a blend of "African," "Appalachian," and the suffix "-ian" — named something that had existed for centuries but had never had a name: the experience of being both Black and Appalachian, of belonging to both identities simultaneously, of refusing the false choice between them. → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
this phrase, which a mountain farmer in 1887 would have understood to mean a hole dug in a hillside, would be interpreted by courts in the twentieth century to include strip mining, augering, and mountaintop removal. Methods of extraction that had not yet been invented were encompassed by language w → Case Study 15.1: The Broad Form Deed — Signing Away a Mountain for Pennies
"brain drain"
has been one of the most consequential demographic forces in the region's modern history. When the young people leave, they take their energy, their skills, their tax contributions, and their childbearing potential with them. The communities they leave behind grow older, smaller, and less able to su → Chapter 36: The New Appalachia — Immigration, Remote Work, Tourism, and Reinvention
"briar"
a slur directed at Appalachian migrants — was common in Cincinnati schools and workplaces. Appalachian children were placed in remedial classes because their accents were interpreted as signs of low intelligence. Appalachian adults were denied housing in some neighborhoods and denied service in some → Case Study 41.2: The Rust Belt and Appalachia — Parallel Histories of Deindustrialization
the assumption that Appalachian poverty was at least partly a cultural problem requiring cultural solutions — diverted attention and resources from structural causes. Programs designed to change attitudes, teach job skills, and improve personal habits were not useless, but they were insufficient. Yo → Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again
"culture of poverty" thesis
the idea that poverty is caused by the cultural characteristics of the poor rather than by structural economic forces. In Appalachia, the feuding stereotype was a key building block of this argument. It provided a ready-made explanation for why the region remained poor even as its resources enriched → Chapter 13: The Feud Mythology — What Really Happened (and What It Was Really About)
"culture wars"
the framing of American politics as a conflict between traditional values and secular liberalism — created a new axis of political identity that cut across the old economic axis. A union miner in Harlan County who voted Democratic because the party supported his union and his paycheck might also be → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
mirrors the broader extraction pattern that has defined the region's history (see the recurring theme of "The Extraction Pattern" throughout this textbook). The resource being extracted is not coal or timber. It is stories. → Chapter 35: Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Appalachian Identity
"enchanted world"
a world in which the boundary between the natural and the supernatural was porous, in which signs, omens, portents, and invisible forces were understood to operate alongside the visible, material world. This enchanted worldview coexisted with Christianity — sometimes comfortably, sometimes in tensio → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
is one of the most consequential policy decisions in American history. The promise originated in Special Field Order No. 15, issued by General William T. Sherman in January 1865, which set aside coastal lands in Georgia and South Carolina for freed people. President Andrew Johnson reversed the order → Chapter 12: Emancipation in the Mountains — Black Appalachians from Slavery to Freedom
"hillbilly" stereotype
the image of Appalachians as ignorant, dirty, lazy, violent, and culturally backward. This stereotype, whose construction we traced in Chapter 14, followed the migrants from the mountains to the cities and was weaponized against them by established urban residents who saw the newcomers as a threat t → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
a progressive lung condition found exclusively in men who worked underground in coal mines. By the early twentieth century, the medical evidence was substantial: coal dust inhalation caused lung disease, and prolonged exposure caused severe, often fatal disease. → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
immortalized in Merle Travis's 1946 song "Sixteen Tons" and later made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 recording — was not poetic exaggeration. It was an accurate description of a system in which a working man could labor underground for a month and emerge on payday with no cash at all. In som → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
"redneck"
which in modern usage has been appropriated as a class-based slur or a self-deprecating badge of identity, depending on who is speaking — has its origins in the West Virginia mine wars. The red bandana worn around the neck was a union identifier, a visible declaration of solidarity. Miners who wore → Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal — Labor Wars in the Mountains
a place whose people and environment are sacrificed for the benefit of others — was not invented for Appalachia, but it applies with devastating precision. The coalfields of Appalachia were, for more than a century, a sacrifice zone: a place where American energy was produced at a human cost that th → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
"Sang digging"
the colloquial term, from the shortened pronunciation "sang" — was hard, skilled work. A digger needed to know the plant's preferred habitat (shaded slopes with rich soil, often near tulip poplar, sugar maple, and buckeye trees), recognize it among the many other forest plants, and extract the root → Case Study 1 — The Ginseng Trade: Appalachia's First Global Export
"sociolinguistic gratuity"
the principle that linguists who study a community have an obligation to give something back. His outreach programs have included dialect awareness curricula for schools, public lectures, documentaries, and community-engaged research projects designed to help Appalachian communities understand and t → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
"solastalgia"
coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress caused by environmental change in one's home environment — was adopted by researchers studying the psychological impacts on coalfield communities. People grieved for mountains the way they might grieve for a death in the fa → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
"the anointing"
a felt sense of God's presence and direction that tells the believer it is time to take up the serpent. Handling outside the anointing — out of pride, showmanship, or the desire to prove something — is considered dangerous and spiritually improper. The anointing is understood as God's specific, mome → Case Study 1: Snake Handling — The Most Sensationalized, Least Representative Practice
"The right to remove any timber"
the company could cut the family's trees to shore up mine tunnels. Timber that the family might have sold, or used for building, or depended on for the forest ecology that sustained game, nuts, and medicinal plants — all of it was now the company's to take. → Case Study 15.1: The Broad Form Deed — Signing Away a Mountain for Pennies
"Three Sisters"
maize, beans, and squash planted together in a symbiotic combination. The cornstalks provided poles for the bean vines to climb. The beans fixed nitrogen in the soil, replenishing the fertility that the heavy-feeding corn depleted. The broad squash leaves shaded the ground, retaining moisture and su → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
"unified development"
the idea that a region's problems were interconnected and had to be solved together. You could not control floods without building dams. You could not build dams without generating electricity. You could not distribute electricity without building transmission lines. You could not improve agricultur → Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — TVA, the CCC, and Federal Transformation
"Unto These Hills"
the outdoor drama that has been performed every summer since 1950 in a mountainside amphitheater in Cherokee — tells the story of Cherokee history from European contact through the Trail of Tears and the founding of the Qualla Boundary. For decades, the most-attended outdoor drama in North Carolina, → Chapter 39: The Eastern Band and Indigenous Persistence — Native Appalachia Then and Now
"Yellow Dog Democrat"
meaning someone who would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote Republican — was coined in the South but applied with particular force in the Appalachian coalfields. In Mingo County, West Virginia, in McDowell County, in Harlan County, Kentucky — in the union hollows where the UMWA had organi → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
$13.5 million
at the time, one of the largest disaster settlements in American history. Divided among the more than six hundred plaintiffs, the average payment was roughly $13,000 per family. For families that had lost everything — homes, possessions, community, and in many cases loved ones — the amount was inade → Case Study 1: Buffalo Creek — The Disaster That Created Citizen Activists
making it the deadliest mine disaster in American history. The actual toll was almost certainly higher; many miners, particularly immigrant workers, were unrecorded in company rosters, and family members reported missing men who never appeared in the official count. Some researchers have estimated t → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
500 families
between 2,000 and 3,000 people — from the Blue Ridge. The removals were conducted over several years in the 1930s, often with minimal notice and inadequate compensation. Families who had occupied their land for a century or more were told to leave. Those who resisted were physically removed. → Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — TVA, the CCC, and Federal Transformation
500,000 acres of abandoned mine land
land that was mined, used, and left without adequate reclamation. These lands include open mine portals that leak acid mine drainage into streams, unstable slopes that are prone to landslides, coal refuse piles that can spontaneously combust, and subsidence zones where underground mines have collaps → Chapter 37: Energy Transition — Appalachia's Past, Present, and Future in the Climate Crisis
A
A 300-bed hospital
an extraordinary investment for a community of 10,000, rivaling the healthcare infrastructure of much larger towns. The hospital was staffed by multiple physicians, nurses, and support staff. It served not only Lynch residents but also people from surrounding communities who had no other access to h → Case Study 1: U.S. Coal and Coke in Lynch, Kentucky — A Company Town in Detail
A charcoal yard
the area where timber was converted to charcoal. Charcoal production was a major operation in itself. Hardwood (oak was preferred) was cut, stacked in carefully constructed mounds called **charcoal pits** or **charcoal kilns**, covered with earth or turf to exclude air, and then slowly burned for da → Case Study 2 — Iron Furnaces of the Southern Mountains
A synthesis conclusion (1,000-1,500 words)
An essay that draws the interviews together, identifies the common threads and the contradictions, and reflects on what you learned about Appalachian history and identity from listening to these voices. This synthesis should explicitly engage with the textbook's recurring themes — extraction, resist → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
A water-power system
a dam, millrace, and waterwheel that powered the bellows supplying the air blast. Most furnaces were located on streams large enough to provide reliable water power year-round. → Case Study 2 — Iron Furnaces of the Southern Mountains
absentee ownership
the pattern of land and mineral wealth being owned by distant individuals and corporations who extract wealth without local reinvestment. The 1981 Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force study found that in many coalfield counties, outside corporate interests owned 70 to 90 percent of the mineral weal → Chapter 15 Exercises: King Coal — How the Coal Industry Transformed Appalachia
Acid mine drainage
the flow of acidic, heavy-metal-laden water from abandoned mines into streams and rivers — is one of the most persistent environmental legacies of coal mining. When coal seams are exposed to air and water through mining, chemical reactions produce sulfuric acid, which dissolves toxic metals like iro → Chapter 37: Energy Transition — Appalachia's Past, Present, and Future in the Climate Crisis
the suggestion that the stereotype is a compliment, that mocking someone's poverty is really a celebration of their authenticity — would become one of the most durable features of media representations of Appalachia. The outsider who photographs a dilapidated barn and calls it "rustic charm" is oper → Chapter 35: Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Appalachian Identity
Affrilachian
A term coined by poet Frank X Walker in 1991 to describe African Americans with roots in Appalachia, reclaiming a presence that the dominant narrative has denied. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 6
the national federation of labor unions — made the Pittston strike a priority, channeling resources and organizing support across the country. International unions sent solidarity delegations. Religious organizations — the National Council of Churches, the Catholic Conference of Bishops, local and r → Case Study 2: The Pittston Coal Strike and Camp Solidarity
African American Great Migration
the movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North between approximately 1910 and 1970. Black families leaving McDowell County, West Virginia or Harlan County, Kentucky joined a migration stream that included Black families from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and eve → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
African Americans
both enslaved and free — were present in significant numbers and participated in the revival with an intensity that several observers specifically noted. One account described Black participants "in great numbers" among those experiencing the physical exercises. The revival, whatever its other dynam → Case Study 1 — The Cane Ridge Revival of 1801
Hardy, Pendleton, Pocahontas, and others in the high ridges — were included partly to give the new state a defensible eastern border and partly because their sparse populations made opposition easy to override. These counties were deeply divided internally, and some had significant Confederate sympa → Case Study 11.1: The Creation of West Virginia — A State Born from Division
American Community Survey
Five-year estimates provide detailed contemporary demographic, economic, and social data at the county level - **National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS)** (nhgis.org) — Aggregated historical census data with mapping tools → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
An essay that introduces the collection, explains the thematic connection between the interviews, describes your methodology, and previews the major themes that emerge across the interviews. → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
An ore bank or mine
often an open-pit excavation where workers dug iron ore from surface deposits or shallow underground seams. Mountain iron ores were typically **brown hematite** (limonite) or **magnetite**, found in deposits that had weathered out of the Appalachian geological formations. → Case Study 2 — Iron Furnaces of the Southern Mountains
Anchor institutions
particularly land-grant universities — create islands of economic activity in otherwise struggling regions. Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, West Virginia University in Morgantown, Appalachian State University in Boone, East Tennessee State University in Johnson City — these institutions provide stable → Chapter 36: The New Appalachia — Immigration, Remote Work, Tourism, and Reinvention
ANFO
a mixture of **ammonium nitrate and fuel oil** that is cheap, effective, and available in enormous quantities. A single blast at a mountaintop removal site can use millions of pounds of explosives. The detonation fractures the rock of the mountain, breaking it into rubble. → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
the **Principal People**, the name the Cherokee used for themselves — had built a civilization that stretched across the heart of the southern Appalachian Mountains. They had not wandered into these mountains by accident. They had not scratched out a bare existence on its slopes. They had shaped the → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
Annotations
Footnotes or endnotes throughout the transcript that provide historical context for events, places, institutions, or practices the interviewee mentions. When an interviewee says "We used to get paid in scrip at the company store," your annotation should reference Chapter 16 and explain what scrip wa → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
antecedent drainage
is the key to understanding the New River's most distinctive feature: it flows north. While most rivers in the eastern United States follow the general slope of the land toward the Atlantic (eastward) or the Mississippi (westward), the New River rises in the Blue Ridge of northwestern North Carolina → Case Study 1: The New River — One of the Oldest Rivers on Earth
Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS)
a network of corridors designed to connect the isolated communities of the Appalachian region to the national highway network — consumed the lion's share of ARC funding. The logic was straightforward: Appalachia was poor because it was isolated. If you built roads, you connected communities to marke → Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again
Appalachian Plateau
relatively flat-topped terrain deeply dissected by erosion into narrow valleys and hollows; contains the major coal deposits. (2) The **Ridge and Valley Province** -- long, parallel ridges separated by narrow valleys, formed by folding and differential erosion of alternating hard and soft rock layer → Answers to Selected Exercises
Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC)
a federal-state partnership designed to promote economic development across the thirteen-state Appalachian region, from southern New York to northern Mississippi. The ARC was, and remains, the largest and most sustained federal commitment to a specific American region outside of the Tennessee Valley → Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again
Appalachian Studies
An academic field emerging from 1970s activism, committed to scholarship that serves the region's communities. Founded by figures like Helen Lewis, the field has expanded from its initial focus on economic exploitation to include race, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration. → Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story
initially a project of the Berea College-based **Council of the Southern Mountains** — sent young people into eastern Kentucky communities beginning in 1963 to repair schoolhouses, organize community groups, and provide direct assistance to impoverished families. → Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again
Archaic period
the long era spanning roughly 10,000 to 3,000 BP — did not simply suffer the loss of the megafauna. They adapted. And their adaptations were so successful, so sophisticated, and so enduring that they laid the foundations for everything that followed in Appalachian Indigenous life. → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
a locomotive fitted with steel plating and mounted machine guns — rolled slowly up the tracks along Paint Creek, and the men inside opened fire on the sleeping tent colony. This was not a metaphor. This was not a exaggeration passed down through oral tradition. An armored train with machine guns fir → Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal — Labor Wars in the Mountains
Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson
born in 1923 in Deep Gap, North Carolina, blind from infancy — was perhaps the single most influential guitarist in the folk and country tradition. Watson grew up in a musical family in the Blue Ridge Mountains, learned to play from family and neighbors, and developed a **flatpicking** guitar style → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
Asheville, North Carolina
an Appalachian city with a population of approximately 95,000 in Buncombe County — voted overwhelmingly Democratic in every election during the period of coalfield realignment. Asheville's politics were shaped by its university community, its arts and tourism economy, and an influx of progressive-le → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
At least 2 theoretical/framework sources
works that provide the analytical vocabulary for your comparison. Suggested: - Helen Lewis, "Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case" (1978) - John Gaventa, *Power and Powerlessness* (1980) - Robert D. Bullard, *Dumping in Dixie* (1990) — for environmental justice framework - Steve Lerne → Capstone Project 3: The Comparative Extraction Analysis
At least 8 scholarly sources
peer-reviewed journal articles, academic books, or scholarly reports. At least 4 must focus on your comparison region; at least 2 must focus on Appalachia (drawn from this textbook's Further Reading sections or bibliography). → Capstone Project 3: The Comparative Extraction Analysis
At least five primary sources
census records, land deeds, newspaper articles, oral histories, government reports, photographs, letters, or other original documents - **At least five secondary sources** — scholarly books, journal articles, county histories, or theses written by historians - **Additional sources as needed** — webs → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
a large, flat, open field used for stickball games (a predecessor of lacrosse) that served simultaneously as athletic competition, social bonding, and a means of settling disputes between towns without warfare. The ball ground was typically located near the town house, and important games could draw → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
narrative songs that told stories, usually of love, betrayal, murder, supernatural encounters, or historical events. Many of them were very old. The Scottish and English ballads that scholars would later classify had been circulating in the British Isles for centuries before any settler boarded a sh → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
band mill
also called a band saw mill — was the primary processing technology. Unlike the older circular saws that had been used in smaller sawmill operations, the band mill used a continuous loop of steel blade, thin and flexible, that could cut through the largest logs with remarkable speed and efficiency. → Chapter 18: Timber, Railroads, and Environmental Devastation — The First Extraction
banjar
appear in descriptions of enslaved people's music as early as the seventeenth century. The West African **akonting** (from the Jola people of Senegambia), the **ngoni** (from the Mande people of West Africa), and related instruments share the essential features of the banjo: a skin-covered gourd res → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
Bank barn
A distinctive German-origin barn built into a hillside, with upper and lower levels accessed from different grades — a signature of German settlement in the Shenandoah Valley. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 5
Baptist polity
the system of church governance — was radically democratic and radically local. Each Baptist congregation was autonomous: it governed itself, chose its own minister, set its own standards for membership, and owed no obedience to any hierarchy above the congregational level. There was no bishop, no p → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
approximately 10,000 armed miners battle mine guards and state forces in the largest armed uprising since the Civil War. Federal troops end the battle. - **1927:** Bristol Sessions -- Ralph Peer records the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, launching the commercial country music industry. → Appendix B: Historical Timeline
Biltmore Estate
a 250-room French Renaissance chateau that remains the largest privately owned house in the United States. Vanderbilt's construction of Biltmore was, in miniature, the entire dynamic of Appalachian "discovery": a fabulously wealthy outsider arrives in the mountains, is enchanted by the landscape, ac → Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia — How Outsiders Invented a Region
first held in Boone, North Carolina, in 2005 — brought together Black banjo players, scholars, and enthusiasts to celebrate and recover the African American banjo tradition. The gathering, organized by Tony Thomas and others, was a landmark event that made the African origins of the banjo visible in → Case Study 2: The African American Roots of the Banjo and Mountain Music
Black churches
Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) — were the most important of these. They were not just places of worship. They were meeting halls, mutual aid societies, community courts, and the places where African American cultural life — music, oratory, fellowship — flourished. → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias — provided the same functions for Black miners that the Italian, Hungarian, and Polish organizations provided for immigrant miners: insurance, social life, collective identity, and a measure of dignity in a system designed to extract labor and noth → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
Black housing
known in the blunt language of the time as "Colored Town" or "the colored section" — was almost universally segregated from white housing, typically placed at the far end of the camp, up the hollow, on the least desirable ground. The houses were identical in construction to white miners' housing (an → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
a legendary experimental arts school that operated in nearby Black Mountain from 1933 to 1957, attracting artists like Josef Albers, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller — had established a precedent for creative community in the region. → Case Study 1: Asheville's Transformation — From Sanatorium Town to Tourism Boomtown
Blacksburg, Virginia
home to Virginia Tech, in the heart of the New River Valley — voted Democratic by wide margins. The university's faculty, staff, and student population created a political dynamic that diverged sharply from the surrounding rural counties. The New River Valley exemplified the urban-rural political di → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
Blue Grass Boys
named for his home state of Kentucky, the Bluegrass State — in 1938, and they became a fixture on the **Grand Ole Opry**, the Nashville radio show that was already the most important platform for country music. The band's lineup changed frequently, but the classic formation that crystallized the blu → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
Blue Ridge Parkway
the 469-mile scenic highway that winds along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina — is one of the most beloved public works projects in American history. It is the most visited unit of the Nationa → Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — TVA, the CCC, and Federal Transformation
single miners or newly arrived immigrant men who did not yet have families in camp. Boarding was a significant source of additional income, but it also meant that a woman might be cooking for, cleaning up after, and doing laundry for four or five men in addition to her own family. The boarder system → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
Boone County, West Virginia
one of the epicenters of the mountaintop removal era — a much larger project came online in 2023. The Boone County solar installation, built on approximately 400 acres of reclaimed mine land, was the largest solar farm in West Virginia at the time of its completion. The project created construction → Case Study 1: Reclaiming Mine Land for Solar — Promise and Reality
breadth
the ability to master two regional histories well enough to compare them meaningfully — and **analytical precision** — the ability to identify what is structurally similar, what is genuinely different, and why those differences matter. → Capstone Project 3: The Comparative Extraction Analysis
Breece Dexter John Pancake
known as Breece D'J Pancake, the unusual abbreviation the result of a typographical error in his first published story that he chose to keep — produced twelve short stories, published six of them in *The Atlantic Monthly* and other magazines during his brief lifetime, and then, in April 1979, at the → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
bridge fuel
a transitional energy source that was cleaner than coal and could serve as a stepping-stone to full renewable energy. In Appalachia, it became something more complicated: an economic lifeline for some communities, an environmental threat for others, and a political obstacle to the renewable energy t → Chapter 37: Energy Transition — Appalachia's Past, Present, and Future in the Climate Crisis
Bristol Sessions
the recordings made by Ralph Peer in Bristol between July 25 and August 5, 1927 — are often called "the Big Bang of country music." The phrase is not an exaggeration. In those two weeks, Peer recorded two acts that would become foundational: the **Carter Family** and **Jimmie Rodgers**. Between them → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
recognizing that the digital divide has become the new geographic isolation, and that communities without high-speed internet access are as cut off from economic opportunity as communities without roads were in the 1960s. This investment represents a significant shift in the ARC's thinking — from ph → Case Study 2: The Appalachian Regional Commission — Still Operating, Still Debated
C
Calvinist doctrine of predestination
the belief that God had chosen, from before the foundation of the world, who would be saved and who would be damned, and that no human action could alter this divine decree — was particularly important in Appalachian religious life. It produced a distinctive emotional tone: a seriousness, a gravity, → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
camp meeting
a multi-day outdoor religious gathering that brought hundreds or even thousands of people together for preaching, prayer, singing, and the pursuit of conversion. The camp meeting movement was part of the broader **Second Great Awakening** — the wave of evangelical Protestant revivalism that transfor → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
also absorbed large numbers of Appalachian migrants. These neighborhoods developed their own institutions: Appalachian-oriented churches (often Baptist congregations that maintained the preaching style and hymnody of the mountains), community centers, mutual aid organizations, and social clubs that → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
campanilismo
loyalty to one's home village, symbolized by the sound of the village church bell (campana). In the coalfields, this translated into tight ethnic enclaves where families from the same village or region clustered together in adjacent company houses. They established **mutual aid societies** — organiz → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
Canning
preserving food in sealed glass jars processed in boiling water — became the backbone of mountain food preservation after the development of reliable home canning equipment in the late nineteenth century. Before modern canning, mountain families relied on older methods: drying, smoking, salt-curing, → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
carbon capture and storage (CCS)
technologies designed to capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions or directly from the atmosphere and store it underground in geological formations. Some proposals have targeted Appalachia's deep geological formations — the same kinds of sedimentary rock layers that hold coal and natural gas → Chapter 37: Energy Transition — Appalachia's Past, Present, and Future in the Climate Crisis
Carolina Chocolate Drops
founded in 2005 by **Rhiannon Giddens**, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson — brought the African American string band tradition back into the mainstream of American music with electrifying performances and Grammy-winning recordings. The Carolina Chocolate Drops played old-time music — fiddle tunes, b → Case Study 2: The African American Roots of the Banjo and Mountain Music
causal framework
by telling the story of Appalachian hardship in a way that centers causes rather than symptoms. The opioid crisis did not happen because Appalachian people are weak. It happened because pharmaceutical companies deliberately targeted a vulnerable population (see Chapter 33). Rural hospitals are not c → Chapter 35: Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Appalachian Identity
the 1860 census records enslaved people in nearly every Appalachian county, with some counties (particularly in the Great Valley and along major river systems) having substantial enslaved populations. (2) **Industrial records** -- enslaved people provided critical labor in the Kanawha Valley salt wo → Answers to Selected Exercises
Centrality to American History
Appalachia is not a sideshow; it is central to understanding industrialization, labor, environmental policy, energy, migration, and political realignment 2. **The Extraction Pattern** — outside capital extracting wealth from the land while leaving communities with the costs, repeating from timber to → _continuity.md — The History of Appalachia
Chain migration
The process by which early settlers encourage friends and family from their communities of origin to follow them, creating clustered, kinship-based settlement patterns. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 5
Champion Fibre Company
later Champion International — built its operations around Canton, North Carolina, establishing a pulp and paper mill that would operate for more than a century. Champion was unusual among Appalachian timber operations in that it established a permanent processing facility rather than a temporary on → Chapter 18: Timber, Railroads, and Environmental Devastation — The First Extraction
Change and Continuity
What is the biggest change you have seen in this community during your lifetime? - What has stayed the same? - If you could explain one thing about this place to someone who has never been here, what would it be? → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
Chanted preaching
sometimes called "the tone" or "holy whine" — is a sermonic delivery in which the preacher begins speaking normally but gradually shifts into a rhythmic, almost musical cadence, with each phrase rising to a melodic peak and then falling, the congregation responding with murmured affirmations. The st → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
Chapter 11: A Region Divided
Appalachia and the Civil War. Unionism, secession, the creation of West Virginia, guerrilla warfare, the Shelton Laurel massacre, and the internal war that tore communities apart along lines of class as much as ideology. → Part Three: The Civil War and Its Aftermath
Chapter 12: Emancipation in the Mountains
What freedom meant in the mountain context. Black churches, schools, land ownership, and systematic dispossession. The beginning of an erasure that would last more than a century. → Part Three: The Civil War and Its Aftermath
Chapter 13: The Feud Mythology
The Hatfields and McCoys, and what the feuds were really about. Timber, politics, industrial transformation — and the newspaper sensationalism that turned a land dispute into proof of Appalachian backwardness. → Part Three: The Civil War and Its Aftermath
Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia
Local color writers, William Goodell Frost, settlement schools, and the construction of Appalachia as a place to be pitied, studied, and saved. How outsiders invented a region — and how that invention still shapes everything. → Part Three: The Civil War and Its Aftermath
Chapter 15: King Coal
The arrival of railroads and land agents. The broad form deed and the dispossession of mineral rights. The transformation from farming to coal dependency. How single-industry economies create structural vulnerability. → Part Four: Industrialization and Extraction
Chapter 16: Company Towns
Life under corporate rule. Company housing, the company store, scrip currency, mine guards. The racial and ethnic diversity of coal camps. Competing interpretations: total oppression or complex community. → Part Four: Industrialization and Extraction
Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal
The Mine Wars of West Virginia. Paint Creek, Cabin Creek, Matewan, Blair Mountain, Bloody Harlan. Mother Jones and the UMWA. Why the deadliest labor conflicts in American history happened here. → Part Four: Industrialization and Extraction
Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia
Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Black, Welsh, and Greek miners in the coalfields. Ethnic enclaves, interracial organizing, and the diversity that the single-ethnicity narrative erased. → Part Four: Industrialization and Extraction
Chapter 1: The Oldest Mountains in the World
The geological history of the Appalachians, from the Alleghenian orogeny to the five physiographic provinces. How coal formed. How rivers cut. How the hollow became the basic unit of settlement. The paradox of rich geology and persistent poverty. → Part One: The Land Before
Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out
Why millions left. Route 23, the Hillbilly Highway. Urban Appalachian communities in Northern cities. The cultural and economic devastation of depopulation for the communities left behind. → Part Four: Industrialization and Extraction
Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago
The human cost of coal. Occupational disease, mine disasters from Monongah to Upper Big Branch, the Black Lung movement, and the question of who pays for cheap energy. → Part Four: Industrialization and Extraction
Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains
The TVA, rural electrification, the CCC, national parks, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Federal transformation and its contradictions: help that also displaced, conservation that also dispossessed. → Part Five: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty
Chapter 23: The War on Poverty
LBJ on Tom Fletcher's porch. Harry Caudill. The Appalachian Regional Commission. VISTA. What worked, what failed, and why treating symptoms while leaving extractive structures intact guaranteed the poverty would persist. → Part Five: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty
Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal
When they blew up the mountains. The shift from underground to surface mining. Environmental devastation, stream burial, community displacement. Larry Gibson and Kayford Mountain. Regulatory capture and the failure of enforcement. → Part Five: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty
Chapter 25: Education and the Fight for Literacy
From one-room schools to settlement schools to the Highlander Folk School. Education as both opportunity and cultural imposition. School consolidation and its consequences for rural communities. → Part Five: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty
Chapter 26: The Appalachian Resistance Tradition
Blair Mountain, Buffalo Creek, the Pittston strike, Camp Solidarity, anti-mountaintop-removal organizing, and modern pipeline opposition. A continuous thread of resistance spanning more than a century. → Part Five: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty
Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains
From British Isles ballads through the Bristol Sessions to bluegrass, country, and beyond. The banjo's African origins. Shape-note singing. The commodification of mountain music and the living tradition that outlasts it. → Part Six: Culture and Identity
Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature
Writing the mountains from within. James Still, Harriette Arnow, Lee Smith, Silas House, Ron Rash. The Affrilachian Poets and Black Appalachian literary voices. The challenge of writing from inside a stereotyped region. → Part Six: Culture and Identity
Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers
Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal traditions. Churches as community infrastructure. Snake handling in context. Religion's complex role in both supporting and opposing social change. → Part Six: Culture and Identity
Chapter 2: First Peoples
Ten thousand years of Indigenous life in the mountains. Archaeological evidence from Paleo-Indian through Mississippian periods. Trade networks, agricultural development, and the sophisticated societies that lived here long before European contact. → Part One: The Land Before
Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture
Ramps, cornbread, leather britches. Quilting, basket-weaving, woodworking. The Foxfire project. Indigenous, African, and European roots. The tension between craft as tradition and craft as commodity. → Part Six: Culture and Identity
Chapter 32: The Coal Economy's Collapse
Natural gas, renewables, automation, and the end of coal's dominance. Job losses, community devastation, the "War on Coal" framing, and the inadequacy of just transition proposals. → Part Seven: Modern Appalachia
Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis
From Purdue Pharma's marketing to the fentanyl wave. Why Appalachia was specifically vulnerable. Criminalization versus treatment. Harm reduction and the slow work of recovery. → Part Seven: Modern Appalachia
Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics
From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump country. Political realignment, cultural conservatism, economic populism, *Hillbilly Elegy* and its critics, and what Appalachian voting patterns reveal about America. → Part Seven: Modern Appalachia
Chapter 36: The New Appalachia
Latino immigration, COVID-era remote work migration, tourism economies, gentrification, housing crises. Who benefits from reinvention and who gets left behind. → Part Seven: Modern Appalachia
Chapter 37: Energy Transition
Coal-to-solar on reclaimed mine land. Wind energy. The Mountain Valley Pipeline. The justice question: the people whose land was sacrificed deserve a seat at the table. → Part Seven: Modern Appalachia
Chapter 38: Health, Despair, and Resilience
Company doctors to rural hospital closures. Deaths of despair. The Frontier Nursing Service. Mental health, dental health, maternal mortality. Community-based care and the free clinic movement. → Part Seven: Modern Appalachia
Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia
The Cherokee Nation as the dominant civilization of southern Appalachia. Governance, agriculture, diplomacy, the clan system, and the syllabary. Why Cherokee history must be understood as Appalachian history, not as background to European settlement. → Part One: The Land Before
Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia?
Race, class, gender, and the fight over a region's story. Black Appalachians, Indigenous persistence, Latinx communities, women's history, LGBTQ+ lives, disability. The Affrilachian movement. Why telling a single "Appalachian story" is always a political act. → Part Eight: Synthesis and Reflection
Chapter 41: What Appalachia Teaches America
Resource extraction, inequality, and the sacrifice zone. Internal colonialism as a framework. The connection between Appalachian history and national patterns of exploitation. Why understanding this region is essential to understanding the country. → Part Eight: Synthesis and Reflection
Contemporary Appalachian voices in their own words. The region as it is right now — complex, diverse, evolving. Neither triumph nor tragedy. The unfinished story, being written by the people who live it. → Part Eight: Synthesis and Reflection
Chapter 5: Who Came to the Mountains?
Scotch-Irish, German, English, and African migration into Appalachia. The Great Wagon Road. Push and pull factors. Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road. The diversity that the "Scotch-Irish thesis" has obscured. → Part Two: Settlement and the Frontier
Chapter 6: Slavery in the Mountains
The hidden history of Black Appalachia. Slavery at salt works, iron furnaces, and small farms. Demographic patterns by subregion. Free Black communities. Why the erasure has been so thorough and whose interests it served. → Part Two: Settlement and the Frontier
Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy
Subsistence, trade, ginseng, salt, iron, livestock. The myth of pure self-sufficiency versus the evidence of market integration. Whiskey as currency. Women's home production as economic engine. → Part Two: Settlement and the Frontier
Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier
Gender, labor, and survival. Agricultural work, spinning, midwifery, herbal medicine. Mary Draper Ingles and the captivity narrative. The tension between the "helpless frontier woman" myth and the evidence of extraordinary agency. → Part Two: Settlement and the Frontier
Charleston fell on May 12, 1780
the largest American surrender of the war, with approximately 5,500 Continental soldiers captured. The American commander in the South, General Benjamin Lincoln, was among those taken prisoner. His replacement, General Horatio Gates — the hero of Saratoga — marched south with a hastily assembled arm → Case Study 10.1: The Battle of Kings Mountain — Appalachian Backwoodsmen Turn the War
a complete writing system for the Cherokee language — around 1821. Within a few years, Cherokee literacy rates exceeded those of the surrounding white population. The achievement was extraordinary: Sequoyah created, essentially single-handedly, a tool that allowed an oral culture to become a literat → Chapter 4: Contact, Colonization, and the Unmaking of Indigenous Appalachia
a fungal disease caused by *Cryphonectria parasitica*, accidentally introduced from Asia around 1904 — spread through the Appalachian forests with devastating speed. By the 1940s, the American chestnut was functionally extinct as a canopy tree. An estimated four billion trees died. The ecological im → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
chiefdoms
hierarchical societies led by hereditary chiefs who commanded the labor and loyalty of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of people. The hallmark of Mississippian culture was the **platform mound** — a flat-topped, rectangular earthen structure, often massive in scale, that served as the elevat → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
that became the standard reference for ballad scholarship. Decades later, when folklorists began collecting songs in the Appalachian mountains, they discovered that mountain singers were performing Child ballads that had survived in oral tradition for centuries — songs that had been largely forgotte → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
Children of migrants
the generation born in the cities to parents from the mountains — occupied a liminal space: Appalachian at home, urban at school, fully at home in neither world. Their experiences of identity negotiation are captured in some oral history projects but rarely centered in the narrative. → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
Children's experiences
growing up bilingual, mediating between cultures, attending segregated or integrated company schools, playing in the coal dust — are captured in some oral history collections but rarely centered in the historical narrative. → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
Chronological arc
students should be able to trace the full story from geological formation through the present 2. **Core themes** — extraction, labor, diversity, stereotype construction, resistance, and agency must all be represented 3. **The four anchor examples** — Harlan County, New River Valley, McDowell County, → Syllabus: 10-Week Quarter System
church conference
a regular business meeting of the congregation — was the primary venue for organizing this mutual aid. Church conference records, where they survive, document a community institution managing not only spiritual matters (receiving and dismissing members, ordaining ministers, disciplining moral offens → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
church discipline
informal tribunals that adjudicated disputes, enforced community moral standards, and imposed consequences for behavior that the congregation considered unacceptable. A member accused of dishonesty, adultery, drunkenness, or other offenses could be brought before the church meeting, given the opport → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
circuit rider
an itinerant Methodist preacher who traveled a regular route through scattered frontier communities, preaching in homes, barns, courthouses, and open fields — was one of the most important religious figures in early Appalachian history. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Methodist circuit rid → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
circuits
through the backcountry, visiting scattered settlements on a regular rotation. A circuit might cover two hundred miles or more, taking a rider two to four weeks to complete, after which he turned around and rode it again. The most famous circuit rider of the era, **Francis Asbury**, who served as th → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
instruction in American government, the Constitution, and the rights and responsibilities of free citizens — was included in many schools, reflecting the Reconstruction-era conviction that freed people needed to be prepared for full participation in democratic life. → Case Study 12.1: Freedmen's Schools in Appalachia
a term that historians sometimes shy away from but that the participants themselves used openly and accurately. On one side were coal operators backed by private armies, compliant courts, cooperative governors, and ultimately the military power of the United States government. On the other side were → Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal — Labor Wars in the Mountains
Clear the surface
all trees and vegetation are removed from the mountaintop, typically by clearcutting. (2) **Remove overburden** -- explosives (often ammonium nitrate/fuel oil mixtures, using millions of pounds annually) blast away the rock layers above the coal seam, potentially removing hundreds of vertical feet o → Answers to Selected Exercises
its ability to control state legislatures, county governments, and judicial systems across the coalfield states — was not confronted. The broad form deed, which allowed mineral owners to destroy surface land without the surface owner's consent, remained in force. The severance taxes that could have → Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again
sometimes called a **sludge pond** or **slurry pond** — is a dam built to hold the liquid waste produced by coal processing. When raw coal is washed and processed to remove impurities and increase its energy content, the process generates enormous volumes of wastewater laden with coal dust, silt, cl → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
coal tipple
the structure where coal was loaded from mine cars into railroad cars — rose at the railroad siding. The mine entry was cut into the hillside above, and the first miners went underground. In Harlan County's thick seams, the early mines could be remarkably productive: a crew of men with picks and sho → Case Study 15.2: Harlan County's Transformation from Farm to Coalfield
black lung — is a occupational lung disease caused by the inhalation of coal dust over extended periods. The mechanism is straightforward: fine particles of coal dust, inhaled deep into the lungs, accumulate in the lung tissue. The body's immune system responds to these foreign particles by surround → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
an industrial landscape dominated entirely by coal production and organized entirely around the coal companies' needs. The county's economy, its social structure, its political system, and its physical landscape had been remade. → Case Study 15.2: Harlan County's Transformation from Farm to Coalfield
coalfield geography
the physical shape of the land — determined which communities were transformed and which were bypassed. Using your map, identify at least two areas that would have been difficult for railroads to reach. What geographical features created those barriers? → Chapter 15 Exercises: King Coal — How the Coal Industry Transformed Appalachia
Code-switching
the practice of shifting between two or more languages or dialects depending on the social context — is one of the most important and most psychologically complex aspects of the Appalachian linguistic experience. → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
colliers
charcoal burners — who managed the slow, smoky process of converting wood to charcoal were among the most skilled workers in the iron industry, and their great cone-shaped charcoal kilns, called **charcoal pits**, were a defining feature of the iron-making landscape. → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
a term used by Appalachian scholars including John Gaventa, Helen Lewis, and others to describe the structural relationship between the mountain region and the national economy. Raw materials flowed out. Finished goods and profits flowed in one direction only — out. The railroads were the arteries o → Case Study 2: The Norfolk and Western Railway — Opening the Coalfields
Common schools
publicly funded schools open to all children — arrived in Appalachia later and more unevenly than in other parts of the country. The common school movement, which swept the northeastern United States in the 1830s and 1840s under the influence of education reformers like Horace Mann, reached the moun → Chapter 25: Education and the Fight for Literacy — From Settlement Schools to Consolidation
communal singing
and the most distinctive form of that tradition was **shape-note singing**, a system of musical notation and a practice of communal music-making that is one of Appalachia's most important contributions to American culture. → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
runs through all forty-two chapters, asking students to research the history of a single Appalachian county across the entire arc of the book. → Preface
community infrastructure
a network of mutual support, social organization, and collective identity that extended far beyond the Sunday morning service. In communities with minimal government services, no organized charity, no social workers, and no safety net, the church was the safety net. → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
company town
and it is one of the most important stories in American labor history. The company town was not simply a place where coal miners happened to live near their workplace. It was a **total institution**: a system in which a single entity — the coal company — controlled nearly every aspect of a worker's → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
composite profiles
characters constructed from real patterns but not representing specific individuals. What are the strengths and limitations of this approach? How does it differ from oral history (real individuals speaking in their own words)? What can a composite do that oral history cannot, and vice versa? → Chapter 42 Exercises: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
Additional case studies or primary source analyses (especially from underrepresented communities within Appalachia — Black Appalachians, Indigenous peoples, immigrant communities, LGBTQ+ residents) - Updated data for rapidly evolving topics (opioid crisis, energy transition, demographic change) - Ne → Contributing to The History of Appalachia
seminars and conferences that physicians attended to maintain their medical licenses — focused on pain management. These programs, nominally independent but effectively controlled by Purdue through funding and content direction, conveyed a consistent message: chronic pain was undertreated, opioids w → Case Study 1: Purdue Pharma and the Marketing of OxyContin in Coal Country
contour mining
also called **contour strip mining** — which followed the contour of a coal seam around the side of a mountain. Heavy equipment would cut a bench into the mountainside along the seam, removing the rock and soil above the coal, extracting the coal, and then moving along the contour. What was left beh → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
Cooking techniques
slow-braising tough cuts of meat, frying in animal fat, cooking greens low and slow with a piece of pork for seasoning — have roots in West African culinary traditions adapted to the ingredients available in the American South. The centrality of **greens** in Appalachian cooking — poke sallet, creas → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
Corn right
A claim to land established by clearing a plot and planting a crop, based on the principle that labor creates property rights. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 5
Cornbread
made from ground cornmeal, cooked in a cast-iron skillet, without sugar (a point of fierce and enduring controversy between mountain and lowland Southern traditions) — was the daily bread of the mountains. It was eaten at every meal: crumbled into buttermilk for breakfast, served alongside beans and → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
Corrections
Factual errors in historical claims - Outdated statistics or citations - Broken links in Further Reading sections - Typographical errors → Contributing to The History of Appalachia
council house
a large, circular or seven-sided building, often built on a raised mound, capable of holding several hundred people. The council house was the political heart of the community, the place where all major decisions were debated, discussed, and resolved. Town councils included representatives of all se → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
Deed books, mineral rights records, and land transactions (some now digitized) - **Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force data** — If your county was included in the 1981 study, the data on absentee ownership is invaluable → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
county history
a work of narrative scholarship that tells the story of a place and its people across time, grounded in evidence, attentive to diverse voices, and honest about what has been lost and what persists. → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
the production of elaborately patterned bedspreads and blankets using overshot, summer-and-winter, or double-weave techniques — was an art form that combined mathematical precision with aesthetic creativity. Coverlet patterns had names — Snail's Trail, Whig Rose, Pine Bloom, Chariot Wheels — and wer → Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier — Gender, Labor, and Survival in Mountain Communities
coverture
a legal framework inherited from English common law that declared a married woman's legal identity to be "covered" by her husband's. Under coverture, a married woman could not own property in her own name, could not enter into contracts, could not sue or be sued, and could not keep her own earnings. → Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier — Gender, Labor, and Survival in Mountain Communities
COVID-era remote work migration
the movement of knowledge workers from expensive metropolitan areas to rural communities, including many in Appalachia, that accelerated during the pandemic and has continued, in modified form, since. Floyd County, like Asheville and other mountain communities, has seen an influx of remote workers a → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
cultural colonization
not in the sense that they intended to destroy mountain culture (most of their founders thought they were preserving it) but in the sense that they systematically replaced local knowledge, customs, and values with those of the dominant culture, and they did so from a position of power that made resi → Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia — How Outsiders Invented a Region
cultural genocide
the deliberate destruction of a people's way of life, language, governance, and connection to homeland, even if the people themselves survive — is widely applied to the removal era. The debate is not whether removal was a catastrophe or an injustice. The debate is over which word most accurately nam → Chapter 4: Contact, Colonization, and the Unmaking of Indigenous Appalachia
Culture and Community
What traditions or customs from your childhood are still practiced? Which ones have disappeared? - Tell me about the music / food / faith that mattered most in your community. - How would you describe the way people talk in this area? Has that changed? → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
Culture-of-poverty framing
scholars such as Elizabeth Catte (*What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia*, 2018) argue that Vance attributes Appalachian poverty primarily to cultural pathology (lack of personal responsibility, family dysfunction, resistance to change) while minimizing the structural factors (absentee ownersh → Answers to Selected Exercises
the massive server farms that store and process the digital information on which the modern economy depends. Companies like Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft have built data centers in Virginia, North Carolina, and other Appalachian states, attracted by cheap electricity (often generated by → Chapter 36: The New Appalachia — Immigration, Remote Work, Tourism, and Reinvention
debt peonage
involuntary servitude based on indebtedness, a practice prohibited by federal law since 1867. The technical answer is complicated: miners were not physically prevented from leaving, and the debts they owed were (in theory) civil obligations, not criminal ones. The practical answer is simpler: a man → Case Study 2: Scrip, the Company Store, and the Economics of Captive Labor
Decoration Day
the annual spring gathering at the community cemetery to clean graves, place flowers, and remember the dead — was one of the most important communal rituals in mountain religion, and it illustrates how deeply the church was embedded in the fabric of community life. Decoration Day was religious (it t → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
the process by which regional dialects become more similar to each other over time, typically converging toward a standard variety — is a well-documented phenomenon in modern linguistics, and it is happening to Appalachian English. → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
which emerged nationally in the 1970s and 1980s and culminated in the **Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990** — had particular resonance in Appalachia, where disability was not an abstract category but a lived reality for a significant portion of the population. But the intersection of disabilit → Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story
Do your interviews capture the diversity of Appalachian experience? If your interviewees are predominantly white, what does that tell you about access, networks, and whose voices are most easily recorded? What steps could you take to broaden the collection? → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
the guarantee that a widow would receive one-third of her deceased husband's estate for her lifetime use. In a frontier society where men died young and often (from disease, accident, conflict, and the general hazards of frontier life), widowhood was common, and the dower right gave many women their → Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier — Gender, Labor, and Survival in Mountain Communities
specialized court programs that diverted nonviolent drug offenders from incarceration into supervised treatment — represented a middle ground between criminalization and public health approaches. Participants in drug court programs were required to attend treatment, submit to regular drug testing, a → Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis — How Appalachia Became Ground Zero
drug distribution chain
a network of companies responsible for shipping prescription medications from factories to pharmacies. Three companies — **McKesson**, **Cardinal Health**, and **AmerisourceBergen** — controlled approximately 90 percent of the pharmaceutical distribution market in the United States. → Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis — How Appalachia Became Ground Zero
E
Early Life and Community
Tell me about where you grew up. What was the community like? - What did your parents do for a living? Your grandparents? - What are your earliest memories of [the community, the landscape, the work]? - What did people do for fun when you were young? → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
earthworks
carefully constructed mounds of soil, often built over elaborate burial chambers, that served as monuments to the dead and as markers of community identity and territorial authority. The labor required to build even a modest Adena mound was significant: thousands of basket-loads of earth, carried an → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Berkeley and Jefferson Counties, nestled between the Potomac River and the Blue Ridge — was included primarily because of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The B&O was the Union's most important east-west rail line, and keeping it under the jurisdiction of a loyal state was a military necessity. But → Case Study 11.1: The Creation of West Virginia — A State Born from Division
Education
community colleges, regional universities, and public school systems — is a significant employer across the region. Appalachian State University in Boone, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and West Virginia University in Morgantown are economic anchors for their c → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
the government's power to take private property for public use, with compensation — to acquire land from owners who refused to sell. The compensation offered was often well below what the landowners considered fair. Families who had lived on their land for five or six generations were told that they → Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — TVA, the CCC, and Federal Transformation
a Smith College graduate from New Jersey — worked with local leader **William Creech Sr.** to establish the **Pine Mountain Settlement School** in Harlan County, Kentucky. Creech donated the land, and de Long provided the educational vision, the institutional connections, and the fundraising capacit → Case Study 2: The Settlement School Movement — Help or Colonization?
acts that fell short of flight but that asserted a measure of control over the pace and conditions of labor. These acts are difficult to document, precisely because they were designed to be invisible to the slaveholder. But the frequency with which slaveholders complained about the laziness, incompe → Chapter 6: Slavery in the Mountains — The Hidden History of Black Appalachia
excise tax on distilled spirits
the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the new federal government. The tax was part of Hamilton's broader economic program, which aimed to establish federal fiscal credibility, fund the national debt, and build the institutional infrastructure of a centralized national state. → Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier — Gender, Labor, and Survival in Mountain Communities
Extraction pattern
The recurring dynamic, traced throughout this textbook, of outside capital extracting wealth from Appalachian land and labor while leaving communities with the costs. The extraction pattern is fundamentally a class dynamic that intersects with race, gender, and other forms of marginalization. → Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story
eye dialect
nonstandard spellings designed to visually represent dialectal pronunciation ("sez" for "says," "wuz" for "was," "kin" for "can") — they risk making their characters appear ignorant, because American readers have been trained to associate nonstandard spelling with illiteracy. Eye dialect can become → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
F
Facilitate carefully
set ground rules for discussing partisan politics in an academic context. - **Day 2:** Chapter 35. Stereotype construction from Li'l Abner to Deliverance to social media. "Who benefits from the hillbilly image?" Media analysis exercise. - **Day 3:** Chapter 36. Latino immigration. Remote work migrat → Syllabus: 15-Week Semester
Fahe network
a collaborative of housing and community development organizations across Appalachia — has been working to scale CLT and other affordable housing models across the region. Fahe's member organizations operate in communities from Alabama to West Virginia, providing affordable housing, financial servic → Chapter 36: The New Appalachia — Immigration, Remote Work, Tourism, and Reinvention
Farm consolidation
the process by which small farms were absorbed into larger operations or simply abandoned — had been underway nationally since the 1920s, but it hit Appalachia with particular force. The steep terrain that characterized much of the region made mechanized farming difficult or impossible. While farmer → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
Fatalism
the belief that suffering in this world was God's will and that the proper Christian response was patient endurance rather than political action — was a powerful force in mountain religion. "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away" could be a statement of profound faith in the face of genuine tragedy → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
through the ARC, the POWER Initiative, and other channels — directed funds to McDowell County for infrastructure, workforce training, and community development. These investments were real and, in some cases, produced tangible results. But they were dwarfed by the scale of the county's losses. → Case Study 1: McDowell County — From Richest to Poorest in Two Generations
a synthetic opioid approximately fifty to a hundred times more potent than morphine. Fentanyl was cheap to manufacture (primarily in clandestine laboratories in China and Mexico), extraordinarily potent, and frequently mixed into heroin or pressed into counterfeit pills without the user's knowledge. → Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis — How Appalachia Became Ground Zero
fiddle
the same instrument as the violin, but with a different name, a different repertoire, and a different social role — had been central to rural American music since the colonial era. Scots-Irish settlers brought fiddle traditions from Ulster and the Scottish Lowlands. The fiddle was the essential danc → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
deliberate, controlled burning of the forest understory — to manage the landscape. Burning cleared the undergrowth, suppressing shade-tolerant species that competed with the nut trees. It created open, park-like forests where nut trees received more sunlight and produced heavier crops. It encouraged → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Five Civilized Tribes
a term that itself reflects the assimilationist framework of the era, as if "civilization" were something that had to be granted rather than something Indigenous nations had possessed for millennia — emptied the southeastern United States of its Indigenous population and opened millions of acres for → Chapter 4: Contact, Colonization, and the Unmaking of Indigenous Appalachia
foodways
the full complex of food-related practices, including production, preservation, preparation, and consumption — and material culture of Appalachia from their multicultural origins through the twentieth-century craft revival to the contemporary moment, when Appalachian food shows up on fancy restauran → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
a methodology in which students learn academic skills (writing, research, interviewing, editing, photography) through the investigation and documentation of their own community's culture. The approach was student-driven, community-connected, and built on the premise that the knowledge held by ordina → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
Foxfire archives
Particularly strong for material culture and community traditions in southern Appalachia - **Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History** at the University of Kentucky — Extensive Appalachian oral history holdings - **West Virginia and Regional History Center** at West Virginia University → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
Communities of free people of African descent in antebellum Appalachia, formed through manumission, self-purchase, and birth to free mothers, existing under severe legal and social restrictions. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 6
formally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — was established by Congress in March 1865 to assist formerly enslaved people in the transition to freedom. Its mandate was enormous: to distribute food and clothing, establish schools, negotiate labor contracts, adjudicate disputes, an → Chapter 12: Emancipation in the Mountains — Black Appalachians from Slavery to Freedom
Freedom papers
Legal documents proving a free Black person's status, required to be carried at all times and essential for protection against kidnapping and enslavement. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 6
frontiersman
these iconic figures of Appalachian identity are defined by a masculinity that leaves no room for queerness. The **mountain woman** — the loyal wife, the strong mother, the keeper of hearth and faith — is defined by a femininity that is equally constrained. Within these categories, there is no space → Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story
fully transcribed
a complete, verbatim written record of the spoken conversation. Transcription is labor-intensive (expect 4-6 hours of transcription for every hour of recorded interview), but it is essential. A transcript is a primary source document. The audio recording captures what was said; the transcript makes → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
furnace villages
in otherwise rural areas. These villages had their own stores, housing, sometimes churches and schools. They were, in effect, early prototypes of the company towns that would dominate the coal era a century later. And like those later company towns, they concentrated economic power in the hands of a → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
G
gentrification
the process by which an influx of wealthier residents transforms a community's character and displaces its existing population. Gentrification has been studied extensively in urban contexts — in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, in Washington's Shaw neighborhood. But gentrification in a mountain town has → Chapter 36: The New Appalachia — Immigration, Remote Work, Tourism, and Reinvention
geographic isolation
the mountains cut communities off from the broader currents of American culture, preserving older forms that evolved or disappeared elsewhere. There is truth in this. The steep ridges, narrow hollows, and sparse road networks of the central Appalachian highlands did slow the penetration of outside c → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
usually translated as **Beloved Woman** or War Woman. The Ghigau held a seat in the council, had the power to spare prisoners condemned to death, participated in treaty negotiations, and spoke with an authority that derived from both her personal accomplishments and the recognition of her community. → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
a term that was simultaneously a description and a title of respect. The granny midwife was typically an older woman (though not always elderly; some began practicing in their thirties) who had delivered babies for years or decades, who had learned her skills through apprenticeship with an older mid → Case Study 9.2: Midwives, Healers, and the Informal Health System
granny woman
the woman recognized as having the most extensive knowledge of plant medicine — was one of the most important figures in mountain society, consulted for everything from earaches to difficult childbirths. → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
known in Cherokee as the Great New Moon Festival or, in some traditions, the Busk (from a Creek word). The Green Corn Ceremony was held each year when the first corn of the new harvest ripened, typically in late summer. It was a multi-day event that combined religious observance, social renewal, and → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
H
Harlan County, Kentucky
from Cherokee territory to coal kingdom to opioid crisis to uncertain future. One county's history mirrors the entire arc of Appalachia (labor, extraction, poverty, resistance, resilience) 2. **The New River Valley, Virginia (including Blacksburg)** — from Shawnee and Cherokee lands through frontier → _continuity.md — The History of Appalachia
healthcare services
including prenatal care, childhood vaccination, and dental care — to communities that had no access to physicians - Preserved and promoted **Appalachian craft traditions** — weaving, woodworking, basket-making, quilting — by creating markets for handmade goods and teaching traditional skills alongsi → Chapter 25: Education and the Fight for Literacy — From Settlement Schools to Consolidation
heirloom varieties
open-pollinated cultivars that had been selected and saved by mountain families for generations, adapted through decades or centuries of selection to the specific conditions of the local climate, soil, and growing season. A family's seed stock was a form of wealth — biological capital that represent → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
the woman seized by Indigenous peoples, whose suffering and rescue justify white expansion. The second is the **dutiful helpmeet** — the silent, enduring wife who keeps the cabin while the man does the real work of civilization. The third is the **civilizing force** — the woman who brings religion, → Chapter 9: Women on the Frontier — Gender, Labor, and Survival in Mountain Communities
herbal medicine
the identification, preparation, and application of plant-based remedies for illness and injury. This knowledge was extensive, drawing on English, Scotch-Irish, German, and Indigenous traditions that had mingled and merged on the frontier. **Midwifery** — the management of pregnancy and childbirth — → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
including lung, kidney, and colon cancers — than communities in other parts of Appalachia or the nation - **Higher rates of cardiovascular disease** - **Higher rates of respiratory illness**, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma - **Higher rates of birth defects** — a study pub → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
hillbilly stereotype
the image of the Appalachian mountain person as backward, violent, ignorant, sexually deviant, and genetically degraded — was constructed over more than a century through specific media products created by specific people for specific audiences, and it has been maintained because it serves specific → Chapter 35: Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Appalachian Identity
corn kernels treated with lye to remove the hull and release nutrients — was another staple, eaten whole or ground into **grits**. The nixtamalization process that produced hominy was an Indigenous technology of enormous nutritional importance: without it, a corn-heavy diet leads to pellagra, a niac → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
implemented during his tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009 — was an exception, directing party resources to rebuild local organizations in every state and county, including rural Appalachia. The strategy was controversial within the party but produced significant r → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
Hungarian immigrants
a category that included ethnic Magyars, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and other groups from the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire — formed the second-largest European immigrant group in the coalfields. They came from regions with established mining traditions. The coal and iron regions of Hungary and Slo → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
hydraulic fracturing
universally known as **fracking** — and **horizontal drilling** technologies. These technologies, which became commercially viable in the mid-2000s, unlocked vast reserves of natural gas trapped in shale formations across the United States, including the Marcellus and Utica shale formations that und → Chapter 32: The Coal Economy's Collapse — What Happens When the One Industry Dies
I
identity fragmentation
the feeling of being divided between two selves, neither of which is fully authentic. The professional self that speaks Standard American English is competent but incomplete — a performed version of the person, missing the linguistic dimension that connects them to home, family, and community. The h → Case Study 2: Code-Switching — When You Change How You Talk to Be Taken Seriously
Immigrant communities
Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and other groups arriving in the coalfields during this exact period — who did not fit the "contemporary ancestors" narrative and were therefore excluded from the story of "Appalachia" even as they were becoming a significant part of the region's population. → Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia — How Outsiders Invented a Region
Immigrant housing
for Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and other European immigrant miners — was often grouped in distinct sections, sometimes colloquially named after the dominant nationality. "Little Italy" or "Hunky Holler" or "Polack Row" were not addresses on a map but real designations that everyone in camp used and → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
Does the history attend to diverse voices — Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, LGBTQ+, working-class? Does it identify whose stories are missing from the historical record? Does it treat the people of the county as protagonists of their own history, not objects of study? → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to reverse the disastrous assimilation policies of the previous half-century — offered tribes the opportunity to adopt formal constitutions and establish more robust governmental structures. The Eastern Band adopted a revised charter in 1889 (prior to the IRA) but subseq → Chapter 39: The Eastern Band and Indigenous Persistence — Native Appalachia Then and Now
Indigenous peoples
the Cherokee and other nations who still lived in or near the mountains during this period — had their own rich spiritual traditions: the Green Corn Ceremony, the relationship with the Long Man (the river), the stories of Selu (the Corn Mother) and Kanati (the Lucky Hunter). These traditions were no → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
union chapters where Black miners and white miners sat in the same hall, voted on the same contracts, and went on strike together. In an era when most American institutions were rigidly segregated, this was extraordinary. → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
Interactions between groups
the marriages across ethnic lines, the friendships between Italian and Hungarian families, the moments of shared celebration or shared grief — are less well documented than the divisions. The company records track ethnicity and race. They do not track the human connections that crossed those lines. → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
a term coined by the legal scholar **Kimberle Crenshaw** in 1989 to describe the way that multiple forms of oppression combine and interact. An intersectional analysis of Appalachian history does not ask whether race or class is more important. It asks how they work together. It asks whose experienc → Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story
intersectional solidarity
a place where the Navajo uranium legacy, the Appalachian coal legacy, the Cancer Alley petrochemical legacy, and the broader struggle for environmental justice converged. Appalachian activists from anti-pipeline and anti-mountaintop-removal movements traveled to Standing Rock and recognized the patt → Case Study 41.1: From Appalachia to Standing Rock — The Extraction Pattern
state laws that determine who inherits. In most states, the result was that the property became jointly owned by all heirs as **tenants in common**. Each heir owned an undivided share of the whole property, but no heir owned any specific piece of it. → Case Study 12.2: Black Land Ownership and Dispossession in the Mountains
a group of stories featuring a clever, resourceful young man named Jack who outwits giants, devils, kings, and various supernatural opponents through wit rather than strength. The Jack Tales are closely related to the European folktale tradition (Jack and the Beanstalk is the best-known example), bu → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
Jeff Mann
a poet, memoirist, and novelist from Hinton, West Virginia — has written extensively about the experience of being gay in Appalachia, claiming both identities with a defiance that challenges the assumption that mountain culture and queer identity are incompatible. His work insists that the mountains → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
Jeffersonian democracy
the vision of a republic of independent small farmers, suspicious of centralized financial power, hostile to the Hamiltonian program of banks, tariffs, and federal economic management. When Andrew Jackson emerged in the 1820s as the champion of the common man against the eastern establishment, mount → Chapter 10: Revolution, Republic, and the Whiskey Rebellion — Appalachia in the New Nation
Joe Manchin
the Democratic senator from West Virginia who had won election in 2010 and reelection in 2018 by positioning himself as a moderate, pro-coal, pro-gun Democrat — became the last vestige of Appalachian Democratic representation at the federal level in the coalfield states. His ability to survive in an → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
JOIN (Jobs or Income Now)
affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — organized Appalachian migrants in Uptown around issues of poverty, housing, and police brutality. The **Young Patriots Organization**, a radical group composed largely of young Appalachian men, allied with the Black Panther Party and the Youn → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
Judge James Eversole
produced years of violence between 1887 and 1894. At least a dozen people were killed. The conflict was rooted in competition for control of Perry County's political offices at a time when the county was being opened up to timber and coal extraction. Both French and Eversole were prominent men — pol → Chapter 13: The Feud Mythology — What Really Happened (and What It Was Really About)
The largest industrial enterprise in antebellum Appalachia, producing millions of bushels of salt annually and employing 2,000 to 3,000 enslaved workers — one of the largest concentrations of enslaved industrial labor in the United States. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 6
Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies
later renamed the Frontier Nursing Service — with a plan that was unprecedented in American healthcare. She would recruit trained nurse-midwives (initially from Britain, where the profession was well-established, and later from a school she would found herself). She would station them in small nursi → Case Study 1: The Frontier Nursing Service — Mary Breckinridge and the Nurse-Midwives
Kentucky Poet Laureate
a recognition that placed a Black Appalachian woman at the center of the state's literary identity for the first time. The appointment was not symbolic. It was a statement about whose voice belongs to Kentucky and whose Kentucky belongs in literature. → Case Study 2: Crystal Wilkinson and the Literature of Black Appalachia
Key Evidence:
Mountain topography did create physical barriers to travel and communication before railroads. - Appalachian English preserves linguistic features lost elsewhere in English-speaking world. - Ballad collectors (Cecil Sharp, 1916-1918) found British Isles songs surviving in the mountains. - William Go → Appendix C: Argument Maps
the ancient ceremonial site considered by many Cherokee to be the mother town, the place where Cherokee civilization began. Kituwah is to the Cherokee what Plymouth Rock is to New England or Independence Hall is to American democracy — a geographic anchor for a people's identity, the place where the → Chapter 39: The Eastern Band and Indigenous Persistence — Native Appalachia Then and Now
a U.S. Senate investigation into violations of workers' rights, chaired by Senator Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin — heard extensive testimony in 1937-1938 about conditions in Harlan County. The testimony painted a picture of total corporate control over community institutions, including churche → Case Study 2: Churches as Community Infrastructure During the Coal Wars
in which vast acreages of Appalachian land, including the mineral rights beneath them, were owned by absentee corporations that extracted resources and exported profits without contributing to the local tax base — was not addressed. The Appalachian Land Ownership Study, conducted in the late 1970s ( → Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again
purchases of land by the EBCI that are then placed into federal trust status, expanding the Boundary's territorial base and the tribe's jurisdictional authority. These acquisitions have been strategically pursued, targeting parcels with cultural, economic, or geographic significance. Each acquisitio → Chapter 39: The Eastern Band and Indigenous Persistence — Native Appalachia Then and Now
language shame
the internalized belief that your natural way of speaking is inferior, that the language of your family and community is deficient, that something fundamental about who you are is wrong. Language shame is psychologically damaging in ways that are difficult to overstate. It attacks the most intimate → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
Leather britches
dried green beans, one of the most practical and efficient preservation techniques in the mountain food repertoire — carried a similar burden. The sight of strings of drying beans hanging from the porch was legible, to anyone who knew the code, as a sign of rural poverty. Never mind that leather bri → Case Study 2: Ramps, Leather Britches, and the Politics of Appalachian Food
people building queer community in rural spaces, navigating both the beauty and the hostility of small-town life > - **Disabled Appalachians** — people living with the physical legacies of industrial labor, or with disabilities unrelated to industry, in a region where accessibility infrastructure is → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
at the time the fourth-largest coal company in the United States and the most powerful company in the central Appalachian coalfields. Massey's chairman and CEO, **Don Blankenship**, was infamous for his confrontational approach to regulation, his willingness to spend lavishly on political campaigns, → Case Study 2: The Sludge Impoundment Disaster at Martin County, Kentucky
Mastodons
shaggy, elephant-like creatures standing nine to ten feet at the shoulder — browsed the spruce forests of the Appalachian valleys. **Mammoths**, their larger and more open-country cousins, ranged the grasslands at the margins of the mountains. Giant ground sloths, some weighing more than a ton, lumb → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
matched-guise study
a technique in which the same speaker records the same text in two or more accents, and listeners evaluate the recordings without knowing they are hearing the same person — listeners consistently rate Appalachian-accented speech lower on measures of intelligence, education, competence, and professio → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
Material culture
the objects, foods, tools, and crafts that people create and use in daily life — is history you can touch, taste, and smell. It tells you things that documents alone cannot: what people ate, how they worked, what they valued enough to make beautiful when beauty was not strictly necessary. A quilt pa → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
Matewan Massacre
or the Battle of Matewan, depending on whose side you were on — was front-page news across the country. Sid Hatfield became an instant folk hero in the coalfields, the lawman who had stood up to the Baldwin-Felts and won. Miners sang songs about him. His image circulated in UMWA publications. The co → Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal — Labor Wars in the Mountains
matrilineal
descent, identity, property, and clan membership all passed through the mother's line. A child belonged to their mother's clan, lived in their mother's household, and was raised not primarily by their biological father but by their mother's brothers — their maternal uncles. A woman's house was her h → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
May Stone
traveled to Hindman, a small town in the hills of Knott County in eastern Kentucky. They came to hold what they called an "Industrial School" — a summer program of classes in cooking, sewing, hygiene, and academic subjects for the women and children of the surrounding hollows. They set up in a rente → Case Study 2: The Settlement School Movement — Help or Colonization?
Maybelle Carter
came from Maces Spring, Virginia, a tiny community in the Clinch Mountain region of southwestern Virginia. A.P. was a collector of songs — he traveled through the mountains gathering tunes from neighbors, relatives, and anyone who would sing for him. Sara had a voice of extraordinary clarity and emo → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
McDowell County, West Virginia
which would become one of the most productive coal counties in America — outside corporations had acquired mineral rights to the vast majority of the county's land by 1900. The Norfolk and Western Railway and its associated land companies were the largest holders, but dozens of corporations based in → Chapter 15: King Coal — How the Coal Industry Transformed Appalachia
Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT)
the use of medications like **buprenorphine** (Suboxone), **methadone**, or **naltrexone** (Vivitrol) to reduce cravings and prevent withdrawal symptoms — was the evidence-based standard of care for opioid addiction. Clinical trials and real-world studies consistently demonstrated that MAT dramatica → Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis — How Appalachia Became Ground Zero
a term applied to mixed-heritage communities in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Kentucky — have been the subject of intense historical and genetic investigation. The origins of the Melungeon communities are debated: they likely include Indigenous, European, and → Chapter 39: The Eastern Band and Indigenous Persistence — Native Appalachia Then and Now
Memory and Silence
What do your interviewees choose to talk about, and what do they avoid? The silences in an oral history — the topics that are deflected, minimized, or refused — are as historically significant as the stories that are told. → Capstone Project 2: The Appalachian Oral History Collection
Mesha Maren
the list of contemporary Appalachian writers grows longer every year, and the range of voices and perspectives grows broader. These writers are not writing the same Appalachian story that James Still wrote in 1940 or that Harriette Arnow wrote in 1954. They are writing new stories — stories shaped b → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
micro-hospital
a facility with a small number of inpatient beds (typically 8-15), an emergency room, and basic diagnostic services — offers a scaled-down version of hospital care that may be financially sustainable in communities too small to support a full-scale hospital. → Case Study 2: Rural Hospital Closures and the Healthcare Desert
mine superintendent's house
the largest and finest dwelling in the camp, typically a two-story frame house with a porch, a yard, and sometimes a picket fence. The superintendent was the company's chief representative in the camp, the man who hired and fired, who allocated houses, who decided which grievances would be heard and → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
miners' families
the wives, mothers, daughters, and children of the striking miners. The women of Camp Solidarity ran the kitchen, organized logistics, maintained morale, and, in many cases, participated directly in picket lines and civil disobedience actions. Their role was not auxiliary. It was essential. Without → Case Study 2: The Pittston Coal Strike and Camp Solidarity
a form of theatrical entertainment in which white performers in blackface makeup caricatured African American music, dance, and speech — was the most popular form of entertainment in America from the 1830s through the 1870s. Minstrel performers adopted the banjo as their signature instrument, and th → Case Study 2: The African American Roots of the Banjo and Mountain Music
part subsistence, part barter, part cash, part global trade. A family in a western North Carolina hollow in 1800 might grow their own corn, weave their own cloth, distill their own whiskey, and dig their own ginseng — and that ginseng might end up in Canton, China, six months later. The same family → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
mixed mesophytic forest
a community dominated by an extraordinary variety of hardwood species. The term "mesophytic" means "middle moisture" — these forests occupied the moderate conditions between the dry ridgetops and the wet valley bottoms, and they rewarded that moderation with a diversity that astonished the botanists → Chapter 18: Timber, Railroads, and Environmental Devastation — The First Extraction
model of community-wide resistance
in which the strike was not just a workplace action but a community action, involving men and women, miners and non-miners, the church and the kitchen and the picket line — influenced subsequent organizing efforts across the region. The women who had sustained Camp Solidarity went on to sustain othe → Case Study 2: The Pittston Coal Strike and Camp Solidarity
a market with a single buyer (in this case, a single seller in a captive market). The company store faced no competition. It could charge whatever prices it wished, because the customer had no alternative. The scrip system ensured that the customer's money could only be spent in one place. The geogr → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
Mother Jones
the legendary labor organizer who roused miners across the coalfields (Chapter 17) — was the most famous woman in Appalachian labor history, but she was not alone. Women organized the **Brookside Strike** of 1973-74 in Harlan County, Kentucky, documented in Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning fil → Chapter 40: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story
rooted in Civil War Unionism, anti-slavery sentiment, and the areas that had broken from the Confederacy — persisted in parts of western North Carolina, east Tennessee, and the northern West Virginia panhandle. These areas had voted Republican since the 1860s, for reasons that had nothing to do with → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
Mountain slavery
The institution of slavery as it operated in Appalachia, characterized by smaller slaveholdings, diversified agriculture, and integration with industrial operations, but sharing the fundamental features of unfreedom, family separation, and racial domination that defined slavery everywhere. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 6
the **Mine Safety and Health Administration** — as the federal agency responsible for enforcing mine safety and health standards. It set permissible dust exposure limits. It created a federal black lung benefits program that provided monthly payments to miners disabled by CWP and to the widows and d → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
Does the county history read as a unified, coherent narrative? Is the writing clear, specific, and engaging? Are transitions between eras smooth? Is there a discernible through-line or argument? → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
Nashville Sound
developed by producers like **Chet Atkins** and **Owen Bradley** in the late 1950s and early 1960s — replaced the fiddles and banjos of traditional country with string sections, background vocals, and polished production values. The goal was to make country music palatable to a broader audience — to → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
Natural gas competition
the shale gas revolution (hydraulic fracturing/fracking) dramatically increased natural gas supply and reduced prices, making gas-fired electricity generation cheaper than coal in most markets. This is widely considered the single largest driver of coal's decline. (2) **Renewable energy cost decline → Answers to Selected Exercises
that stretched seventy-three miles up the Clinch River Valley. It was designed to control flooding, generate hydroelectric power, and demonstrate that public power could provide electricity to rural communities at rates far below what the private utilities charged. → Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — TVA, the CCC, and Federal Transformation
Northern missionary societies
particularly the **American Missionary Association (AMA)**, the American Freedmen's Union Commission, and various denominational organizations — provided teachers and funding. The AMA was the most active organization in Appalachian education, sending teachers (most of them young white women from New → Case Study 12.1: Freedmen's Schools in Appalachia
a tradition particularly strong in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia — maintained these rituals with meticulous fidelity across generations. An Old Regular Baptist communion and footwashing service in 2020 would have been recognizable to a participant from 1820: the same hymns (lined out, u → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
one-room schools
single-room buildings, typically of log or frame construction, serving all grades together under a single teacher. The students ranged in age from six to sixteen or older. The teacher, who might have only a few years of education beyond the students themselves, was responsible for teaching all subje → Chapter 25: Education and the Fight for Literacy — From Settlement Schools to Consolidation
open harmony
raw, parallel intervals of fourths and fifths that sound archaic and slightly dissonant to ears accustomed to modern harmonic conventions. The voices were loud, unrestrained, pushed to their full volume — this was not the genteel, blended singing of a trained church choir. It was a muscular, full-th → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
Optional appendices
photographs, reproductions of primary source documents, data tables, family histories, or other supplementary material that enriches the narrative but would interrupt its flow → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
Oral history projects
including the Appalachian Oral History Project at Alice Lloyd College, the Foxfire archives, and numerous local and regional projects — have preserved recordings of traditional Appalachian speech that are invaluable to linguists and historians. These recordings capture not just the words but the rhy → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
oral tradition
was not a primitive substitute for literacy. It was a sophisticated system for preserving and transmitting complex knowledge that had its own methods, its own quality controls, and its own advantages. Oral tradition was personal — the learner received not just information but context, nuance, and th → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
frontier taverns spaced along the route at intervals of roughly a day's travel. These were not comfortable establishments. A typical ordinary was a log building with a common room where travelers slept on the floor, often a dozen or more to a room, sharing space with strangers. The food was basic: c → Case Study 5.1: The Great Wagon Road — Migration Highway to the Mountains
the particular way that people from outside a community see, interpret, and represent the people within it — is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding Appalachian history. It does not require malice. Many of the local color writers genuinely liked the mountain people they met. But likin → Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia — How Outsiders Invented a Region
Over-the-Rhine
a neighborhood whose name tells a story about layers of migration. In the nineteenth century, German immigrants settled here in such numbers that crossing the Miami-Erie Canal (which once ran where Central Parkway now is) was likened to crossing the Rhine River into Germany. By the mid-twentieth cen → Case Study 2: Urban Appalachians in Cincinnati and Chicago
overburden
is removed by enormous machines. The largest of these are **draglines** — massive cranes that swing buckets the size of small houses through the air, scooping up a hundred cubic yards of rock at a time and depositing it somewhere else. A single dragline can cost $100 million and stand as tall as a t → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
Overmountain settlements
communities west of the Blue Ridge in what is now northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. They were the most remote, most independent, and most heavily armed civilian population on the continent. They were Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers who had crossed the mountains precisely b → Chapter 10: Revolution, Republic, and the Whiskey Rebellion — Appalachia in the New Nation
Overstated ethnic homogeneity
the Celtic thesis treats Appalachia as overwhelmingly Scotch-Irish when in fact the region was settled by a mix of ethnic groups including Germans, English, Welsh, and African Americans (both enslaved and free). (2) **Erasure of other influences** -- by attributing Appalachian cultural traits to a s → Answers to Selected Exercises
Overwork system
A practice at some industrial operations where enslaved workers could earn small payments for production above a daily quota, providing a marginal economic space within the institution of slavery. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 6
the earliest phase of human habitation in the Americas, spanning roughly 13,000 to 10,000 years before the present (BP) — was an era in which small, mobile bands of hunters moved across the landscape in pursuit of the large animals that the Ice Age environment sustained. And those animals were extra → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Geological formation, ten thousand years of Indigenous life, the Cherokee civilization, and the catastrophe of colonization and removal. - **Part II: Settlement and the Frontier (Ch. 5-10)** — Migration into the mountains, the hidden history of mountain slavery, the frontier economy, religion, women → Instructor Guide: Overview
sometimes called recovery support specialists — were people who had experienced addiction themselves, achieved sustained recovery, and received training in counseling and crisis intervention. They were stationed in emergency departments, in community organizations, at syringe service programs, and i → Case Study 2: Harm Reduction in Rural Appalachia — What Actually Works
a McCoy relative by marriage — held legal title to approximately 5,000 acres of timberland on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork. This was valuable property. The forests of the Tug Fork region contained immense stands of virgin hardwood — yellow poplar, white oak, walnut, chestnut — that were wo → Case Study 1: Hatfields and McCoys — A Property Dispute Becomes a National Myth
preserving vegetables (and sometimes fruits and eggs) in a vinegar brine — was another essential technique. Pickled corn, pickled beans, pickled beets, chow-chow (a pickled relish of green tomatoes and mixed vegetables), and sauerkraut lined the pantry shelves alongside the canned goods. Fermentatio → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
was the primary product of the blast furnace. Pig iron was brittle and high in carbon; it needed further refining at a forge or foundry before it could be worked into useful products. → Case Study 2 — Iron Furnaces of the Southern Mountains
Pill mills
clinics that prescribed opioids to virtually anyone who walked through the door, often after perfunctory or nonexistent medical examinations — flourished in the Appalachian region because the remoteness of the communities, the scarcity of alternative medical providers, and the distance from regulato → Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis — How Appalachia Became Ground Zero
Pisgah culture
named for the Pisgah Phase defined by archaeologist Joffre Coe — represents the Mississippian adaptation to the high mountain environment. Pisgah communities, established roughly 1000 to 1500 CE, built villages in the river valleys of the French Broad and its tributaries, practiced intensive maize a → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
the largest city in the Appalachian region by the ARC's definition — was solidly Democratic. Allegheny County (which contains Pittsburgh) voted for Biden by 20 points in 2020. Pittsburgh's politics were shaped by its transformation from a steel city to a technology and healthcare hub, by its large u → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
one of the largest coal companies in the Appalachian coalfields, the same corporate entity whose subsidiary had built the dam that failed at Buffalo Creek in 1972 — announced that it would no longer honor the healthcare provisions of its contract with the United Mine Workers of America. → Case Study 2: The Pittston Coal Strike and Camp Solidarity
the geological age dominated by repeated glaciations — was ending, but it had not ended yet. The great continental ice sheets had not reached the southern Appalachians (the glaciers stopped well north of Pennsylvania), but the Ice Age had transformed the mountains all the same. Temperatures were col → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Pocahontas coalfield
a region straddling the Virginia-West Virginia border in what is now McDowell County, West Virginia, and Tazewell and Mercer counties, Virginia. The Pocahontas seam, a thick deposit of high-quality bituminous coal, would prove to be one of the most valuable coal deposits in the world. The coal was i → Case Study 2: The Norfolk and Western Railway — Opening the Coalfields
often a raised platform or fallen log — surrounded by a clearing where the congregation gathered. Around the periphery, families set up their camps: tents, wagons, brush arbors (temporary shelters made from poles covered with branches and leaves). → Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia
Preparation:
The affirmative team should gather evidence from the chapter's discussion of Appalachian TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube creators, focusing on reach, accessibility, and the power of personal testimony. - The negative team should gather evidence from the chapter's discussion of Appalachian Studies, He → Chapter 35 Exercises: Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Appalachian Identity
Primary Source Excerpts
letters, speeches, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and government documents with guided analysis questions - **Map Analysis** — exercises that use geographic data to reveal historical patterns - **Oral History Prompts** — structured guides for interviewing family or community members about their → How to Use This Book
the disease is devastating. The lungs become so scarred and stiffened that breathing becomes progressively more difficult, then agonizing, then impossible. A man with advanced PMF cannot walk across a room without gasping for breath. He cannot lie flat without feeling that he is drowning. He spends → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
systems that store energy by pumping water to an elevated reservoir when electricity is cheap (during periods of excess renewable generation) and releasing it through turbines to generate electricity when demand is high. Pumped storage is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage currently av → Chapter 37: Energy Transition — Appalachia's Past, Present, and Future in the Climate Crisis
the geometric designs formed by the arrangement of fabric pieces — carried names, meanings, and regional associations that constituted a visual language as rich as any folk art tradition in the world. Patterns like **Double Wedding Ring**, **Log Cabin**, **Bear's Paw**, **Drunkard's Path**, **Star o → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
quilting bee
a communal gathering at which women came together to quilt — was one of the most important social institutions in mountain communities, rivaling the church in its capacity to build and maintain social bonds. A quilting bee was work, but it was also conversation, gossip, advice, storytelling, singing → Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived
an alliance that predated Jesse Jackson's use of the term by more than a decade. The coalition was brokered by **Fred Hampton**, the charismatic young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers, who argued that poor whites, poor Blacks, and poor Latinos shared common interests that transcended racial divi → Case Study 2: Urban Appalachians in Cincinnati and Chicago
Ramp suppers
communal meals built around ramps cooked in every conceivable way (fried with eggs and potatoes, cooked with beans, pickled, eaten raw) — are spring rituals that have been held in mountain communities for as long as anyone can remember. The Feast of the Ramson (an old English word for wild garlic) i → Case Study 2: Ramps, Leather Britches, and the Politics of Appalachian Food
Ramps
wild leeks, *Allium tricoccum* — push up through the leaf litter on the forest floor in dense patches, their broad green leaves and purple-red stems unmistakable to anyone who has ever harvested them. The smell is somewhere between garlic and onion but stronger than either, a pungent, sulfurous arom → Case Study 2: Ramps, Leather Britches, and the Politics of Appalachian Food
Recurring themes
What patterns appear across multiple eras? Does the extraction pattern show up? The resistance tradition? The tension between insider identity and outsider perception? - **Key turning points** — What are the moments when your county changed dramatically? The arrival of the railroad? The coal boom? T → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
regulatory capture
the process by which a regulatory agency, created to oversee an industry, gradually comes to serve the interests of the industry it is supposed to regulate — is a staple of political science textbooks. In the history of mountaintop removal in Appalachia, it is not an abstract concept. It is a docume → Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When They Blew Up the Mountains
Religious Right
the coalition of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians that became a major political force in the 1980s — found fertile ground in Appalachia's deeply religious communities. Issues like abortion, school prayer, and opposition to gay rights mobilized voters who had never before thought of themselv → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
Repetition
Are you saying the same thing in multiple sections? Consolidate. - **Abrupt transitions** — Does the shift from one era to the next feel natural, or does it feel like you are jumping between disconnected assignments? Add transitional passages that connect the eras. - **Tonal consistency** — Does the → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
Requirements:
At least five primary sources and five secondary sources - Attention to diverse perspectives (race, class, gender, age, newcomers and longtime residents) - Connection to the textbook's recurring themes - Clear, specific, evidence-grounded writing - A conclusion that resists easy endings — that honor → Chapter 42 Exercises: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
Resolved: Appalachia's best days are ahead of it.
*For:* The collapse of coal, while devastating, has liberated the region from a century of mono-economy dependency. New economic models, cultural pride, self-representation, and a generation of young Appalachians committed to their communities suggest that transformation is possible. The resistance → Discussion Guide — Chapter 42: View from the Porch
a Unionist rival government that claimed to be the legitimate government of the entire state. Under the legal fiction that this body represented Virginia, it then gave itself permission to form a new state from Virginia's western counties. → Chapter 11: A Region Divided — Appalachia and the Civil War
resurgence of severe black lung disease
a dramatic increase in advanced cases of progressive massive fibrosis among Appalachian coal miners that has been documented since the mid-2010s. The resurgence is linked to the shift toward thinner coal seams (which require cutting more rock, generating more silica dust), longer work shifts, and th → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
Retention of "r" in all positions
Appalachian English is fully rhotic (pronouncing "r" wherever it appears in spelling), a feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English that was preserved in the mountains while non-rhotic speech developed in England and in some American coastal cities. Appalachian speakers thus retained the → Answers to Selected Exercises
Return migration
the movement of migrants back to their communities of origin — was a consistent, if smaller, counterflow to the great outward stream. People returned for many reasons: retirement (they had spent their working lives in the city and wanted to spend their final years in the mountains), disability (they → Chapter 20: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains
MacArthur Fellow, Grammy winner, cofounder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops — has done more than any other contemporary musician to recover and celebrate the African American roots of Appalachian and southern music. Giddens's solo work, her collaborative projects, and her public advocacy have forced → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
rhotic
speakers pronounce the "r" at the end of words and before consonants ("car," "farm," "water") where many Eastern American dialects drop it. This feature is inherited from the Scots-Irish and Northern English dialects that dominated the settlement of the Appalachian region. Far from being a deviation → Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound
Richard Trumka
a young, charismatic leader from a coal mining family in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania — understood that the political and media landscape of 1989 was fundamentally different from that of 1921. Armed resistance would not produce sympathy. It would produce a military response and a public relations disaste → Case Study 2: The Pittston Coal Strike and Camp Solidarity
connecting the ore bank, the charcoal yard, the limestone quarry, and the furnace itself. Transporting these bulky raw materials to the furnace was one of the most labor-intensive aspects of the operation. → Case Study 2 — Iron Furnaces of the Southern Mountains
Robert Gipe
a community arts organizer from Harlan County, Kentucky — has published a series of graphic novels (*Trampoline*, 2015; *Weedeater*, 2018; *Pop*, 2021) that combine visual storytelling with Appalachian voices in a form that is entirely new to the tradition. His protagonist, Dawn Jewell, is a young w → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
Ron Rash
born in 1953 in Chester, South Carolina, raised in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, rooted in the mountain country of western North Carolina where his family has lived for generations — is the most acclaimed Appalachian writer of his generation, a novelist, short story writer, and poet whose body of → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
the collapse of the mine ceiling — were the leading cause of death. **Methane gas** (called "firedamp" by miners) could accumulate in pockets and ignite, causing explosions that killed dozens or hundreds at a time. **Coal dust**, suspended in the air and ignited by a spark, could create secondary ex → Chapter 15: King Coal — How the Coal Industry Transformed Appalachia
a chasm between the demand for addiction treatment and the available supply. Wait lists for treatment programs stretched weeks or months. People who reached the point of asking for help — which, given the stigma, was itself an act of extraordinary courage — were told to wait. And while they waited, → Chapter 33: The Opioid Crisis — How Appalachia Became Ground Zero
until the water evaporated and the salt crystallized. The fuel for the furnaces was initially wood (contributing to the deforestation of the Kanawha Valley), and then, in a development that foreshadowed Appalachia's industrial future, **natural gas** — which seeped from the same geological formation → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
Salt licks
natural mineral springs where saline water seeped to the surface — were scattered across the Appalachian region, and they had been known and used by Indigenous peoples and animals for thousands of years. (Many of the first European "discoveries" of mountain passes and river valleys were simply follo → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
sanctification
the belief that a Christian could achieve, through a second definitive spiritual experience after conversion, a state of complete freedom from willful sin — the Holiness movement insisted on a more intense, more experiential, more emotionally immediate form of worship than the increasingly sedate ma → Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life
Descendants of Scottish Lowlanders settled in the Irish province of Ulster in the 1600s who emigrated to the American colonies in large numbers between 1717 and 1775. → Key Takeaways: Chapter 5
Scotch-Irish sacramental tradition
a practice, brought to America by Presbyterian settlers from Ulster, of holding multi-day communion services (sometimes called "holy fairs") that drew people from a wide area for several days of preaching, prayer, and the celebration of the Lord's Supper. These sacramental occasions were already lar → Case Study 1 — The Cane Ridge Revival of 1801
scrip book
a small booklet issued by the company, from which the store clerk tears coupons as you make purchases. Each coupon represents a denomination of scrip: five cents, ten cents, twenty-five cents, fifty cents, one dollar. When the book is used up, you can request another — an advance against your husban → Chapter 16: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule
a cyclical pattern of movement through the landscape, timed to the availability of specific resources. In spring, bands gathered at river confluences where fish spawned in predictable runs. In early summer, they moved to upland meadows where wild plant foods were ripening. In autumn, they dispersed → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Second-generation immigrants
the children born in the coalfields to immigrant parents — attended company schools where English was the language of instruction. These children became bilingual by necessity, speaking their parents' language at home and English at school and on the street. They translated for their parents at the → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
seed savers
gardeners and small farmers across Appalachia who preserve heirloom plant varieties that have adapted over generations to the specific soils, climates, and microclimates of the mountain region. These varieties — with names like Turkey Craw bean, Candy Roaster squash, Greasy Cut Short, and Radiator C → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
is one of the most insidious tools in the construction of regional stereotypes. It does not require lying. It requires only choosing, and the choices are made by people who are not from the community, do not answer to the community, and are producing images for audiences who will never see the commu → Chapter 14: The "Discovery" of Appalachia — How Outsiders Invented a Region
self-monitoring
a background process of attention in which the speaker constantly evaluates their own speech for features that might trigger negative reactions. This monitoring consumes cognitive resources. It is an additional task layered on top of whatever the speaker is actually trying to accomplish (arguing a c → Case Study 2: Code-Switching — When You Change How You Talk to Be Taken Seriously
self-reliance
the conviction that communities and individuals should take care of themselves rather than depending on external institutions. This ethic was not merely philosophical; it was the product of material conditions. When the nearest government, doctor, market, or church was days away, self-reliance was n → Chapter 10: Revolution, Republic, and the Whiskey Rebellion — Appalachia in the New Nation
self-sufficiency myth
the idea that early Appalachian settlers lived entirely outside market economies, producing everything they consumed and consuming only what they produced — has shaped how Americans think about the mountains for two centuries. It feeds the romantic image of the mountain homesteader as the last true → Chapter 7: The Frontier Economy — Subsistence, Trade, and the First Industries
Sequoyah
known in English as George Gist or George Guess — was born around 1770 in the Cherokee town of Tuskegee, in what is now eastern Tennessee. He was the son of a Cherokee woman named Wut-teh of the Paint Clan and, most likely, a European trader or soldier. He grew up speaking Cherokee and apparently ne → Chapter 3: Cherokee Appalachia — The Nation That Shaped the Mountains
a language with so few speakers that its survival beyond the current generation is not assured without extraordinary intervention. The Eastern Band has invested heavily in language revitalization, establishing the Kituwah Academy as a Cherokee-language immersion school for children from infancy thro → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
Shape-note singing
a system of musical notation in which the shape of each note indicates its pitch within the scale — was developed in New England in the late eighteenth century as a way to teach music to people who could not read standard notation. It used four syllable names — fa, sol, la, and mi — mapped to four d → Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From Ballads to Bluegrass to Country to Beyond
shell middens
massive accumulations of discarded mussel shells, mixed with ash, bone, and other refuse, that built up along riverbanks over centuries and millennia of use. Shell middens along the Tennessee River in eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama, along the Green River in Kentucky, and along the Kanawha in → Chapter 2: First Peoples — 10,000 Years of Indigenous Life in the Appalachian Mountains
Shelton Laurel massacre
Confederate soldiers execute thirteen suspected Unionist men and boys in Madison County, NC, the youngest aged thirteen. The massacre exemplifies the war's brutality in mountain communities. - 1864-1865: Desertion from Confederate forces becomes widespread in mountain counties. Appalachian Unionists → Appendix B: Historical Timeline
Sid Hatfield
no close relation to the feuding Hatfields of a generation earlier, though the coincidence of the name in Tug Fork country was noted by every journalist who covered what happened next — was twenty-seven years old, a former miner himself, and openly sympathetic to the union cause. This was unusual. I → Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal — Labor Wars in the Mountains
Silas House
born in 1971 in Lily, a community in Laurel County, Kentucky — represents a generation of Appalachian writers who came of age after the folk revival and the War on Poverty, after the stereotypes had hardened but also after the tools for contesting them had been sharpened. House is a novelist, essayi → Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the Mountains from Within
silicosis
a well-recognized occupational disease caused by silica dust — and coal workers' pneumoconiosis, arguing that while silica dust (which is present in some mining environments) might cause disease, coal dust itself was "inert" and harmless. This argument was medically false, but it was effective: by m → Chapter 21: Black Lung, Cave-Ins, and Sago — The Human Cost of Coal
single-industry dependency
a condition in which an entire community's economic survival rests on a single employer or a single commodity. When that industry thrives, the community thrives (or at least survives). When that industry declines — as coal inevitably would — the community has nothing to fall back on. The structural → Chapter 15: King Coal — How the Coal Industry Transformed Appalachia
the farmers' market economy, craft brewing and distilling, specialty food production, fiber arts, pottery, woodworking — provide income for a growing number of Appalachian residents, many of them return migrants or newcomers who bring new markets and new marketing skills to traditional products. Mar → Chapter 42: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today
migration with the intention of return — was common among Italian immigrants across the United States. Some did return. But many more stayed, particularly as wives and children arrived and as the social infrastructure of the Italian community deepened. A man who had planned to stay three years found → Chapter 19: Immigrant Appalachia — The Diversity of the Coalfields
Source Use and Evidence
Do you draw on at least five primary and five secondary sources? Are claims supported by evidence? Are sources cited properly? Do you evaluate the reliability and perspective of your sources? → Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio
Sources the student has not yet found
"Your county has a WPA oral history collection at the state archives; have you looked for it?" 2. **Questions the student has not yet asked** — "You covered the coal industry but did not mention whether the county had a company town. Was there one?" 3. **Voices that are missing** — "Your settlement → Assessment Rubrics
Southern Strategy
the deliberate effort to attract white Southern voters alienated by the Democratic Party's support for civil rights legislation — was aimed primarily at the Deep South. But its effects rippled into Appalachia. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both passed under Democrat → Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country
southwestern Virginia
the New River Valley and surrounding counties — the enslaved population was smaller but still significant. Montgomery County had roughly 1,600 enslaved people in 1860, approximately 15 percent of the population. Wythe County had over 2,200. Smyth County had over 1,700. Washington County, at the Tenn → Chapter 6: Slavery in the Mountains — The Hidden History of Black Appalachia
occupying land they could not afford to buy, making improvements that increased the value of someone else's investment, and living under the constant threat of eviction by an absentee owner who had never seen the property.