 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(March 2024) |
Appalachian studies is the area studies field concerned with the Appalachian region of the United States.
Contents
| This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(March 2024) |
Appalachian studies is the area studies field concerned with the Appalachian region of the United States.
Some of the first well-known Appalachian scholarship was done by Cratis D. Williams. His 1937 MA thesis in English from the University of Kentucky focused on 471 ballads and songs from eastern Kentucky and his 1961 PhD dissertation at New York University was called "The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction" with part of it appearing in The Appalachian Journal 1975-76. [1]
Berea College president W.D. Weatherford received a Ford Foundation grant in 1957 to underwrite an exhaustive regional study, The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, [2] published in 1962, which many see as the beginning of the modern Appalachian studies movement. [3]
In 1966, West Virginia University librarian Robert F. Munn noted that "more nonsense has been written about the Southern Mountains than any comparable area in the United States." He also observed that there was "distressingly little in the way of useful primary and secondary materials" available for historical research on Appalachia". [4]
Over the four decades since Munn's comments, a wealth of excellent Appalachian scholarship has been published. Appalachian Studies is interdisciplinary, as befits the study of a complex and diverse region and people. Appalachian Studies includes such disciplines as history, literature, anthropology, music, religion, economics, education, environment, folklore and folk customs, labor issues, women's issues, ethnicity, health care, community organizing, economic development, coal mining, tourism, art, demography, migration, and urban & rural planning. Appalachian scholarship has addressed – and continues to address – various issues within all of these academic disciplines.
Several academic journals are dedicated to Appalachian Studies, including Appalachian Journal, published by Appalachian State University, Journal of Appalachian Studies, published by the Appalachian Studies Association, Now & Then, published by East Tennessee State University, and Appalachian Heritage, published by Berea College.
Much of the scholarship and research about Appalachia is done by scholars who are members of the Appalachian Studies Association.
A number of colleges and universities in and around Appalachia offer courses and degrees in Appalachian Studies. [5] These range from a Master of Arts in Appalachian Studies offered at Appalachian State University and East Tennessee State University, to undergraduate minors at a dozen schools. Many schools also have Appalachian Studies collections and archives in their libraries. [6]
The following is a brief list of important books in the Appalachian Studies canon that would serve as a good introductory reading list. These titles were culled from a poll of members of the Steering Committee of the Appalachian Studies Association taken in the Spring of 2007.[ citation needed ]
Berea College is a private liberal arts work college in Berea, Kentucky. Founded in 1855, Berea College was the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. It was integrated from as early as 1866 until 1904, and again after 1954.
Melungeons are a group of people from Appalachia who predominantly descend from northern or central Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Their ancestors were likely brought to Virginia as indentured servants in the mid-17th century.
Appalachia is a geographic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. It stretches from the western Catskill Mountains of New York state into Pennsylvania, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains into northern Georgia and Alabama. In 2021, the region was home to an estimated 26.3 million people, of whom roughly 80% were white.
Appalachian English is American English native to the Appalachian mountain region of the Eastern United States. Historically, the term Appalachian dialect refers to a local English variety of southern Appalachia, also known as Smoky Mountain English or Southern Mountain English in American linguistics. This variety is both influential upon and influenced by the Southern U.S. regional dialect, which has become predominant in central and southern Appalachia today, while a Western Pennsylvania regional dialect has become predominant in northern Appalachia, according to the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE identifies the "Inland South,” a dialect sub-region in which the Southern U.S. dialect's defining vowel shift is the most developed, as centering squarely in southern Appalachia: namely, the cities of Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama; and Asheville, North Carolina. All Appalachian English is rhotic and characterized by distinct phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. It is mostly oral but its features are also sometimes represented in literary works.
Appalachian music is the music of the region of Appalachia in the Eastern United States. Traditional Appalachian music is derived from various influences, including the ballads, hymns and fiddle music of the British Isles, the African music and blues of early African Americans, and to a lesser extent the music of Continental Europe.
The Encyclopedia of Appalachia is the first encyclopedia dedicated to the region, people, culture, history, and geography of Appalachia. The Region, as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission, is a 205,000-square-mile area that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Forty-two percent of this Region's population is rural, compared with 20 percent of the national population, but the region also includes urban areas, such as Pittsburgh and Chattanooga. The encyclopedia is 1,832 pages long and contains over 2,000 entries. Produced by the Center of Excellence for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), Rudy Abramson and Dr. Jean Haskell, are the two main editors of the encyclopedia. Jill Oxendine served as managing editor. The volume was published in March 2006 by the University of Tennessee Press. It includes a foreword by William Ferris, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who called the encyclopedia "truly a feast of information about its region. .. a remarkably detailed portrait of a landscape that runs from New York to Mississippi.” The volume also includes an appreciation by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, who is a native of West Virginia. Gates wrote that the encyclopedia "lays out for everyone else what we who grew up there have always known. Appalachia is a rich and beautiful land steeped in tradition and open to change. It is home to countless storytellers and stories without end. Both its lushness and its rockiness teach us to make our way in the world, but Appalachia never leaves us."
Gurney Norman is an American writer documentarian, and professor.
The Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) is an organization of scholars and activists interested in Appalachian studies.
Urban Appalachians are people from or with close ancestral ties to Appalachia who are living in metropolitan areas outside of the region. Because migration has been occurring for decades, most are not first generation migrants from the region but are long-term city dwellers. People have been migrating from Appalachia to cities outside the region ever since many of these cities were founded. It was not until the period following World War II, however, that large-scale migration to urban areas became common due to the decline of coal mining and the increase in industrial jobs available in the Midwest and Northeast. The migration of Appalachians is often known as the Hillbilly Highway.
Appalachia is a geographic region of the Eastern United States. Home to over 25 million people, the region includes mountainous areas of 13 states: Mississippi, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Maryland, as well as the entirety of West Virginia.
John B. Stephenson was a sociologist and scholar of Appalachia, a founder of the Appalachian Studies Conference, and president of Berea College from 1984 to 1994.
The Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) was a non-profit organization, active from 1912 to 1989, concerned with education and community development in southern Appalachia.
Appalachian Volunteers (AV) was a non-profit organization engaged in community development projects in central Appalachia that evolved into a controversial community organizing network, with a reputation that went "from self-help to sedition" as its staff developed from "reformers to radicals," teaching things from Marx, Lenin and Mao, in the words of one historian, in the brief period between 1964 and 1970 during the War on Poverty.
David Walls is an activist and academic who has made significant contributions to Appalachian studies and to the popular understanding of social movements. He is professor emeritus of sociology at Sonoma State University (SSU) in California, where he was dean of extended education from 1984 to 2000.
Settlement schools are social reform institutions established in rural Appalachia in the early 20th century with the purpose of educating mountain children and improving their isolated rural communities.
Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers is a book written by American author Horace Kephart (1862–1931), first published in 1913 and revised in 1922. Inspired by the years Kephart spent among the inhabitants of the remote Hazel Creek region of the Great Smoky Mountains, the book provides one of the earliest realistic portrayals of life in the rural Appalachian Mountains and one of the first serious analyses of Appalachian culture. While modern historians and writers have criticized Our Southern Highlanders for focusing too much on sensationalistic aspects of mountain culture, the book was an important departure from the previous century's local color writings and their negative distortions of mountain people.
The Appalachian region and its people have historically been stereotyped by observers, with the basic perceptions of Appalachians painting them as backwards, rural, and anti-progressive. These widespread, limiting views of Appalachia and its people began to develop in the post-Civil War; Those who "discovered" Appalachia found it to be a very strange environment, and depicted its "otherness" in their writing. These depictions have persisted and are still present in common understandings of Appalachia today, with a particular increase of stereotypical imagery during the late 1950s and early 1960s in sitcoms. Common Appalachian stereotypes include those concerning economics, appearance, and the caricature of the "hillbilly."
Jim Wayne Miller was an American poet and educator who had a major influence on literature in the Appalachian region.
Charles Counts (1934–2000) was an American potter, designer, textile artist, quilter, teacher, writer, and activist. Counts worked to preserve the art forms of his native Appalachia, and later moved to Nigeria where he taught until his death.
Helen Dingman was an American academic and social worker who was one of the central figures in the Progressive and New Deal eras to bring social and economic reform to Appalachia. After teaching in Massachusetts for five years from 1912 to 1917, Dingman moved to Kentucky to establish the Smith Community Life School under the auspices of the United Presbyterian Church. Serving as principal and directing six other schools in Harlan County, Kentucky, she provided both education and social services to the community until 1922. After a two-year placement as an assistant superintendent for the mission board in New York, she was hired as a teacher in the Sociology Department at Berea College. She taught social work courses and trained teachers for the rural schools in the region until 1952. In addition, she served as Executive Secretary of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, establishing the professional basis for social workers. The first comprehensive economic and social survey of the Southern Appalachias was spearheaded by Dingman.
For a list of Appalachian Studies journals and magazines, refer to Marie Tedesco's Selected Bibliography on the Appalachian Studies Association website. For more detailed bibliographies, refer to the Bibliography section of the ASA website. For teachers who would like to incorporate Appalachian Studies content into their classroom, the ASA website includes a list of Appalachian Studies syllabi for college and university teachers, as well as a list of resources for K-12 teachers.