Unlike most southern whites during the Civil War, the majority of residents of the Appalachian counties resisted secession, and a significant minority fought against the Confederacy. After 1865, many joined the Republican Party and remained the only large group of white southerners in the party until the 1950s.
In this important work, first published in 1978, Gordon McKinney offers a detailed, balanced, and deeply researched narrative history of the emergence and growth of mountain Republicanism. Although the story is told in terms of the changing fortunes of the mountain Republican...
Unlike most southern whites during the Civil War, the majority of residents of the Appalachian counties resisted secession, and a significant minority...
When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, its western residents were outraged and formed a separate state two years later, introducing political upheaval into already tumultuous times. Men like Granville Davisson Hall sought to throw off the shackles of a slaveholding aristocracy and to revitalize their region s economy in the process. Hall's account of those events, which first appeared when the birth of West Virginia was still a living memory, takes modern readers back to those turbulent days. An active participant in the statehood movement and West Virginia's second secretary...
When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, its western residents were outraged and formed a separate state two years later, introducing politic...
Dark violence and piebald absurdity share an uncertain border, and now and then some mythmaker on his day off, like Grubb, manages to write within this certainty. A fine book, written for the hell of it, which is a splendid reason. Time Set in the Appalachian backcountry in the midst of the Great Depression, Fools Parade traces the adventures of three ex-convicts who become involved in a wild and woolly chase along the Ohio River. Convicted murderer Mattie Appleyard has just served forty-seven years in Glory Penitentiary. His release puts him in possession of a check for $25,452.32...
Dark violence and piebald absurdity share an uncertain border, and now and then some mythmaker on his day off, like Grubb, manages to write within thi...
John Anthony Caruso s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward expansion. Bringing to life the region s history from its earliest seventeenth-century scouting parties to the admission of Tennessee to the Union in 1796, Caruso describes the exchange of ideas, values, and cultural traits that marked Appalachia as a unique frontier. Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the...
John Anthony Caruso s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward exp...
Appalachian Echoes Thomas E. Douglass, series fiction editor Very real and tremendously moving. . . . Not only an obvious brief for the unfortunate but a well told and honest story. New York Times Hubert Skidmore, a native West Virginian, wrote as a witness from inside the belly of the beast. His gift is for pitch-perfect dialogue, a varied cast of characters, and the calling up of emotion, of anger, fear, dread, and love. To encounter this novel at last is a sort of resurrection, both for its persecuted author and the Depression poor whose lives it evokes. Denise Giardina,...
Appalachian Echoes Thomas E. Douglass, series fiction editor Very real and tremendously moving. . . . Not only an obvious brief for the unf...
Perhaps no group has had such a controversial place in the literature of Appalachianstudies as the home missionaries. Accused of cultural and religious imperialism, many scholars fault home missionaries for casting mountain peoples in the role of?other, ? as well as for partnering with economic interests to exploit the region's resources. Edward O. Guerrant, a Kentucky-born physician and Presbyterian minister, has been singled out as one of the worst offenders.For most of his adult life, Guerrant traveled the hills and hamlets of southernAppalachia, spreading gospel, building churches, and...
Perhaps no group has had such a controversial place in the literature of Appalachianstudies as the home missionaries. Accused of cultural and religiou...
First published in 1946, Harry Kroll's portrayal of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud (1878-90) is seen through the eyes of six women of the two families. Their Ancient Grudge stands as the last major treatment of this iconic sliver of American culture completed before the story struggle was examined and reinterpreted by of a later generation of historians. Although the brutal cycle of the conflict often takes center stage, the novel is replete with sensitive observations of Appalachian nature and landscape, and most strikingly, the cultural positions occupied by women. In crafting this...
First published in 1946, Harry Kroll's portrayal of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud (1878-90) is seen through the eyes of six women of the two famil...
In 1882, William Simpson Pearson, writing under the pseudonym Brinsley Matthews, published "Well-Nigh Reconstructed," a thinly disguised autobiographical novel excoriating the enormous societal changes that had beset the former Confederacy during Reconstruction. Pearson s work was especially notable in that the author was a onetime Radical Republican and supporter of Ulysses S. Grant s bid for the presidency. A product of Pearson s perception that northern Reconstruction policies had devastated his native North Carolina, the book set in motion a genre of politically motivated novels...
In 1882, William Simpson Pearson, writing under the pseudonym Brinsley Matthews, published "Well-Nigh Reconstructed," a thinly disguised autobio...
