The United States of Appalachia How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America

by Biggers, Jeff

• ISBN13: 9781593760311
• ISBN10: 1593760310
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-23
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence and a hotbed for labor and civil rights movements and groundbreaking science, literature, and music. Far from being in the backwash of American history, Appalachia has produced some of our country's most important innovators. To name only a few: Cherokee inventor Sequoyah; Black History Month founder Carter Woodson; jazz and country music legends Bessie Smith, W.C. Handy, Nina Simone, and the Carter Family; New York Times Publisher Adolph Ochs; authors Pearl S. Buck, Thomas Wolfe, Edward Abbey, Cormac McCarthy, Henry Louis Gates, and Rebecca Harding Davis; and social activists John Rankin, Martin Delany, Myles Horton, and Walter Reuther. With humor, intelligence, and clarity, Jeff Biggers shows us that to properly understand American history it is essential to know the history of Appalachia. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Prologue: Rank Strangers	1	(24)
The Trail of Words	25	(20)
The First Washington, D.C.	45	(22)
Down from the Mountain	67	(14)
The Emancipators	81	(22)
All the News That's Fit to Print	103	(32)
The Great American Industrial Saga	135	(34)
We Shall Overcome	169	(26)
Epilogue: We Are All Appalachians	195	(18)
Acknowledgments	213	(2)
Bibliographic Notes	215	(12)
Index	227