Studying Appalachian Studies

In this collection, contributors reflect on scholarly, artistic, activist, educational, and practical endeavor known as Appalachian Studies. Following an introduction to the field, the writers discuss how Appalachian Studies illustrates the ways interdisciplinary studies emerge, organize, and institutionalize themselves, and how they engage with intellectual, political, and economic forces both locally and around the world. Essayists argue for Appalachian Studies' integration with kindred fields like African American studies, women's studies, and Southern studies, and they urge those involved in the field to globalize the perspective of Appalachian Studies; to commit to continued applied, participatory action, and community-based research; to embrace more fully the field's capacity for bringing about social justice; to advocate for a more accurate understanding of Appalachia and its people; and to understand and overcome the obstacles interdisciplinary studies face in the social and institutional construction of knowledge. Contributors: Chris Baker, Chad Berry, Donald Edward Davis, Amanda Fickey, Chris Green, Erica Abrams Locklear, Phillip J. Obermiller, Douglas Reichert Powell, Michael Samers, Shaunna L. Scott, and Barbara Ellen Smith.

In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.

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.

Known for its dramatic beauty and valuable natural resources, Appalachia has undergone significant technological, economic, political, and environmental changes in recent decades. Home to distinctive traditions and a rich cultural heritage, the area is also plagued by poverty, insufficient healthcare and education, drug addiction, and ecological devastation. This complex and controversial region has been examined by generations of scholars, activists, and civil servants -- all offering an array of perspectives on Appalachia and its people. In this innovative volume, editors William Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher assemble both scholars and nonprofit practitioners to examine how Appalachia is perceived both within and beyond its borders. Together, they investigate the region's transformation and analyze how it is currently approached as a topic of academic inquiry. Arguing that interdisciplinary and comparative place-based studies increasingly matter, the contributors investigate numerous topics, including race and gender, environmental transformation, university-community collaborations, cyber identities, fracking, contemporary activist strategies, and analyze Appalachia in the context of local-to-global change. A pathbreaking study analyzing continuity and change in the region through a global framework, Appalachia Revisited is essential reading for scholars and students as well as for policymakers, community and charitable organizers, and those involved in community development.

A Handbook to Appalachia provides a clear, concise first step toward understanding the expanding field of Appalachian studies, from the history of the area to its sometimes conflicted image, from its music and folklore to its outstanding literature. Also includes information on African Americans, Asheville, (North Carolina), ballads, baskets, bluegrass music, blues music, Cherokee Indians, Cincinnati (Ohio), Churches, Civil War, coal, cultural diversity, death, folk culture, food, Georgia, health, immigration, industry, Irish, Kentucky, Midwest, migration, Melungeons, Native Americans, North Carolina, out-migration, politics, population, poverty, Radford University, schools, Scotch-Irish, Scotland, South Carolina, storytelling, strip mining, Tennessee, Ulster Scots, Virginia, West Virginia, Women, etc.

"The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of the realm that they would encounter on high. The name "Appalachia" became shorthand for a series of moral and economic calculations and pop culture references. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. Proving Ground studies a collection of these professionals in transit to show that the travelers' tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge. The visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise, and it was to these groups that they became insiders. They were not immersing themselves in a regional culture, but rather in their own professional cultures. These were people who used the mountains to help themselves. Proving Ground is a cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century. By using these frameworks to analyze the personal papers, professional records, and popular works of these budding experts, the book presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. It will attract students of Appalachian Studies who are interested in the phenomena of cultural and environmental intervention, environmental historians concerned with the construction of hybrid landscapes, and mobility scholars who recognize the organizational power derived from access and movement"--