Johnson City is a city in Washington, Carter, and Sullivan counties in the U.S. state of Tennessee, mostly in Washington County. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 71,046, making it the eighth largest city in Tennessee. Johnson City is the principal city of the Johnson City Metropolitan Statistical Area, which consists of Carter, Unicoi, and Washington counties and had a population of 207,285 as of 2020. The MSA is also a component of the Johnson City–Kingsport–Bristol, Tennessee–Virginia Combined Statistical Area – commonly known as the "Tri-Cities" region. This CSA is the fifth-largest in Tennessee with a population of 514,899 as of 2020.
Appalachia is a socio-economic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern United States. It stretches from the western Catskill Mountains in the east end of the Southern Tier of New York state west and south into Pennsylvania, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains into northern Georgia, and through the Great Smoky Mountains from North Carolina into Tennessee and northern Alabama. In 2020, the region was home to an estimated 26.1 million people, of whom roughly 80% are white.
East Tennessee State University (ETSU) is a public research university in Johnson City, Tennessee. It was historically part of the State University and Community College System of Tennessee under the Tennessee Board of Regents, but since 2016, the university has been transitioning to governance by a separate institutional Board of Trustees. As of May 2017, it is the fourth largest university in the state and has off-campus centers in nearby Kingsport, Elizabethton, and Sevierville.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) is a United States federal–state partnership that works with the people of Appalachia to create opportunities for self-sustaining economic development and improved quality of life. Congress established ARC to bring the region into socioeconomic parity with the rest of the nation.
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.
Appalshop is a media, arts, and education center located in Whitesburg, Kentucky, in the heart of the southern Appalachian region of the United States.
The Museum of Appalachia, located in Norris, Tennessee, 20 miles (32 km) north of Knoxville, is a living history museum that interprets the pioneer and early 20th-century period of the Southern Appalachian region of the United States. Recently named an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum is a collection of more than 30 historic buildings rescued from neglect and decay and gathered onto 63 acres (25 ha) of picturesque pastures and fields. The museum also preserves and displays thousands of authentic relics, maintains one of the nation's largest folk art collections, and hosts performances of traditional Appalachian music and annual demonstrations by hundreds of regional craftsmen.
The Tennessee Higher Education Commission(THEC) was established by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1967 to coordinate and support the efforts of higher education institutions in the State of Tennessee. One of its statutory requirements is to create a master plan for developing public higher education in Tennessee.
John Marsden Ehle, Jr. was an American writer known best for his fiction set in the Appalachian Mountains of the American South. He has been described as "the father of Appalachian literature".
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."
Wilma Dykeman Stokely was an American writer of fiction and nonfiction whose works chronicled the people and land of Appalachia.
The University of Tennessee Press is a university press associated with the University of Tennessee.
Florence Reece was an American social activist, poet, and folksong writer. She is best known for the song "Which Side Are You On?" which she originally wrote at the age of twelve while her father was out on strike with other coal miners, according to The Penguin Book of American Folk Song by Alan Lomax.
Appalachian studies is the area studies field concerned with the Appalachian region of the United States.
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.
Claude Howard Dorgan was an American academic best known for his research and writing on the topic of religion in Appalachia.
The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a digital library of 17th-century English Broadside Ballads, a project of the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The project archives ballads in multiple accessible digital formats.
Ancella Radford Bickley is an American historian born in Huntington, West Virginia on July 4, 1930. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from West Virginia State College, now West Virginia State University in 1950, a master's degree in English from Marshall University in 1954, and an Ed.D. in English from West Virginia University in 1974. She is involved in the preservation of African American history in West Virginia.
The Student Health Coalition (SHC), also known as the Appalachian Student Health Coalition, was an organization founded at Vanderbilt University in 1969 to provide health care to low-income, medically underserved communities in Appalachia, particularly East Tennessee, and later expanded to communities in Nashville and West Tennessee.
Rob Amberg is a North Carolina photographer, folklorist, and chronicler of a small Madison County mountain community, Revere, North Carolina, which he depicted in his long-term photo project Sodom Laurel Album. Amberg anticipated the completion of highway I-26 from Charleston, South Carolina, to the Tennessee Tri-Cities area and, starting in 1994, began photographing, interviewing, and collecting objects to document the cutting of a nine-mile stretch of I-26 through some of North Carolina's most spectacular vistas and some of the world's oldest mountains—a project which contributed to the publication of his book The New Road. His documentary photography is archived in a collection at Duke University Library.
