- This article is about the region in the United States.
For other uses, see Appalachia .
Appalachia is a term used to
describe a cultural region in the eastern
United
States
that stretches from western New
York
state to northern Alabama
, Mississippi
, and Georgia
. While the Appalachian Mountains
stretch from Belle
Isle
in Canada
to Cheaha
Mountain
in the U.S.
state of Alabama
, the
cultural region of Appalachia typically refers only to the central
and southern portions of the range. As of 2005, the region
was home to approximately 23 million people.
Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th
century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and
distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, and behavior of
its inhabitants. Early 20th-century writers focused on
sensationalistic aspects of the region's culture, such as
moonshining and clan feuding, and often
portrayed the region's inhabitants as uneducated and prone to
impulsive acts of violence. Sociological studies in the 1960s and
1970s helped to deconstruct these stereotypes, although popular
media continued to perpetuate the image of Appalachia as a
culturally backward region into the 21st century.
While endowed with abundant natural resources, Appalachia has long
struggled with poverty. In the early 20th century, large-scale
logging and
coal
mining firms brought wage-paying jobs and modern amenities to
Appalachia, but by the 1960s the region had failed to capitalize on
any long-term benefits from these two industries. Beginning in the
1930s, the federal government sought to alleviate poverty in the
Appalachian region with a series of
New
Deal initiatives, such as the construction of dams to provide
cheap electricity and the implementation of better farming
practices. In 1965, the
Appalachian Regional
Commission was created to further alleviate poverty in the
region, mainly by diversifying the region's economy and helping to
provide better health care and educational opportunities to the
region's inhabitants. By 1990, Appalachia had largely joined the
economic mainstream, but still lagged behind the rest of the nation
in most economic indicators.
Defining the Appalachian region

William G.
Since Appalachia lacks definite physiographical or topographical
boundaries, there has been some disagreement over what exactly the
region encompasses. The most commonly-used modern definition of
Appalachia is the one initially defined by the Appalachian Regional
Commission in 1965 and expanded over subsequent decades.
The region
defined by the Commission currently includes 420 counties and eight
independent cities in 13
states, including all of West Virginia
and 14 counties in New York
, 52 in Pennsylvania
, 32 in Ohio
, 3 in
Maryland
, 54 in Kentucky
, 25 counties and 8 cities
in Virginia
, 29 in North Carolina
, 52 in Tennessee
, 6 in South Carolina
, 37 in Georgia
, 37 in Alabama
, and 24 in
Mississippi
. When the Commission was established,
counties were added based on economic need, however, rather than
any cultural parameters.
The first
major attempt to map Appalachia as a distinctive cultural region
came in the 1890s with the efforts of Berea College
president William Goodell Frost, whose "Appalachian
America" included 194 counties in eight states. In 1921,
John C. Campbell published
The Southern Highlander and His
Homeland in which he modified Frost's map to include 254
counties in 9 states.
A landmark survey of the region in the
following decade by the United
States Department of Agriculture
defined the region as consisting of 206 counties in
6 states. In 1984, Karl Raitz and Richard Ulack
expanded the ARC's definition to include 445 counties in 13 states,
although they removed all counties in Mississippi
and added two in New Jersey
. Historian John Alexander Williams, in his
2002 book Appalachia: A History, distinguished between a
"core" Appalachian region consisting of 164 counties in West Virginia
, Kentucky
, Virginia
, Tennessee
, North
Carolina
, and
Georgia
, and a greater region defined by the
ARC.
Etymology and pronunciation

Detail of Gutierrez' 1562 map showing
the first known cartographic appearance of a variant of the name
"Appalachia"
While
exploring inland along the northern coast of Florida in 1528, the
members of the Narváez
expedition, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca, found a Native American
village near present-day Tallahassee, Florida
whose name they transcribed as Apalchen or
Apalachen . The name was soon altered by the
Spanish to
Apalachee and used as a name
for the tribe and region spreading well inland to the north.
Pánfilo de Narváez's
expedition first entered Apalachee territory on June 15, 1528 and
applied the name. Now spelled "Appalachian", it is the fourth
oldest surviving European place-name in the U.S. After the
de Soto expedition in 1540,
Spanish cartographers began to apply the name of the tribe to the
mountains themselves. The first cartographic appearance of
Apalchen is on
Diego
Gutierrez' map of 1562; the first use for the mountain range is
the map of
Jacques le Moyne
de Morgues in 1565.
The name was not commonly used for the whole mountain range until
the late 19th century. A competing and often more popular name was
the "Allegheny Mountains", "Alleghenies", and even "Alleghania." In
the early 19th century,
Washington
Irving proposed renaming the United States either Appalachia or
Alleghania.
In northern U.S. dialects, the mountains are or . The cultural
region of Appalachia is pronounced , also , all with a third
syllable like "lay". In southern U.S. dialects, the mountains are
called the , and the cultural region of Appalachia is pronounced ,
both with a third syllable like the "la" in "latch". This
pronunciation is favored in the "core" region in central and
southern parts of the Appalachian range. The occasional use of the
"sh" sound for the "ch" in the last syllable in northern dialects
was popularized by
Appalachian
Trail organizations in New England in the early 20th
century.
History
Early history
Native
American hunter-gatherers first arrived in what is now
Appalachia over 12,000 years ago.
Several Archaic period (8000-1000
B.C.) archaeological sites have been identified in the region, such
as the St. Albans site in Virginia and the Icehouse
Bottom
site in Tennessee. In the 16th century, the
de Soto and
Juan Pardo
expeditions explored the mountains of South Carolina, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and encountered complex agrarian
societies populated by
Muskogean-speaking inhabitants. De Soto
indicated that much of the region west of the mountains was part of
the domain of
Coosa, a
paramount chiefdom centered around a village
complex in northern Georgia. By the time English explorers arrived
in Appalachia in the late 17th century, the central part of the
region was controlled by
Algonquian
tribes (namely the
Shawnee) and the southern
part of the region was controlled by the
Cherokee.
European migration into Appalachia began in the 18th century. As
lands in eastern Pennsylvania and the tidewater areas of Virginia
and the Carolinas filled up, immigrants began pushing further and
further westward into the Appalachian Mountains. A relatively large
proportion of the early backcountry immigrants were Ulster Scots—
later known as "
Scotch-Irish"— who were
seeking cheaper land and freedom from Quaker leaders, many of whom
considered the Scotch-Irish "savages." Others included Germans from
the
Palatinate region and
English settlers from the
Anglo-Scottish border country. Between
1730 and 1763, immigrants trickled into Western Pennsylvania,
Northwestern Virginia, and Western Maryland.
Thomas Walker's discovery of
Cumberland
Gap
in 1750 and the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 lured
settlers deeper into the mountains, namely to upper East Tennessee,
Northwestern North Carolina, Upstate South Carolina, and Central
Kentucky. Between 1790 and 1840, a series of treaties with
the Cherokee and other Native American tribes opened up lands in
North Georgia, Northeast Alabama, the Tennessee Valley, the
Cumberland Plateau regions, and the highlands along what is now the
Tennessee-North Carolina border. The last of these treaties
culminated in the removal of the bulk of the Cherokee population
from the region via the
Trail of
Tears in 1838.
The Appalachian frontier
Appalachian frontiersmen have long been romanticized for their
ruggedness and self-sufficiency. A typical depiction of an
Appalachian pioneer involves a hunter wearing a
coonskin cap and buckskin clothing, and
sporting a long rifle and shoulder-strapped
powder horn. Perhaps no single figure symbolizes
the Appalachian pioneer more than
Daniel
Boone (1734-1820), a
long hunter and
surveyor instrumental in the early settlement of Kentucky and
Tennessee. Like Boone, Appalachian pioneers moved into areas
largely separated from "civilization" by high mountain ridges, and
had to fend for themselves against the elements. As many of these
early settlers were living illegally on Native American lands,
attacks from Native American tribes were a continuous threat until
the 1800s.
As early as the 18th century, Appalachia (then known simply as the
"backcountry") began to distinguish itself from its wealthier
lowland and coastal neighbors to the east. Frontiersmen often
bickered with lowland and tidewater "elites" over taxes, sometimes
to the point of armed revolts such as the
Regulator Movement (1767-1771) in
North Carolina. In 1778, at the height of the
American Revolution, backwoodsmen
from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and what is now Kentucky took part in
George Rogers Clark's
Illinois campaign.
Two years later, a
group of Appalachian frontiersmen known as the Overmountain Men routed British forces at
the Battle of
Kings Mountain
after rejecting a call by the British to
disarm. After the war, residents throughout the Appalachian
backcountry— especially the Monongahela region in Western
Pennsylvania and northwestern Virginia— refused to pay a tax placed
on whiskey by the new American government, leading to what became
known as the
Whiskey
Rebellion.
Early 19th century
In the early 1800s, the rift between the
yeoman farmers of Appalachia and their wealthier
lowland counterparts continued to grow, especially as the latter
dominated most state legislatures. People in Appalachia began to
feel slighted over what they considered unfair taxation methods and
lack of state funding for improvements (especially for roads). In
the northern half of the region, the lowland "elites" consisted
largely of industrial and business interests, whereas in the parts
of the region south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the lowland elites
consisted of large-scale land-owning planters. The
Whig Party, formed in the 1830s,
drew widespread support from disaffected Appalachians.
Tensions between the mountain counties and state governments
sometimes reached the point of mountain counties threatening to
break off and form separate states. In 1832, bickering between
western Virginia and eastern Virginia over the state's constitution
led to calls on both sides for the state's separation into two
states. In 1841, Tennessee state senator (and later U.S. president)
Andrew Johnson introduced legislation
in Tennessee's state senate calling for the creation of a separate
state in East Tennessee. The proposed state would have been known
as "Frankland" and would have invited like-minded mountain counties
in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama to join it.
The U.S. Civil War
By 1860, the Whig Party had disintegrated. Sentiments in northern
Appalachia had shifted to the pro-
abolitionist Republican Party. In southern
Appalachia, abolitionists still constituted a radical minority,
although several smaller opposition parties (most of which were
both pro-Union and pro-slavery) were formed to oppose the
planter-dominated Southern Democrats. As states in the southern
United States moved toward secession, a majority of Southern
Appalachians still supported the Union.
In 1861, a Minnesota
newspaper identified 161 counties in Southern
Appalachia— which the paper called "Alleghenia"— where Union
support remained strong, and which might provide crucial support
for the defeat of the Confederacy. However, many of these
Unionists— especially in the mountain areas of North Carolina,
Georgia, and Alabama— were "conditional" Unionists in that they
opposed secession, but also opposed violence to prevent secession,
and thus when their respective state legislatures voted to secede,
their support shifted to the Confederacy. Kentucky sought to remain
neutral at the outset of the conflict, opting not to supply troops
to either side. After Virginia voted to secede, several mountain
counties in northwestern Virginia rejected the ordinance and with
the help of the Union army established a separate state, admitted
to the Union as West Virginia in 1863. However, half the counties
of the new state, comprising two-thirds of its territory, were
secessionist. This caused great difficulty for the new Unionist
state government in Wheeling, both during and after the war.
A similar effort
occurred in East Tennessee, but the initiative failed after
Tennessee's governor ordered the Confederate army to occupy the
region, forcing East Tennessee's Unionists to flee to the north or
go into hiding.
Both central and southern Appalachia suffered tremendous violence
and turmoil during the U.S. Civil War.
While there were two
major theaters of operation in the region— namely the Shenandoah
Valley
of Virginia (and present day West Virginia) and the
Chattanooga area along the Tennessee-Georgia border— much of the
violence was caused by bushwhackers and
guerilla war. Large numbers of
livestock were killed (grazing was an important part of
Appalachia's economy), and numerous farms were destroyed, pillaged,
or neglected. The actions of both Union and Confederate armies left
many inhabitants in the region resentful of government authority
and suspicious of outsiders for decades after the war.
Late 19th and early 20th centuries
After the war, northern parts of Appalachia experienced an economic
boom, while economies in the southern parts of the region
stagnated, especially as Southern Democrats regained control of
their respective state legislatures at the end of Reconstruction.
Pittsburgh
and its surrounding areas in Western Pennsylvania
grew into one of the nation's major industrial centers, especially
regarding iron and steel production. By 1900, the
Chattanooga area and North Georgia and Northern Alabama had
experienced similar changes due to manufacturing booms in Atlanta
and Birmingham
at the edge of the Appalachian region.
Railroad construction between the 1880s and early 1900s gave the
greater nation access to the vast coalfields in central Appalachia,
making the economy in that part of the region practically
synonymous with coal mining. As the nationwide demand for timber
skyrocketed, lumber firms turned to the virgin forests of Southern
Appalachia, using sawmill and logging railroad innovations to reach
remote timber stands. The
Tri-Cities area of Tennessee and
Virginia and the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia became major
petrochemical production centers.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the development of
various regional stereotypes. Attempts by President
Rutherford B. Hayes to enforce the whiskey tax in the
late 1870s led to an explosion in violence between Appalachian
"moonshiners" and federal "revenuers" that lasted through the
Prohibition period in the 1920s.
The breakdown of authority and law
enforcement during the Civil War may have contributed to an
increase in clan feuding, which by the 1880s was reported to be a
problem across most of Kentucky's Cumberland region as well as
Carter
County
in Tennessee, Carroll County
in Virginia, and Mingo
and Logan
counties in West Virginia. Regional writers
from this period such as
Mary
Noailles Murfree and
Horace
Kephart liked to focus on such sensational aspects of mountain
culture, leading readers outside the region to believe they were
more widespread than in reality. In an 1899 article in
Atlantic, Berea president William G. Frost attempted to
redefine the inhabitants of Appalachia as "noble mountaineers"—
relics of the nation's pioneer period whose isolation had left them
unaffected by modern times.
Modern Appalachia
Logging firms' rapid devastation of the forests of Southern
Appalachia sparked a movement among conservationists to preserve
what remained and allow the land to "heal." In 1911, Congress
passed the
Weeks Act, giving the federal
government authority to create
national forest and control
timber harvesting.
Regional writers and business interests led
a movement to create national parks in the eastern United States
similar to Yosemite
and Yellowstone
in the west, culminating in the creation of the
Great Smoky Mountains National
Park
in Tennessee and North Carolina, Shenandoah
National Park
in Virginia, and the Blue Ridge Parkway
(connecting the two) in the 1930s. During
the same period, New England forester
Benton MacKaye led the movement to build the
Appalachian Trail, which stretches
from Georgia to Maine and extends into Canada.
By the 1950s, poor farming techniques and the loss of jobs to
mechanization in the mining industry had left much of Central and
Southern Appalachia poverty-stricken. The lack of jobs also led to
widespread difficulties with outmigration. Beginning in the 1930s,
federal agencies such as the
Tennessee Valley Authority began
investing in the Appalachian region. Sociologists such as James
Brown and Cratis Williams and authors such as
Harry Caudill and Michael Harrington brought
attention to region's plight in the 1960s, prompting Congress to
create the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965. The
commission's efforts helped to stem the tide of outmigration and
diversify the region's economies. Although there have been drastic
improvements in the region's economic conditions since the
commission's founding, the ARC still listed 81 counties as
"distressed" in 2008.
Culture
Ethnic groups
An
estimated 90% of Appalachia's earliest European settlers originated
from the Anglo-Scottish border country
— namely the English counties of Cumberland
, Westmoreland
, Northumberland
, Durham, Lancashire
, and Yorkshire
, and the Lowland
Scottish counties of Ayrshire
, Dumfriesshire
, Roxburghshire
, Berwickshire
, and Wigtownshire
. Most of these were from families who had
been resettled in the Ulster
Plantation in northern Ireland
in the 17th century, but some came directly from
the Anglo-Scottish border region. In America, these people
are often grouped under the single name "
Scotch-Irish" or "Scots-Irish". While various
20th-century writers tried to associate Appalachia with
Scottish highlanders, Highland Scots
comprised a relatively insignificant percentage of the region's
early European immigrants.
Germans were the other major pioneer
group to migrate to Appalachia, settling mainly in the northern
part of the region in Western Pennsylvania, although some were part
of the initial wave of migrants to the southern mountains. In the
19th century,
Welsh immigrants were
brought into the region for their mining and metallurgical
expertise, and by 1900 over 100,000 Welsh immigrants were living in
Western Pennsylvania alone.
Thousands of German-speaking Swiss migrated to Appalachia in the second
half of the 19th century, and their descendants remain in places
such as East
Bernstadt, Kentucky
and Gruetli-Laager, Tennessee
. The coal mining and manufacturing boom
in the late-19th and early-20th centuries brought large numbers of
Italian and Eastern Europeans to
Appalachia, although most of these families left the region when
the
Great Depression shattered the
economy in the 1930s.
African-Americans have been present in the
region since the 18th century, and currently comprise 8% of the
ARC-designated region, mostly concentrated in urban areas and
former mining and manufacturing towns. Native Americans, the
region's original inhabitants, comprise only a small percentage of
the region's present population, their most notable concentration
being the reservation of the
Eastern Band of Cherokee
Indians in North Carolina. The
Melungeons, a group of mixed African, European,
and Native American ancestry, is scattered across northeastern
Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia.
Religion
Religion has long been one of the most powerful forces in
Appalachia. Religion in Appalachia is characterized by a sense of
independence and a distrust of religious hierarchies, both rooted
in the evangelical tendencies of the region's pioneers, many of
whom had been influenced by the "New Light" movement in England.
Many of the religions brought from Europe underwent modifications
or factioning during the
Second
Great Awakening (especially the
Holiness movement) in the early 19th
century. A number of 18th and 19th-century religious traditions are
still practiced in parts of Appalachia, including natural water (or
"creek")
baptism, rhythmically-chanted
preaching, congregational shouting, and
foot washing. While most church-goers in
Appalachia attend fairly-well organized churches affiliated with
regional or national bodies, small unaffiliated congregations are
not uncommon in rural mountain areas.
Christian Protestantism is the most dominant religious force in
Appalachia, although there is a significant
Catholic presence in the northern half of the
region and in urban areas. The region's early Lowland and Ulster
Scot immigrants brought
Presbyterianism to Appalachia, eventually
organizing into bodies such as the
Cumberland Presbyterian
Church. English
Baptists— most of whom
had been influenced by the
Separate
Baptist and
Regular Baptist
movements— were also common on the Appalachian frontier, and today
are represented in the region by groups such as the
Free Will Baptists, the
Southern Baptist,
Missionary Baptists, and "old-time"
groups such as the
United Baptists
and
Primitive Baptists.
Circuit rider such as
Francis Asbury helped spread
Methodism to Appalachia in the early 19th century,
and today 9.2% of the region's population is Methodist, represented
by such bodies as the
United
Methodist Church, the
Free
Methodist Church, and the
African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church.
Major Pentecostal
movements within the region include the Church of God (based in
Cleveland,
Tennessee
) and the Assembly of
God. Scattered
Mennonite
colonies exist throughout the region.
Dialect
The Appalachian dialect is a dialect of
Midland American English known as
the Southern Midland dialect, and is spoken primarily in Central
and Southern Appalachia. The Northern Midland dialect is spoken in
the northern parts of the region. The Southern Appalachian dialect
is considered part of the
Southern American dialect although
the two are distinguished by the
rhotic nature of the
Appalachian dialect. Early 20th-century writers believed the
Appalachian dialect to be a surviving relic of Old World Scottish
or Elizabethan dialects. Recent research suggests, however, that
while the dialect has a stronger Scottish influence than other
American dialects, most of its distinguishing characteristics are
American in origin.
Education
For much of the region's history, education in Appalachia has
lagged behind the rest of the nation due in part to struggles with
funding from respective state governments and an agrarian-oriented
population that often failed to see a practical need for formal
education. Early education in the region evolved from teaching
Christian morality and learning to read the Bible into small,
one-room schoolhouses that convened in months when children were
not needed to help with farm work. After the Civil War, mandatory
education laws and state assistance helped larger communities begin
to establish graded schools and high schools. During the same
period, many of the region's institutions of higher education were
established or greatly expanded. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, service organizations such as
Pi
Beta Phi and various religious organizations established
settlement schools and mission
schools in the region's more rural areas.
In the 20th century, national trends began to have more of an
effect on education in Appalachia, sometimes clashing with the
region's traditional values.
The Scopes
Trial— the nation's most publicized debate over the teaching of
the Theory of Evolution— took
place in Dayton,
Tennessee
in Southern Appalachia in 1925. In spite of
consolidation and centralization, schools in Appalachia struggled
to keep up with federal and state demands into the 21st century.
Since 2001, a number of the region's public schools were threatened
with loss of funding due to difficulties fulfilling the demands of
No Child Left Behind.
Music
Appalachian music is one of the most well-known manifestations of
Appalachian culture. Traditional Appalachian music is derived
primarily from the English and Scottish
ballad tradition and Irish and Scottish
fiddle music.
African-American blues
musicians played a significant role in developing the instrumental
aspects of Appalachian music, most notably with the introduction of
the
banjo— one of the region's iconic symbols—
in the late 18th century. In the years following
World War I, British folklorist
Cecil Sharp brought attention to Southern
Appalachia when he noted that its inhabitants still sang hundreds
of English and Scottish ballads that had been passed down to them
from their ancestors. Commercial recordings of Appalachian
musicians in the 1920s would have a significant impact on the
development of
country music,
bluegrass, and
old-time music. Appalachian music saw a
resurgence in popularity during the
American folk music revival of
the 1960s, when musicologists such as
Mike
Seeger,
John Cohen, and
Ralph Rinzler traveled to remote parts of the
region in search of musicians unaffected by modern music. Today,
dozens of annual music festivals held throughout the region
preserve the Appalachian music tradition.
Literature
Early Appalachian literature typically centered on the observations
of people from outside the region, such as
Henry Timberlake's
Memoirs (1765)
and
Thomas Jefferson's
Notes on the State of
Virginia (1784), although there are notable exceptions,
including Davy Crockett's
A Narrative of the Life of Davy
Crockett (1834). Travellers' accounts published in
19th-century magazines gave rise to Appalachian
local color, which reached its height with
George Washington Harris's
Sut Lovingood character of the 1860s and native novelists such as
Mary Noailles Murfree. Works
such as
Rebecca Harding
Davis's
Life in the Iron Mills (1861), Emma Bell
Miles'
The Spirit of the Mountains (1905), and
Horace Kephart's
Our Southern Highlanders
(1913) marked a shift in the region's literature from local color
to realism. The transition from an agrarian society to an
industrial society and its effects on Appalachia are captured in
works such as
Olive Tilford
Dargan's
Call Home to the Heart (1932),
James Still's
The River of Earth
(1940),
Harriette Simpson
Arnow's
The Dollmaker (1954), and
Harry Caudill's
Night Comes to the
Cumberlands (1963). In the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of
authors like
Cormac McCarthy,
Breece D'J Pancake,
Dorothy Allison, and
Lisa Alther brought greater literary diversity
to the region.
Along with the above-mentioned, some of Appalachia's best known
writers include:
James Agee (
A Death
in the Family),
Wendell Berry
(
Hannah Coulter,
The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay
on Kentucky's Red River Gorge,
Selected Poems of Wendell
Berry),
Jesse Stuart (
Taps for
Private Tussie,
The Thread That Runs So
True),
Denise Giardina (
The
Unquiet Earth,
Storming Heaven),
Lee Smith (
Fair and Tender
Ladies,
On Agate Hill),
Silas
House (
Clay's Quilt,
A Parchment of
Leaves),
Wilma Dykeman (
The
Far Family,
The Tall Woman), Maurice Manning
(
Bucolics,
A Companion for Owls), Anne Shelby
(
Appalachian Studies,
We Keep a Store),
George Ella Lyon (
Borrowed
Children,
Don't You Remember?),
Pamela Duncan (
Moon Women,
The
Big Beautiful),
Chris Offutt
(
No Heroes,
The Good Brother),
Charles Frazier (
Cold Mountain,
Thirteen
Moons),
Sharyn McCrumb (
The
Hangman's Beautiful Daughter), Robert Morgan (
Gap
Creek), Jim Wayne Miller (
The Brier Poems),
Gurney Norman (
Divine Right's Trip,
Kinfolks),
Elizabeth
Madox Roberts ("The Great Meadow, "The Time of Man"),
Thomas Wolfe (
Look Homeward Angel,
You Can't Go Home Again),
Rachel
Carson (
The Sea Around
Us,
Silent Spring;
Presidential Medal of
Freedom), and
Jeannette Walls
(
The Glass Castle).
Folklore
Appalachian folklore has a strong mixture of
European, Native American (especially
Cherokee), and Biblical influences. The Cherokee
taught the region's early European pioneers how to plant and
cultivate crops such as
corn and
squash and how to find edible plants such as
ramps. The Cherokee also passed
along their knowledge of the medicinal properties of hundreds of
native herbs and roots, and how to prepare tonics from such plants.
Before the introduction of modern agricultural techniques in the
region in the 1930s and 1940s, many Appalchian farmers followed the
Biblical tradition of planting by "the signs," such as the phases
of the moon, or when certain weather conditions occurred.
Appalachian folk tales are rooted in English, Scottish, and Irish
fairy tales, as well as regional heroic figures and events.
Jack tales, which tend to revolve around
the exploits of a simple-but-dedicated figure named "Jack," are
popular at story-telling festivals. Other stories involve wild
animals, such as hunting tales. Regional folk heroes such as the
railroad worker
John Henry and
frontiersman
Davy Crockett are
examples of real-life figures that evolved into popular folk tale
subjects. Murder stories, such as
Omie
Wise and
John Hardy, are
popular subjects for Appalachian ballads. Ghost stories, or "haint
tales" in regional English, are a common feature of southern oral
and literary tradition.
Ghost stories native to the region include
the story of the Greenbrier Ghost,
which is rooted in a Greenbrier County, West
Virginia
murder.
Urban Appalachians
Urban Appalachians are people from Appalachia who are living in
metropolitan areas outside the Appalachian region. Mechanization of
coal mining during the 1950s and 1960s was the major source of
unemployment in central Appalachia.
Many migration streams covered relatively
short distances, with West Virginians moving to Cleveland
and other cities in eastern and central Ohio
, and eastern
Kentuckians moving to Cincinnati
and southwest Ohio in search of jobs.
More
distant cities like Detroit
and Chicago
attracted migrants from many states.
Enclaves of Appalachian culture can still be found in some of these
communities.
Communications
In the
1940s through the 60s, Wheeling, West Virginia
became a cultural center of the region because
it had a clear-channel
AM radio station WWVA
, which could be heard throughout the entirety of
eastern USA at night. Although stations such as Pittsburgh
's KDKA
and
KQV were 50 kilowatt clear channels that dated back to the
early 1920s (as well as spanning all the east coast in signal
strength), WWVA prided itself on rural and
farm programming that appealed to a wider audience in the rural
region.
Appalachian studies
Appalachia as an academic interest was the product of a critical
scholarship that emerged across the disciplines in the 1960s and
1970s.
With a renewed interest in issues of power,
scholars could not dismiss the social inequity, class conflict, and
environmental destruction encountered by America's
so-called "hillbillies." Appalachia's emergence in
academia is a result of the intersection between social conditions
and critical academic interests, and has resulted in the
development of many
Appalachian
studies programs in colleges and universities across the
region, as well as in the
Appalachian Studies
Association.
Economy
The economy of Appalachia traditionally rested on
agriculture,
mining,
timber, and in the cities, manufacturing.
Since the late 20th century, tourism and second home developments
have assumed an increasingly major role.
Agriculture
While the climate of the Appalachian region is suitable for
agriculture, the region's hilly terrain greatly limits the size of
the average farm, a problem exacerbated by population growth in the
latter half of the 19th century.
Subsistence farming was the backbone
of the Appalachian economy throughout much of the 19th century, and
while economies in places such as Western Pennsylvania, the Great
Valley of Virginia, and the upper Tennessee Valley in East
Tennessee, transitioned to a large-scale farming or manufacturing
base around the time of the Civil War, subsistence farming remained
an important part of the region's economy until the 1950s. In the
early 20th-century, Appalachian farmers were struggling to
mechanize, and abusive farming practices had over the years left
much of the already-limited farmland badly eroded. Various federal
entities intervened in the 1930s to restore damaged areas and
introduce less-harmful farming techniques. In recent decades, the
concept of
sustainable
agriculture has been applied to the region's small farms, with
some success. Nevertheless, the number of farms in the Appalachian
region continues to dwindle, plunging from 354,748 farms on 47
million acres (19 million hectares) in 1969 to 230,050 farms on 35
million acres (14 million hectares) in 1997.
Early Appalachian farmers grew both crops introduced from their
native Europe (such as sweet potatoes) as well as crops native to
North America (such as
corn and
squash). Tobacco has long been an important
cash crop in Southern Appalachia, especially since the land is
ill-suited for cash crops such as cotton. Apples have been grown in
the region since the late 18th-century, their cultivation being
aided by the presence of thermal belts in the region's mountain
valleys. Hogs, which could
free range in
the region's abundant forests, were the most popular livestock
among early Appalachian farmers. The early settlers also brought
cattle and sheep to the region, which they would typically graze in
highland meadows known as
balds
during the growing season when bottomlands were needed for crops.
Cattle, mainly the
Hereford,
Angus, and
Charolais breeds, are now the region's
chief livestock.
Logging
The mountains and valleys of Appalachia once contained what seemed
to be an inexhaustible supply of timber. The poor roads, lack of
railroads, and general inaccessibility of the region, however,
prevented large-scale logging in most of the region throughout much
of the 19th century. While logging firms were established in the
Carolinas and the Kentucky River valley before the Civil War, most
major firms preferred to harvest the more accessible timber stands
in the Midwestern and Northeastern parts of the country. By the
1880s, these stands had been exhausted, and a spike in the demand
for lumber forced logging firms to seek out the virgin forests of
Appalachia. The first major logging ventures in Appalachia
transported logs using mule teams or rivers, the latter method
sometimes employing
splash dams. In the
1890s, innovations such as the
Shay
locomotive, the steam-powered loader, and the steam-powered
skidder allowed massive harvesting of the
most remote forest sections.
Logging in Appalachia reached its peak in the early 20th-century,
when firms such as the Ritter Lumber Company cut the virgin forests
on an alarming scale, leading to the creation of
national forest in 1911 and
similar state entities to better manage the region's timber
resources. Arguably the most successful logging firm in Appalachia
was the Georgia Hardwood Lumber Company, established in 1927 and
renamed
Georgia-Pacific in 1948 when
it expanded nationally. Although logging in Appalachia declined as
the industry shifted focus to the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s,
rising overseas demand in the 1980s brought a resurgence in
Appalachian logging. In 1987, there were 4,810 lumber firms
operating in the region. In the late 1990s, the Appalachian lumber
industry was a multi-billion dollar industry, employing 50,000
people in Tennessee, 26,000 in Kentucky, and 12,000 in West
Virginia alone.
Coal mining
Coal mining is the industry most frequently associated with
Appalachia in outsiders' minds, due in part to the fact that the
region once produced two-thirds of the nation's coal. At present,
however, the mining industry employs just 2% of the Appalachian
workforce. The region's vast coalfield covers between northern
Pennsylvania and central Alabama, mostly along the
Cumberland Plateau and
Allegheny Plateau regions. Most mining
activity has been concentrated in Eastern Kentucky, Southwestern
Virginia, West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania, with smaller
operations in Tennessee and Alabama. The
Pittsburgh coal seam, which has
produced 13 billion tons of coal since the early 19th century, has
been called the world's most valuable mineral deposit. There are
over 60 major coal seams in West Virginia, and over 80 in Eastern
Kentucky. Most of the coal mined is
bituminous coal, although significant
anthracite deposits exist on the fringe
of the region in central Pennsylvania. About two-thirds of
Appalachia's coal is produced by
underground mining, the rest
by
surface
mining.
Mountaintop removal,
a form of surface mining, is a highly controversial mining practice
in central Appalachia due to its negative impacts on the
environment.
In the late 19th century, the post-Civil War
Industrial Revolution and the
expansion of the nation's railroads brought a soaring demand for
coal, and mining operations expanded rapidly across Appalachia.
Hundreds of thousands of workers poured into the region from across
the United States and from overseas, essentially overhauling the
cultural makeup of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and Western
Pennsylvania. Mining corporations gained considerable influence in
state and municipal governments, especially as they often owned the
entire towns in which the miners lived. The mining industry was
vulnerable to economic downturns, however, and booms and busts were
frequent, with major booms occurring during World War I and II, and
the worst bust occurring during the Great Depression. The
Appalachian mining industry also saw some of the nation's bloodiest
labor strife between the 1890s and the 1930s. Mining-related
injuries and deaths were not uncommon, and diseases such as
black lung disease
afflicted miners throughout the 20th century. After World War II,
innovations in mechanization (such as
longwall mining) and competition from oil
and natural gas led to a decline in the region's mining operations.
Environmental restrictions, such as those placed on high-
sulfur coal in the 1980s, brought further mine
closures. While with annual earnings of $55,000, Appalachian miners
make more than most other local workers, Appalachian coal mining
employed just under 50,000 in 2004.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry in Appalachia is rooted primarily in the
ironworks and steelworks of early Pittsburgh and in the textile
mills that sprang up in North Carolina's Piedmont region in the
mid-19th century. Factory construction increased greatly after the
Civil War, and the region experienced a manufacturing boom between
1890 and 1930.
This economic shift led to a mass-migration
from small farms and rural areas to large urban centers, causing
the populations of cities such as Knoxville, Tennessee
and Asheville, North Carolina
to swell exponentially. Manufacturing in
the region suffered a setback during the Great Depression, but
recovered during World War II and peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.
However, difficulties paying retiree benefits, environmental
struggles, and the signing of
NAFTA in 1994
led to a decline in the region's manufacturing operations.
Pittsburgh lost 44% of its factory jobs in the 1980s, and between
1970 and 2001, the number of apparel workers in the Appalachian
region decreased from 250,000 to 83,000 and the number of textile
workers decreased from 275,000 to 193,000.
U.S. Steel,
founded in Pittsburgh in 1901, was the world's first corporation
with more than a billion dollars in initial capitalization. Another
Pittsburgh company,
ALCOA, helped establish
the nation's aluminum industry in the early-20th century, and has
had a significant impact on the economies of Western Pennsylvania
and East Tennessee.
Union Carbide
built the world's first petrochemical
plant in Clendenin, West Virginia
in 1920, and in subsequent years the Kanawha Valley became known as the "Chemical
Capital of the World." Eastman
Chemical, also established in 1920, is Tennessee's largest
single employer.
Companies such as Champion Fibre and
Bowater established large pulp operations in Canton,
North Carolina
and Greenville, South Carolina
, respectively, although the former was dogged
by battles with environmentalists throughout the 20th
century.
Tourism
One of region's oldest industries, tourism became a more important
part of the Appalachian economy in the latter half of the 20th
century as mining and manufacturing steadily declined. In
2000-2001, tourism in Appalachia accounted for nearly $30 billion
and over 600,000 jobs. The mountain terrain— with its accompanying
scenery and outdoor recreational opportunities— provide the
region's primary attractions.
The region is home to one of the world's
most well-known hiking trails (the Appalachian Trail), the nation's
most-visited national park (the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park
), and the nation's most visited national parkway
(the Blue Ridge
Parkway
). The craft industry, including the
teaching, selling, and display or demonstration of regional crafts,
also accounts for an important part of the Appalachian economy,
bringing (for example) over $100 million annually to the economy of
Western North Carolina and over $80 million to the economy of West
Virginia.
Important heritage tourism attractions in
the region include the Biltmore Estate
and the Eastern Band of the
Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, Cades Cove
in Tennessee, and Harpers Ferry
in West Virginia. Important theme parks
include Dollywood
and Ghost Town in
the Sky, both on the periphery of the Great Smoky
Mountains.
The
mineral-rich mountain springs of the Appalachians— which for many
years were thought to have health-restoring qualities— were drawing
visitors to the region as early as the 18th century with the
establishment of resorts at Hot Springs, Virginia
and what is now Hot Springs,
North Carolina
. Along with the mineral springs, the cool and
clear air of the range's high elevations provided an escape for
lowland elites, and elaborate hotels— such as the Greenbrier
in West Virginia and the Balsam Mountain Inn in
North Carolina— were built throughout the region's remote valleys
and mountain slopes. The end of
World
War I (which opened up travel opportunities to Europe) and the
arrival of the automobile (which changed the nation's vacation
habits) led to the demise of all but a few of the region's spa
resorts. The establishment of national parks in the 1930s brought
an explosion of tourist traffic to the region, but created problems
with
urban sprawl in the various host
communities. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, states have
placed greater focus on sustaining tourism while preserving host
communities.
Poverty in Appalachia
Poverty had plagued Appalachia for many
years but was not brought to the attention of the rest of the
United States until 1960, by
US President John F. Kennedy, who proceeded to establish
the President's Appalachian Regional Commission in 1963. His
successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, crystallized Kennedy's
efforts in the form of the
Appalachian Regional
Commission, which passed into law in 1965.
[37498]
In Appalachia, severe poverty and desolation were paired with the
necessity for careful cultural sensitivity. Many Appalachian people
feared that the birth of a new modernized Appalachia would lead to
a death of their traditional values and heritage. Because of the
isolation of the region, Appalachian people had been unable to
catch up to the
modernization that
lowlanders have achieved. In the 1960s, many people in Appalachia
had a
standard of living
comparable to
third world countries'.
The film series "West Virginia", produced during the term of
Governor Gaston Caperton, makes the point that at least on some
level images of poverty were contrived. Lyndon B.
Johnson declared a
"War on Poverty" while standing on
the front porch of an Inez, Kentucky
home whose residents had been suffering from a long
ignored problem. The Appalachian Regional Development Act of
1964 stated:
Since the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in
1965, the region has seen dramatic progress. New roads, schools,
health care facilities, water and sewer systems, and other
improvements have brought a better life to many Appalachian
residents. In the 1960s, 219
counties in the
13-
state Appalachian Region were considered
economically distressed. Now that list has been cut in half, to 81
counties, but these are "hard-core" pockets of poverty, seemingly
impervious to all efforts at improving their lot.
Martin
County, Kentucky
, the site of Johnson’s 1964 speech, is one such
county still ranked as "distressed" by the ARC. As of 2000,
the
per capita income in Martin
County was $10,650, and 37% of its residents lived below the
poverty line.
Like Johnson, President
Bill Clinton
brought attention to the remaining areas of poverty in Appalachia.
On July
5, 1999, he made a public statement concerning the situation in
Tyner,
Kentucky
.
Clinton told the enthusiastic crowd:
The region's poverty has been documented often since the early
1960s. John Cohen documents rural lifestyle and culture in
The
High Lonesome Sound, while
photojournalist Earl Dotter has been
visiting and documenting poverty, healthcare and mining in
Appalachia for nearly forty years. Another photojournalist,
Shelby Lee Adams, has been
photographing Appalachian families and lifestyle for decades.
Appalachian Regional Commission
The
Appalachian Regional
Commission (ARC) was created by the
U.S. Congress in
1965 to bring poor areas of the 13 U.S. states of the main
(southern) range of the Appalachians into the mainstream of the
American economy. The commission is a partnership of federal,
state, and local governments, and was created to promote economic
growth and improve the quality of life in the region. The region as
defined by the ARC includes roughly 408 counties, including all of
West Virginia; counties in 13 other states: Alabama, Georgia,
Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia; and also
eight
cities
in Virginia, where state law makes cities administratively separate
from counties. The ARC is a planning, research, advocacy and
funding organization; it does not have any governing powers.
The ARC's geographic range of coverage was defined broadly so as to
cover as many economically underdeveloped areas as possible; it
extends well beyond the area usually thought of as "Appalachia".
For instance, parts of Alabama and Mississippi were included in the
commission because of problems with unemployment and poverty
similar to those in Appalachia proper, and the ARC region extends
into Northeastern states, which are never considered part of
Appalachia culturally. The ARC's wide scope also grew out of the
"pork barrel" phenomenon, as politicians
from outside the traditional Appalachia area saw a new way to bring
home federal money to their areas.
Transportation
Transportation has been the most challenging and expensive issue in
Appalachia since the arrival of the first European settlers in the
18th century. Until major federal intervention in the 1960s, the
region's mountainous terrain continuously thwarted attempts at
major road construction, leaving large parts of the region
virtually isolated and slowing economic growth. Before the Civil
War, major cities in the region were connected via wagon roads to
lowland areas, and
flatboats provided an
important means for transporting goods out of the region. By 1900,
railroads connected most of the region with the rest of the nation,
although the poor roads made travel beyond railroad hubs difficult.
When the Appalachian Regional Commission was created in 1965, road
construction was considered its most important initiative, and in
subsequent decades the commission spent more on road construction
than all other projects combined.
The effort to connect Appalachia with the outside world has
required numerous civil engineering feats. Millions of tons of rock
were removed to build road segments such as
Interstate 40 through the
Pigeon River Gorge
at the Tennessee-North Carolina state line and
U.S. Route 23 in
Letcher
County, Kentucky
. Large tunnels were built through mountain
slopes at Cumberland Gap to speed up travel along
U.S. Route 25E.
The
New River
Gorge Bridge
in West Virginia, completed in 1977, is the
second-longest single-arch bridge in the world. The Blue Ridge
Parkway's Linn Cove
Viaduct
, the construction of which required the assembly of
153 pre-cast segments up the slopes of Grandfather
Mountain
, has been designated a historic civil
engineering landmark.
Popular culture
- The motion pictures Coal
Miner's Daughter (based on the life of noted country singer Loretta
Lynn), Where the Lilies
Bloom and Songcatcher
(see also "Songcatcher" below) attempt an accurate portrayal of
life in Appalachia.
- Songcatcher (2000) - written and
directed by Maggie Greenwald, starring Aiden Quinn and Emmy Rossum.
The film takes place in rural Appalachia in 1907 and features the
"lost" ballads of the Scots-Irish brought over in the 1800s and a
musicologists' quest to preserve them.
- Rock band Rage Against the
Machine made reference to the poverty of Appalachia in the song
"Ashes in the Fall" on the album The Battle of Los
Angeles.
- The
Appalachian town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia
has been the setting of several best-selling
novels, including The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by
John Fox, Jr. and the Big Stone
Gap series by Adriana
Trigiani.
- Stranger with a
Camera is a documentary film from Appalshop about the representation of Appalachian
communities by outsiders in film and video.
- Country Boys is a
documentary film by David Sutherland showing three years in the
lives of two teenagers growing up in eastern Kentucky.
- Homer Hickam's
book Rocket Boys and its movie
adaptation October Sky are
slightly fictionalized versions of his childhood and teenage years
in Coalwood
, a coal camp in Southern West Virginia.
- The 1972 film Deliverance takes place in southern
Appalachia. The film is often held responsible for perpetuating
negative stereotypes of the region, as does the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies, though The
Beverly Hillbillies was a mockery of the Ozark region in
Arkansas.
- The 1987 film Matewan
fictionalizes a real-life clash
between West Virginia coal miners, supported by union organizers,
and coal companies in the 1920s. Scenes depicting the town were actually
shot in Thurmond,
West Virginia
.
- The
1632 series, an alternate history book series created by Eric Flint, features the fictional town of
Grantville, West Virginia
(based upon the real-life town of Mannington,
West Virginia
) transported to Germany
in the time of the Thirty Years' War.
- Large-format photographer Shelby
Lee Adams, himself a son of Appalachian out-migrants, has
portrayed the Appalachian family life sympathetically in several
books.
- Composer Aaron Copland composed
music for a ballet called Appalachian Spring.
- Composer Frederick Delius wrote
a tone poem entitled Appalachia,
and Alan Hovhaness wrote another
named To the Appalachian Mountains (Symphony no. 60).
- Author Catherine Marshall
wrote Christy, loosely
based on her mother's years as a teacher in the Appalachian region.
This became the basis of a short-lived television series of the
same name in 1994.
- In the popular arcade racing game Cruis'n USA, Appalachia appears as one of
the courses.
- Since the 2004 season, Saturday Night Live has shown an
occasional sketch called "Appalachian Emergency Room" about the
hijinks at an anonymous rural hospital.
- In the 2005 film
adaptation of The Dukes Of
Hazzard, the Dukes stop at a red light in Atlanta in which
they are approached by a group of African Americans who call them
hillbillies. Luke Duke (Johnny
Knoxville) responds under his breath "Appalachian
Americans".
- The book Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver explores the ecology
of the region and how the removal of the predators, wolves and
coyotes, has affected the environment.
- The book "Rough Lumber: Stories from Spurlock Creek," by
Justine Felix Rutherford, describes growing up in rural West
Virginia during the Great
Depression.
- Heavy Metal band Baroness has a
song entitled "O'Appalachia" on their first full length album
Red Album
See also
The six physiographic provinces of Appalachia:
Other Appalachia-related topics:
Notes
- Rudy Abramson, Introduction to Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. xix—xxv.
- In Virginia, all municipalities incorporated as "cities" are
legally separate from counties.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel
Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp.
11-14.
- After Florida,
Cape
Canaveral, and Dry Tortugas:
- Walls, David (1977), "On the Naming of Appalachia," In An
Appalachian Symposium, pp. 56-76.
- Stewart, George R. (1967). Names on
the Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
- Walls, David (2006). "Appalachia." The Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press),
pp. 1006-1007.
- Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English
Language Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster,
1993), p. 102.
- Charles Hudson, The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Explorations of
the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.:
University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. 17.
- Williams, Appalachia: A History, pp. 30-44.
- Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 7-13,
19.
- Richard Drake, A History of Appalachia (Lexington,
Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 59-69.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History, pp.
64-68.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History, pp.
118-9.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History, p.
141.
- Eric Lacy, Vanquished Volunteers: East Tennessee
Sectionalism from Statehood to Secession (Johnson City, Tenn.:
East Tennessee State University Press, 1965), pp. 122-126.
- Gordon McKinney, "The Civil War." Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 1579-1581.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History, pp.
160-165.
- Curry, Richard O. A House Divided, Statehood Politics &
the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Press, 1964, pgs. 141-147. Twenty-four of the most mountainous
counties of West Virginia voted for the Secession Ordinance on May
23, 1861.
- "Most of West Virginia went through the Civil war not as an
asset to the Union but as a troublesome battleground, while the
Unionist Ohio River counties struggled to cope with the tide of
refugees fleeing to their sanctuary from the interior." Weigley,
Russell F. A Great Civil War, W.W. Norton, 2003, pg.
55
- Drake, A History of Appalachia, p. 109-123.
- Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp.
39-45.
- Drake, A History of Appalachia, 131-141.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History, pp.
187-193.
- Drake, A History of Appalachia, pp. 200-210.
- John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History, pp.
310-312.
- Appalachian Regional Commission — Designated Distressed
Counties, Fiscal Year 2009. Retrieved: 2 April 2009.
- David Newhall, "English." Encyclopedia of Appalachia
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp.
253-255.
- Rouse, Parke Jr., The Great Wagon Road, Dietz Press, 2004, pg.
32; Leyburn, James G., The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, Univ of
NC Press, 1962, pg. 180
- David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways
in America (New Yokr: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.
620-630.
- John Ellis, "Welsh." Encyclopedia of Appalachia
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), p.
282.
- Bruce Betler, "Swiss." Encyclopedia of Appalachia
(University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 281-282.
- Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee, "African-American Families
and Communities." Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville,
Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 155-156.
- Ima Stephens, "Black Dutch." Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), p. 248.
- Howard Dorgan, Introduction to the "Religion" section,
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University
of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1281-1289.
- Conrad Ostwalt, "Presbyterian, Denominational Family."
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University
of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1342-1344.
- Clifford Grammich, "Baptists, the Old-Time Groups."
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University
of Tennessee, 2006), pp. 1298-1300.
- Heather Ann Ackley Bean, "Methodists." Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 1330-1332.
- Stanley Burgess, Patrick Alexander, and Gary McGee,
"Pentecostals." Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville,
Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1336-1339.
- Harvey Neufeldt, "Mennonites." Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 1327-1329.
- William Labov, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg, Atlas of
North American English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2005
- South Regional Map
- Michael Montgomery, Language — Introduction, The
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of
Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 999-1004.
- Alan DeYoung, Introduction to Education section,
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University
of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1517-1521.
- Philis Alvic, "Settlement, Mission, and Sponsored Schools,"
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University
of Tennessee Press, 2006), p. 1551.
- Ted Olson, "Music — Introduction". Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 1109—1120.
- Grace Toney Edwards, "Literature — Introduction,"
Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University
of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1035-1039.
- Dictionary of American Regional English, Belknap
Press, 1985
- Joseph M. Flora, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, Todd W. Taylor,
The Companion to Southern Literature, Louisiana State University
Press, 2001, pg. 304.
- Deborah Thompson and Irene Moser, "Appalachian Folklife." A
Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp.
143-156.
- Appalachian Odyssey, ed. Phillip J. Obermiller et al.
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000).
- Michael Best and Curtis Wood, Introduction to the Agriculture
section in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp.
395-402.
- Linda Daily Paulson, "Lumber Industry." Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 501-504.
- Vic Weals, The Last Train to Elkmont (Knoxville,
Tenn.: Olden Press, 1993), pp. 1-8.
- [1]
- [2]
- Rudy Abramson, "Bituminous Coal Industry." Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 457-460.
- Jack Hurst, Introduction to Business, Technology, and Industry
section, Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.:
University of Tennessee, 2006), pp. 441-447.
- Janice Willis Barnett, "Aluminum Industry," Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 449-451.
- Martha Avaleen Egan, "Chemical Industry," Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee, 2006),
pp. 468-471.
- Daniel Varat, "Champion Fibre," Encyclopedia of
Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press,
2006), pp. 466-467.
- Benita Howell, "Tourism." Encyclopedia of Appalachia
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp.
611-616.
- Economic Effects of Tourism in Appalachia. Appalachian
Regional Commission Online Resource Center. Retrieved: 7 August
2009.
- Great Smoky
Mountains National Park. Official site. Retrieved: 7 August
2009.
- Blue Ridge Parkway. Official site. Retrieved: 7
August 2009.
- Appalachian Regional Commission Tourism Council, Roadmap for Tourism & Craft. July 2003. Retrieved:
7 August 2009.
- Appalachian Regional Commission Arc.gov
- Earl Dotter, " Coalfield Generations: Health, Mining and the
Environment" Southern Spaces, 16 July 2008.
- [3]
- Mark Burton and Richard Hatcher, Introduction to Transportation
section, Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.:
University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 685-690.
- Appalshop
website
- Appalachian Emergency Room archive, Saturday Night
Live website, accessed November 2, 2009
References
- Abramson, Rudy and Haskell, Jean, editors (2006). Encyclopedia of Appalachia,
University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 1-57233-456-8
- Dotter, Earl. " Coalfield Generations: Health, Mining and the
Environment" Southern Spaces, 16 July 2008.
- Light, Melanie and Ken Light (2006). Coal Hollow.
Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520246546
- Obermiller, Phillip J., Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker,
editors (2000). Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on
the Great Migration. Westport, CT: Praeger. ISBN
0-275-96851-0
- Olson, Ted (1998). Blue Ridge Folklife. University
Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-023-0
- Walls, David (1977).
"On the Naming of Appalachia" An
Appalachian Symposium. Edited by J. W. Williamson. Boone, NC:
Appalachian State University Press.
- Williams, John Alexander (2002). Appalachia: A
History. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN
978-0-8078-5368-9
External links