Customer Reviews:
History that's great reading, and interesting .......2006-07-04
This captures the sense of "being there", and pulls the reader into Appalachia history, like reading a good novel.
Concisely edited for maximum impact, without loss of content.(a fine balancing act by the editors, that took over a decade to compile!)
This is so engaging, tha I have bought several as gifts.
Outstanding documentation, and great storytelling abound.
Reference, coffetable, and personal library uses are a must.
Exciting Overview of Appalachian Culture, Music, Literature & Religion.......2006-06-21
As a undergrad who is finishing up my studies in History with a minor in Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State-I will go on and get my master's in Appalachian & Bluegrass studies .
This is a well-written resource that is full of any information of the Appalachia's. From literature, religion, mountain music, conservation, culture, movies, Foxfire,-more than you can digest in one reading.
The author breaks each catagory down in sections that deal with a specific topic. This is a must for your library. This is a thick volume that should have been broken down into 4 volumes. the book is very bulky and heavy. I guess all the education and reading does weigh a lot!
Excellent Pair: Two Books That Change The Way We See Appalachia.......2006-05-15
Like Amazon's pairing, and featured on National Public Radio, The Encyclopedia of Appalachia and The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America, are two excellent and landmark books in understanding the history, cultures and social importance of the Southern Mountains to our country. The Encyclopedia is divided into several sections: land, people, economy, culture, and institutions (such as schools, media). Like any encyclopedia, the entries are short but concise, and provide just enough information to inform but not bore you and give a long list of resources for more scholarship. The experts and authors that contributed to the book come from colleges around the South and nation. Just leafing through this opus is rewarding. The richness and diversity of the region come through in every section. The United States of Appalachia is similar in its theme -- that Appalachia has been overlooked and undervalued -- but it provides more in-depth and inspiring portraits of Appalachian Americans who have been on the cutting edge of American innovations and social movements. It is divided into several parts: music, American Revolution, abolitionist movement, labor movements, literature, civil rights movement, and the environment.
Both of the these books are indispensable and highly recommended for all readers interested in history and life from one of our country's most misunderstood regions.
The Reference for the Region.......2006-03-25
I was priviledged to be at the Appalachian Studies conference where this mammoth work was unveiled, and it achieves it's purpose: it is a tremenous reference for all things Appalachian. I first knew about the encyclopedia when my father was contacted a few years ago to author a few articles for inclusion in the agriculture section. The editors have worked hard to find the most qualified people to write in every section- my dad grew up in Buchanan County, Virginia on a sustenance farm, and is now an agronomist who works for the University of Kentucky. Every contributor is this qualified!
One note: if you are looking for an "introduction" to the Appalachian Region, this is not it. This is more of a reference, reading this cover to cover would be somewhat comparable to reading the dictionary through, I would imagine. If you want an introduction, go for "A Handbook to Appalachia", by University of Tennessee Press, or, for a less scholarly but quite interesting take, the Foxfire series.
When I got my copy of the Encyclopedia, I was very impressed. I can't wait until I have time to sit down with it for a long while and simply browse through its pages and see how many new things I learn. As an undergraduate researcher in Appalachian Religion, I look forward especially to reading the religion section as edited by Howard Dorgan (whom I luckily had the chance to meet at the conference), the premier authority on religion in Appalachia.
For all scholars of Appalachia, this reference is invaluable.
Comprehensive.......2006-03-15
Comprehensive tome on every aspect of life in the Appalachian region. Some 1800 pages, 30 sections. 170 articles on music alone. Appalachia is not your grandfather's mountain anymore!
If you thought the hills were about hoedowns and yee-haws, this volume will make you think again. Consider, for example, that just in the musical sphere, Jimmy Blanton, Bessie Smith, George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Ray Brown, and Edgar Meyer were all born and raised in Appalachia.
Book Description
The Hatfield-McCoy feud, the entertaining subject of comic strips, popular songs, movies, and television, has long been a part of American folklore and legend. Ironically, the extraordinary endurance of the myth that has grown up around the Hatfields and McCoys has obscured the consideration of the feud as a serious historical event. In this study, Altina Waller tells the real story of the Hatfields and McCoys and the Tug Valley of West Virginia and Kentucky, placing the feud in the context of community and regional change in the era of industrialization.
Waller argues that the legendary feud was not an outgrowth of an inherently violent mountain culture but rather one manifestation of a contest for social and economic control between local people and outside industrial capitalists—the Hatfields were defending community autonomy while the McCoys were allied with the forces of industrial capitalism. Profiling the colorful feudists "Devil Anse" Hatfield, "Old Ranel" McCoy, "Bad" Frank Phillips, and the ill-fated lovers Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield, Waller illustrates how Appalachians both shaped and responded to the new economic and social order.
Customer Reviews:
Great Research of the FEUD.......2004-09-07
This book happens to be one of the only studies that Dr. Coleman Hatfield recommended at one of the talks I attended. Dr. Hatfield is the great-grandson of Devil Anse and is quite a history scholar in his own right -- and the author of "THE TALE OF THE DEVIL" the first and only biography of Devil Anse Hatfield.
Waller has meticulously studied the subject matter, and it's worth reading. And American tragedy.
Useful, but flawed in several important aspects . . ........2002-09-21
Dr. Waller attempts to get past the "traditional accounts", usually assembled from the newspaper and popular accounts of the time, but falls into one error which confounds the rest of her presentation: she found a great deal of information for the Hatfield family and for the West Virginia side of the river, but not as much for the Kentucky side and she generalized about the second using what she learned from the first. While the book was exceptionally well-researched, some information was overlooked or missed. Professor Waller unfortunately accepts the claim that the Tug Valley was a Confederate stronghold. However, only the West Virginia side of the river was strongly Confederate in its sympathies. The Kentucky side of the river contained a large number of Union veterans (possibly as many as a hundred or more men from this area joined the Federal army), and, in fact, in Pike County the area bordering the river was the most loyal in the entire county (post-war voting records reveal the largest percentages of Republican voters in the two precincts which were part of the Tug Valley). Waller's initial conclusions lead her to dismiss the Civil War connections of the feud. She was apparently unaware of the high degree of Unionism in the region and how it may have contributed to what could have been a continuation of the 1861-1865 warfare on the border, despite the alleged thirteen- and five-year respites. While it is well-known that Hatfield and his kin were Confederate veterans (though there is a justifiable dispute as to whether Devil Anse was actually a member of the Logan Wildcats), and it is also known that many of the McCoys had served in gray with the Hatfields, in the later phases of the feud (aptly identified by Dr. Waller) the participation of several former Union veterans or their sons in the fighting against the Hatfields indicates a significant Civil War connection. The evidence that the feuding was a carryover from the war is substantial and cannot be dismissed.
Hatfields and McCoys.......2002-07-21
It has long been assumed that the famous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys in the 1880's was a family affair between two clans of primitive hillbillies. In Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900, Altina Waller argues that this view is nothing less than folklore, and the historical reality of the feud has been all but lost. Her work successfully explodes the myths that have surrounded the feuding Hatfields and McCoys.
In her introduction, Professor Waller discusses the previous interpretations of the feud. The first states that, "the feud and the culture from which it emerged were anachronisms in modern society" and "they represented a primitive way of life which had somehow been preserved in much the same way that prehistoric fossils are preserved." The second school of thought suggests that the feud was a result of the transformation that was occurring in the region due to the "onslaught of industrialization." Waller rejects both of these interpretations because of three aspects of the feud that she has identified as violence, family, and timing. Waller has concluded after much research that "in the 1870s and 1880s, the Tug Valley may have been boisterous and rowdy, but it was far from dangerous" and that "something unusual was happening eithin this particular community which drove a few individuals and families to resort to extreme measures." And Waller discounts the family explanation because " supportersof the Hatfields and of the Mccoys consisted of numerous individuals unrelated to those families; in fact, more than half of each group were unrelated to the feud leaders. More puzzling, there were McCoys on the Hatfield side and Hatfields on the McCoy side." Waller rejects also that the feud was caused by the Civil War. She dates the feud from 1878-1900, and identifies two phases with a five year interim. Waller offers that the feud must be examined internally and also in the light of regional and national trends.
The Tug Valley in the years following the Civil War underwent profound changes. Due to rapid growth in population and the finite agricultural resources available in the Valley, a sort of greedy desperation began to emerge in the character of some inhabitants of the Tug Valley. Also at this time outside interest in the vast resources of the Appalachias was taking the form of big money men and local agents purchasing huge tracts of land in order to exploit the mountains for their coal and timber. Gradually the mountaineer was transformed from an inependent farmer to an impoverished wage laborer. attempting to buck this trend is none other than Devil Anse Hatfield. Through hard work and some crafty legal maneuvers, Anse becomes proprieter of a sizable timber busines. And in the process incurs the wrath of Old Ranel McCoy and Perry Cline. Old Ranel through his own foolishness has not prospered, and Anse has bested Cline in a court action and removed him from his lands, which are then awarded to Anse. This is what Professor Waller has discovered to be the crux of the feud--economic power and control and its resultant societal implications. Anse has climbed the ladder while others have watched, and they are jealous.
These truths were initially lost because of the sensational handling of the feud by the newspapers of the day. Altina Waller has been successful in separating the myths from the reality. She states in conclusion that, "the feudists were struggling with the same historical forces of transformation that had been changing Americal since before the American Revolution." This is the larger picture.
Well-researched and written account of the famous feud along.......1998-05-28
Waller has a done a spectacular job of recreating this now infamous event, seperating fact from myth and rebutting many of the stereotypes that were perpetrated about the feud by the Northern press that glamorized it. As a native of Pike County, Kentucky and a distant relative of many involved in this feud, I found the text most informative. It is also accesible to anyone who is not from Appalachia or who is not versed in its history.
Amazon.com
John O'Brien's scrupulous, exactingly honest memoir opens in 1995 on the day of his father's funeral in Philadelphia, which he will not attend because "eighteen years of silence stand between us [and] my presence would only add to family stress." Instead, he chooses to visit his father's birthplace in Piedmont, West Virginia, and consider the roots of their estrangement in the region that indelibly shaped them both. In a subtle, ruminative text, the author interweaves his memories with a history of Appalachia that debunks many myths. (The Hatfield-McCoy "feud," for example, had more to do with dislocation caused by the coal and timber industries than any native blood lust.) Much of the book limns O'Brien's first few years in Franklin, a small town two hours south of Piedmont where he and his family settled in 1984. A bitter conflict involving the Woodlands Institute, an educational establishment that locals feared was trying to "take over" their school system, becomes a paradigm for O'Brien of the way affluent outsiders have always stereotyped Appalachia as a primitive backwater peopled by hillbillies, while the residents resisted attempts by strangers to "improve" their home ground with a stubborn fatalism about the possibility of (or need for) change. The author's own conflicts with his parents--who were skeptical when he went to college and horrified when he admitted to seeing a psychiatrist--reveal a provincialism and narrow-mindedness he does not deny are common in the region. At the same time, he affirms the joy of living close to nature and honors the "plainspoken, empathetic, and genuine" native character. Because his complex work doesn't trade in stock nostrums or easy sentimentality, the portrait that emerges of a people and a place rings deeply true. --Wendy Smith
Book Description
John O’Brien’s deeply evocative book re- veals a place and a way of life—and the lives of an estranged father and son whose differences rest, ironically, in their own powerful bonds to Appalachia.
John O’Brien was born in Philadelphia, his father having left his beloved home in the West Virginia mountains after an impoverished childhood made all the more painful by family tragedy. Struggling to escape a father defeated by disappointment, displacement, and poverty, John too left home. When John decided to settle near his father’s birthplace in West Virginia, he hoped to comprehend the elder O’Brien’s attachment to the land, as well as the disabling fatalism he had carried north.
What he discovered is hardly the mythic Appalachia most Americans imagine, but a world of extravagant beauty—lush with green mountains, deep forests, ice-cold trout streams, and small hill farms. The people we meet who inhabit this land are for the most part unpretentious, working class, straightforward, open, commonsensical, and easygoing. They tend to look back more than most Americans do, defining themselves by how they fit into an extended family that includes their ancestors. We are in a mountain culture that feels old and deeply rooted, that follows a traditional way of life. It is a world the author would finally love and call his own.
We also come face-to-face with provincialism, intolerance, and—perhaps Appalachia’s defining legacy—the horrors of the coalfields and chemical plants. We see clearly what rapacious greed and exploitation have done for generations to much of
the landscape and to the lives of the people. And we learn of the stream of reformers and missionaries, ever ready to show Appalachia the way, whose real contributions tend to be negligible or absurd.
In this clear-eyed, beautifully rendered telling of his story and his father’s, John O’Brien gives us, as well, the history and true heart of Appalachia.
Customer Reviews:
History.......2007-03-11
This book contains a lot of historical observation about West Virginia from a native son. The author makes the culture of Appalachia come alive, dispeling the stereotypes. I enjoyed the author's personal journey - leaving the area and returning again to address the questions that we all have about how our home towns have influence on our lives. In addressing the issue of "hillbillys" he reminds us that we can all be victims of others' perceptions. He makes me want to add West Virginia, specifically Appalachia to my travel plans.
Closure.......2007-01-22
I hope the John found the closure he was looking for through the writing of this book. May he rest in peace.
A la William Faulkner, but ..........2007-01-10
The author is trying to emulate the stylist Faulkner, but with little success. In architectonics, O'Brien's work is but a poor copy of the fascinating monologues one finds in Faulkner's "Light in August."
He has better watch out his un-English sentences(e.g. pp. 122, 134, 181 of the 2001 Anchor Books edition).
Beautiful, Piognant .......2004-12-16
I love to read, but im not much of a writer. However, i was so moved after reading this book that i had to share my thoughts. For years I have struggled with labels while traveling outside of the my home state of WV. If people even know that the state exists i get comments such as "Are you married to your Uncle? Ha, Ha" I would get so frustrated because these people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, Where do they get this?!? O'Brian does an excellent job of explaining where the stereotypes of our region origiate and how some people then unknowingly act the part of the stereotype.
I had to read this book for a college course, but i could not put it down. First, it is interesting in that I am from the area his book describes and I can identify with so many of his feelings about his home. Second, unlike many reviews at this site, I believe that his life story is essential to the book. His dads relationship is described to aid in the understanding of the region and the people, and i personally found his introspection honest and refreshing, instead of trying to remove himself from the book he put his soul in it.
West Virginia is more than a depression attempt at writing.......2004-04-28
John O'Brien's At Home in the Heart of Appalachia is neither inspring, uplifting, or well written. His book is filled with overindulgent excuses for his father's racism while perpetuating stereotypes of Appalachia. His writing is aimless. In some areas, he seems too engrossed in self pity, and in others he just seems to be building on an image of a man he obviously created for himself in college. Attempts to strip his ego are shallow and unconvincing. At times, I really saw, or felt I saw, O'Brien trying to get a book out by deadline. If this was a writing that glorified the Appalachian experience or its people, he would have had an excuse. John O'Brien had some fuel to work with, if this was the case. The Woodland's Institute would have been suited for a book of this nature. His returning "home" may also have been a great journey, if it truly was his home. It wasn't. New Jersey was his home and John happened to have relatives in West Virginia.
Book Description
Few places in the United States confound and fascinate Americans like Appalachia, yet no other area has been so markedly mischaracterized by the mass media. Stereotypes of hillbillies and rednecks repeatedly appear in representations of the region, but few, if any, of its many heroes, visionaries, or innovators are ever referenced.
Make no mistake, they are legion: from Anne Royall, America's first female muckraker, to Sequoyah, a Cherokee mountaineer who invented the first syllabary in modern times, and international divas Nina Simone and Bessie Smith, as well as writers Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, and Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck, Appalachia has contributed mightily to American culture — and politics. Not only did eastern Tennessee boast the country's first antislavery newspaper, Appalachians also established the first District of Washington as a bold counterpoint to British rule. With humor, intelligence, and clarity, Jeff Biggers reminds us how Appalachians have defined and shaped the United States we know today.
Customer Reviews:
I Loved This Book.......2006-05-08
It got me mid-way, 'bout the time I realized that I was reading not a history book but a great American saga, as the author writers in a seat-of-your-pants chapter on the labor movement: the Great American Industrial Saga. Did you know that the first story of social realist/literary naturalism (don't know the difference myself) came out of Appalachia by a young woman, who wrote about the Iron Mills in Appalachia for The Atlantic Monthly in 1861!! And then jazz-stepping cotton mill girls driving their Model T's down the mountain roads to save their lovers...and then the coal miners: Which Side Are You On? This book goes on like this. One great story after another (only the early American history bogged down on me, but hey, we gotta start somewhere). The United States of Appalachia is an unusual book...the kind that makes you rethink every stereotype you have planted in your brain, but more importantly, the kind that makes you rethink American history completely.
As many other reviews have noted, there is a common question that keeps coming into your head as you read this book: Why have I never heard about this? Why didn't I know that the New York Times was owned and led and saved by an Appalachian publisher? Why didn't I know that mountaineers turned the tide of the American Revolution at Kings Mountain? Why didn't I know that young civil rights students learned We Shall Overcome at an Appalachian school? Why didn't I know that Nina Simone, that tempestous jazz icon, came from the backwoods and introduced House of the Rising Sun (not the silly Animals or Bob Dylan)? Why didn't I know that Pearl Buck wrote a memoir on West Virginia that was instrumental in her Nobel laureate?
Read this book. I loved it. You will, too.
beautiful American story.......2006-04-25
Beautiful writing, page after page, that gets to the heart of the American experience. What impressed me was the range of material. The author starts with Martha Graham and ends with Edward Abbey, and weaves in famous and should-be famous persons from music, the Cherokee, the pioneers, turn-of-the century icons, to the 1960s. Jeff Biggers is an old fashioned renaissance story-teller. He can go from one theme to the next with real ease. I think this book is going to surprise a lot of people. It surprised me.
Great Read.......2006-03-30
I saw this author at the Virginia Book Festival. He is a terrific speaker. I sat spellbound for all of his presentation--or reading. The book, I was afraid, might let me down, but it didn't. It is as inspiring as Biggers' speaking style. In it, the author peels off one incredible story after another--most of which I had never heard before--from the time of the Cherokee and their Renaissance until today. There are more colorful characters than a Greek tragicomedy--and they're all true life figures. Biggers' thesis is simple: You can't understand America until you understand Appalachia. After reading this book, you will be a believer.
American History Your Teacher Never Told You About.......2006-03-18
I rarely read history, but the United States of Appalachia is one of those rare reads that you wished you had read when you were a student. It reads like a novel--the kind you wish would never end. Fortunately for us old-timers today, Jeff Biggers has written a book that forces us to reconsider our misperceptions about how and where American history was made, about how and why we relegate some regions to a footnote when in fact they deserve a major chapter, and shows us how our country's most mocked region has in fact been a wellspring of innovation. Sound like a dry history treatise? This book isn't. Why? Because it tells the stories of history makers, some famous and some not so famous, who have been on the cutting edge of social reforms, social rebellions and social movements for art, justice and political change.
Biggers throws out a wide net. In doing so, he breaks down the ignorant hillbilly stereotype subject by subject, movement by movement. He explains how the stereotypes grew, just as mountaineers continued to be innovators, and how the region became urbanized and urbane. He calls this paradox the great American saga. He writes about Sequoyah and the Cherokee renaissance, pioneers and the first independent community in the colonies and their role in turning the tide of the American Revolution, abolitionists and educators, labor organizers and "disorderly women" who took the jazz age to the mills and mines, pioneering civil rights organizers. He also dedicates a lot of time to music and literature, focusing on surprising figures like jazz singer Nina Simone, blues singer Bessie Smith, Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck, Little Lord Faunteroy author Frances H. Burnett, and contemporary writers like Cormac McCarthy.
In sum, this is American history at its best.
Scotch-Irish AND Africans Americans AND Germans AND Welsh AND AND.......2006-03-14
I agree with most of ther reviewers below. Jeff Biggers has simply shattered the backwards stereotypes with a stunning blow of history and done a lot of research to show the amazing folks that came out of Appalachia. He paints a broad canvass. He's not stuck on one group. He loves them all. In fact, I'd call this book a love letter to Appalachia and a reminder of their importance to America.
Barry Vance's review below is dead wrong. Biggers weaves one tale after another about the Scotch Irish, as other reviewers have noted. And besides, Vance completely confuses his singer. Biggers wrote about Bessie Smith, from Chattanooga, and Nina Simone, from Tryon, North Carolina, not Billie Holiday or Janis Joplin. He just says they were influenced by Smith and Simone. Get your singers right, Mr. Vance!
Customer Reviews:
BELIEVERS IN THE HILLS.......2000-02-11
Into the hills and hollows of Appalachia this book travels to examine the faith of the hill-folk. Written primarily by academics, the contributors are familiar with mountain people and their Christian beliefs. The plurality of the region's faith is emphasized with some contributors searching for a common "mountain religion". From serpent-handlers to double predestinationists, Appalachia is a patchwork quilt, inwhich low church traditions predominate. The low church traditions differ perhaps from other regions of America in that here these traditions are divided up into schisms and sub-schisms. Mainline denominations are included but their relative lack of success with the hill-folk makes their story less interesting. For myself, I found the mountain Baptist and Pentecostal churches by far the most intriquing. In particular the chapters on the Old Time Baptists by Howard Dorgan, Serpent-Handlers by Mary Lee Daughtery, and the Profile of the Church of God by Donald N. Bowdle are worth the price of the book. Some of the other contributors are a bit dry, getting bogged down in denominational minutia and programs rather than describing the people and their faith. In that respect, the book is somewhat like gold mining: a lot of ore, but the nuggets are so worth all the work. As a farmer, I enjoyed the chapter on the "tobacco churches" by Poage. If you love the Southern Appalachians as I do, and are intrigued by its people, you will enjoy this book. The mountain people who are sometimes condescendingly seen as simple, are here portrayed as genuine, sincere zealous seekers of God. With the homogenization of America through mass media(yes, there are satellite dishes in Appalachia), one wonders how much longer the "mountain religion" will remain relatively unchanged. As Samuel S. Hill states in the last chapter, these people are not "frozen in time". But, on an optimistic note, perhaps the mountain people with no quest to be "up to date"(like, for example those in Mainline Protestantism), will continue to remain relatively unchanged, and ironically these premoderns will have something relevant to teach us in the postmodern world.
Book Description
The stereotypical hillbilly figure in popular culture provokes a range of responses, from bemused affection for Ma and Pa Kettle to outright fear of the mountain men in Deliverance. In Hillbillyland, J. W. Williamson investigates why hillbilly images are so pervasive in our culture and what purposes they serve. He has mined more than 800 movies, from early nickelodeon one-reelers to contemporary films such as Thelma and Louise and Raising Arizona, for representations of hillbillies in their recurring roles as symbolic 'cultural others.' Williamson's hillbillies live not only in the hills of the South but anywhere on the rough edge of society. And they are not just men; women can be hillbillies, too. According to Williamson, mainstream America responds to hillbillies because they embody our fears and hopes and a romantic vision of the past. They are clowns, children, free spirits, or wild people through whom we live vicariously while being reassured about our own standing in society.
Customer Reviews:
D.W. Griffith meets Andy Griffith (and the Coen brothers).......2005-03-03
This is a well-researched look at Hollywood's never-ending fascination with moonshine, country bumpkins, and what goes on up there in the hills beyond Beverly. In the early 1920s as more people moved to the cities, Hollywood found it could make money telling audiences about the places they'd left behind. Lurid tales of sex and debauchery, such as 1950's "Tobacco Road," undercut the good-hearted goofiness of the Ma and Pa Kettle series of the 1940s. By the 1990s, the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" was a hit on the strength of Nicolas Cage's ironic portrayal of a lovable yokel (an updated edition of this book would have to include the current TV show "My Name Is Earl," proving this archetype isn't dead by a long shot).
Williamson covers a lot of ground here, from "The Andy Griffith Show" to John Boorman's "Deliverance," and his conclusions are fairly broad ones. His best writing narrows focus on a specific film or theme: the on-location making of the log-cabin potboiler "Stark Love" (1926) is wildly detailed, with newspaper reporting and interviews with local extras who made appearances in the film as members of an "authentic" mountain family. Lots of movie stills, contemporary cartoons, and detailed captions accompany the text. At times the book reads like a college course -- Williamson is a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and acknowledges the input of several students -- but for film buffs and general readers, "Hillbillyland" is an entertaining look at how the film industry exploits one facet of American culture.
Average customer rating:
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The Handcraft Revival in Southern Appalachia, 1930-1990
Garry G. Barker
Manufacturer: University of Tennessee Press
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ASIN: 0870497030 |
Customer Reviews:
more than I needed to know.......2006-07-02
For my unacademic interest in this obscure group of Americans, the detail here was a bit smothering. But the author does raise some good points in his comments on racial attitudes. But he seems to contend that there is no such thing as race and then spends much of the book talking about race. Not a bad read for a long plane ride.
A good read.......2004-04-03
this is the true story behind the legends. I recommend it.
Excellent synopsis of research as it currently stands.......2004-03-19
Wayne Winkler has done an outstanding job researching and synthesizing his findings into an informative, readable book.
Walking Toward the Sunset.......2004-03-18
Good book about a very interesting group of people.
A Fascinating Book.......2004-03-06
I had heard stories all my life about the Melungeons. They were a mysterious people of unknown origin who had strange customs. There have been newspaper and magazine articles in the last few years, but they never seemed to get to the heart of the story and tell us who the Melungeons actually are. I was eager to read this new book, and I'm glad I did. It turns out most of what I "knew" about Melungeons was false. Winkler puts the Melungeon story in historical context, and also talks about the many similar mixed-race groups around the United States, groups that I'd never heard of. This is a fascinating story about a tiny group of people who have survived to celebrate their unique heritage.
Book Description
Appalachia may be the most mythologized and misunderstood place in America, its way of life and inhabitants both caricatured and celebrated in the mainstream media. Over generations, though, the families living in the mountainous region stretching from West Virginia to northeastern Alabama have forged one of the country's richest and most distinctive cultures, encompassing music, food, architecture, customs, and language.
In Appalachian Folkways, geographer John Rehder offers an engaging and enlightening account of southern Appalachia and its cultural milieu that is at once sweeping and intimate. From architecture and traditional livelihoods to beliefs and art, Rehder, who has spent thirty years studying the region, offers a nuanced depiction of southern Appalachia's social and cultural identity. The book opens with an expert consideration of the southern Appalachian landscape, defined by mountains, rocky soil, thick forests, and plentiful streams. While these features have shaped the inhabitants of the region, Rehder notes, Appalachians have also shaped their environment, and he goes on to explore the human influence on the landscape.
From physical geography, the book moves to settlement patterns, describing the Indian tribes that flourished before European settlement and the successive waves of migration that brought Melungeon, Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers to the region, along with the cultural contributions each made to what became a distinct Appalachian culture. Next focusing on the folk culture of Appalachia, Rehder details such cultural expressions as architecture and landscape design; traditional and more recent ways of making a living, both legal and illegal; foodstuffs and cooking techniques; folk remedies and belief systems; music, art, and the folk festivals that today attract visitors from around the world; and the region's dialect. With its broad scope and deep research, Appalachian Folkways accurately and evocatively chronicles a way of life that is fast disappearing.
Customer Reviews:
A definitive depiction of a people and their history .......2004-10-10
Appalachian Folkways by John B. Rehder (Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee) is an informed and informative account of the regional culture Southern Appalachia. Drawing upon more than 30 years of study, Professor Rehder provides the reader with a definitive depiction of a people and their history which began with the settlement by Europeans that was to include successive waves of Melungeon, Scotch-Irish, English, and Germans. Influenced by culture shaping environment, Appalachian Folkways showcases architecture and landscape designs, as well as the culinary traditions, folk remedies, and belief systems of the area. Of special merit is the presentation of Appalachian dialect, music, art, and the folk festivals that are being eroded as a way of life quickly disappears under the pressures of the broader American mass culture. Appalachian Folkways is a welcome and seminal contribution to American regional history collections.
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Books Index
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