The Mountain People

In The Mountain People, Colin M. Turnbull describes the dehumanization of the Ik, African tribesmen who in less than three generations have deteriorated from being once-prosperous hunters to scattered bands of hostile, starving people whose only goal is individual survival. Sad, disturbing, and eloquently written, The Mountain People is a moving meditation on human nature, our capacity for goodness, and the fragility of human society.

An anthropologist records the moral decline of African tribesmen struggling to survive after being forced from their hunting grounds.

David Cohen lived among the Ramapo Mountain People for a year, conducting genealogical research into church records, deeds, wills, and inventories in county courthouses and libraries. He established that their ancestors included free black landowners in New York City and mulattoes with some Dutch ancestry who were among the first pioneers to settle in the Hackensack River Valley of New Jersey.

This book presents the rich panorama of Ute history, from the archaeological features of prehistoric Ute cultures to elements of present-day Ute culture.

In the early 1940s, $10 bought a bus ticket from Appalachia to a better job and promise of prosperity in the flatlands of northeast Ohio. A mountaineer with a strong back and will to work could find a job within twenty-four hours of arrival. But the cost of a bus ticket was more than a week's wages in a lumber camp, and the mountaineer paid dearly in loss of kin, culture, homeplace, and freedom. Numerous scholarly works have addressed this migration that brought more than one million mountaineers to Ohio alone. But Mountain People in a Flat Land is the first popular history of Appalachian migration to one community -- Ashtabula County, an industrial center in the fabled "best location in the nation." These migrants share their stories of life in Appalachia before coming north. There are tales of making moonshine, colorful family members, home remedies harvested from the wild, and life in coal company towns and lumber camps. The mountaineers explain why, despite the beauty of the mountains and the deep kinship roots, they had to leave Appalachia. Stories of their hardships, cultural clashes, assimilation, and ultimate successes in the flatland provide a moving look at an often stereotyped people.