Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82
Book Description
New Appalachia
Author: The New Appalachia: Ideas That Work
Author: Appalachian Regional Appalachian Regional ComissionPublisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781503096899
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 84
Book Description
Think of this small book as a collection of action snapshots of a region on the move. Sometimes the focus is on the land itself, such as "brownfield" sites in western Pennsylvania or small farms in southern New York. Often it's on infrastructure, like a replacement for an aging bridge in Tennessee or links between roads, rail, and a waterway in northeastern Mississippi. Frequently the camera zooms in on sophisticated technology, such as laptops used by schoolchildren in Georgia or satellite-assisted surveys in western Maryland. Always, always, we see people in action-working together to build something. What they're building may be a structure, like a water line along a rocky ridge in western Virginia; or a strategy, like a Kentucky program designed to produce homegrown doctors for rural Appalachia. Sometimes they're investing in projects whose payoffs may not materialize for a generation, as with a West Virginia youth leadership camp or an Alabama county's efforts to encourage its talented high school graduates to stay in the area. One way or another, all these stories are about capacity building-acts of faith in the future of Appalachia. They're also about collaboration within communities, across the Appalachian Region, and with partners in the larger world outside Appalachia. In that respect, they're evidence of how Appalachia has changed during the 37 years since the President's Appalachian Regional Commission called Appalachia "a region apart" from the rest of America. But they're also examples of a continuing commitment to the vision that made change possible. In 1965, economically speaking, Appalachia's eggs were in a very few baskets, each vulnerable to market shocks. The Region depended heavily on the extraction of natural resources and on agriculture. In the southern states, manufacturing meant mostly low-wage textile mills; in the northern Rust Belt, it meant heavy industry in aging plants employing fewer and fewer workers. From 1950 to 1960, a decade when national employment grew 15 percent, Appalachian employment actually declined. One in three Appalachians lived in poverty, a rate 50 percent higher than the national average. The Region's narrow mountain roads choked off the growth of commerce and industry and constricted people's access to jobs, schools, and services. They were used by trucks hauling coal and timber to railheads, and, all too often, by some of the Region's most talented young people moving to places far away
Appalachian Reckoning
Author: Anthony HarkinsPublisher:
ISBN: 9781946684790
Category : Appalachian Region
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover
What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia
Author: Elizabeth CattePublisher:
ISBN: 9780998904146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians. The book offers a must-needed insider's perspective on the region.
Uneven Ground
Author: Ronald D. EllerPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813138639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492
Book Description
This award-winning history examines the politics of progress in America through a close look at industrial development in Appalachia since WWII. Appalachia has played a complex role in the unfolding of American history. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of material production and technology decried what they saw as a the isolation and backwardness of the region and sought to “uplift” its people through education and industrialization. In Uneven Ground, Ronald D. Eller examines the politics of development in Appalachia while exploring the idea of progress as it has evolved in America. “Passionate, clear, concise, and at times profound,” this volume demonstrates that Appalachia's struggle to overcome poverty, to live in harmony with the land, and to respect the value of community is a truly American story (Chad Berry, author of Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles). Winner of the Appalachian Studies Association’s Weatherford Award and the Southern Political Science Association’s V.O. Key Award
Mountain Path
Author: Harriette Simpson ArnowPublisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1609173333
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow’s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow’s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by “those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,” and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path, Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration.
Hillbilly Elegy
Author: J. D. VancePublisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062872257
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Dorie
Author: Florence Cope BushPublisher:
ISBN: 9780870497261
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
Dorie's story begins with her childhood on an isolated mountain farm, where we see first-hand how her parents combined back-breaking labor with intense personal pride to produce everything their family needed--from food and clothing to tools and toys--from the land. Lumber companies began to invade the mountains, and Dorie's family took advantage of the financial opportunities offered by the lumber industry, not realizing that in giving up their lands they were also letting go of a way of life. Along with their machinery, the lumber companies brought in many young men, one of whom, Fred Cope, became Dorie's husband. After the lumber companies stripped the mountains of their timber, outsiders set the area aside as a national park, requiring Dorie, now married with a family of her own, to move outside of her beloved mountains.
Hill Women
Author: Cassie ChambersPublisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 1984818937
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.
Another Appalachia
Author: Neema AvashiaPublisher:
ISBN: 9781952271427
Category : Cross Lanes (W. Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
"Examines both the roots and the resonance of Neema Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, and gun culture"--