley Barlow
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1477172742
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
In Appalachia and Beyond:Yarns and Yearnings in Prose and Poetry, Stanley Barlow entertains us with some stories and sketches--many of them from Appalachia as he experienced it growing up. He engages us in some thinking about education, religion, and personal identity. Here too are some poems--new and selected. The yarns and sketches are for the most part true. Some come from my humorist years, writes the author. The play, Mostly Anecdotal, I hope reads like a short story: it centers on a colorful professor in Oregon, and at the same time, it argues the importance of career counseling in our schools and colleges. Much of the narrative in the book reflects my years as an educator in Tennessee, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York. This book also includes some deep thoughts lets say, jottings that are pensivehence I call them Pensees--that are like Wagnerian chords seeking resolution. They are for conversation. So also, are some of the eighty-one poems. In Appalachia and Beyond, you will find the following:-- In Part One: Twelve humorous stories and collectionsthe author calls them: Yarns--- that will tickle your funny bone, and Fourteen sketches/groups of sketches that highlight unique personalities. In Part Two: An original play: Mostly Anecdotal, features a certain colorful teacher named Jewell, and focuses on career counseling. In Part Three: Twelve Pensees: Thoughts for conversationfrom the authors essays, notes and journalsdiscuss religious beliefs, personal identity questions, and the joys of poetic reverie. In Part Four: Forty-three new poems, under headings: 9/11, Devotions, Looking Back, Love Notes, and Questions In Part Five: Thirty-eight poems selected from Swimming Laps in August . . . (2001) --with some revisions and notes.

Gone Home

Gone Home PDF Author: Karida L. Brown
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469647044
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown's Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond. Drawn from over 150 original oral history interviews with former and current residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, Brown shows that as the nation experienced enormous transformation from the pre- to the post-civil rights era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of black coal miners, Brown shows the mutable and shifting nature of collective identity, the struggles of labor and representation, and that Appalachia is far more diverse than you think.

Movie-Made Appalachia

Movie-Made Appalachia PDF Author: John C. Inscoe
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book

Book Description
While Hollywood deserves its reputation for much-maligned portrayals of southern highlanders on screen, the film industry also deserves credit for a long-standing tradition of more serious and meaningful depictions of Appalachia's people. Surveying some two dozen films and the literary and historical sources from which they were adapted, John C. Inscoe argues that in the American imagination Appalachia has long represented far more than deprived and depraved hillbillies. Rather, the films he highlights serve as effective conduits into the region's past, some grounded firmly in documented realities and life stories, others only loosely so. In either case, they deserve more credit than they have received for creating sympathetic and often complex characters who interact within families, households, and communities amidst a wide array of historical contingencies. They provide credible and informative narratives that respect the specifics of the times and places in which they are set. Having used many of these movies as teaching tools in college classrooms, Inscoe demonstrates the cumulative effect of analyzing them in terms of shared themes and topics to convey far more generous insights into Appalachia and its history than one would have expected to emerge from southern California's "dream factory."

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods PDF Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385674546
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book

Book Description
God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.

Beyond the Mountains

Beyond the Mountains PDF Author: Drew A. Swanson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region’s environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

Unwhite

Unwhite PDF Author: Meredith McCarroll
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353620
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book

Book Description
Appalachia resides in the American imagination at the intersections of race and class in a very particular way, in the tension between deep historic investments in seeing the region as "pure white stock" and as deeply impoverished and backward. Meredith McCarroll's Unwhite analyzes the fraught location of Appalachians within the southern and American imaginaries, building on studies of race in literary and cinematic characterizations of the American South. Not only do we know what "rednecks" and "white trash" are, McCarroll argues, we rely on the continued use of such categories in fashioning our broader sense of self and other. Further, we continue to depend upon the existence of the region of Appalachia as a cultural construct. As a consequence, Appalachia has long been represented in the collective cultural history as the lowest, the poorest, the most ignorant, and the most laughable community. McCarroll complicates this understanding by asserting that white privilege remains intact while Appalachia is othered through reliance on recognizable nonwhite cinematic stereotypes. Unwhite demonstrates how typical characterizations of Appalachian people serve as foils to set off and define the "whiteness" of the non-Appalachian southerners. In this dynamic, Appalachian characters become the racial other. Analyzing the representation of the people of Appalachia in films such as Deliverance, Cold Mountain, Medium Cool, Norma Rae, Cape Fear, The Killing Season, and Winter's Bone through the critical lens of race and specifically whiteness, McCarroll offers a reshaping of the understanding of the relationship between racial and regional identities.