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"Appalachian Region"
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Burning bright : stories
Captures the eerie beauty, stark violence, and rugged character of Appalachia in a collection of stories that spans the Civil War to the present day.
Book
Standing Our Ground
Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal examines women's efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal coal mining, which involves demolishing the tops of hills and mountains to provide access to coal seams, is one of the most significant environmental threats in Appalachia, where it is most commonly practiced.
The Appalachian women featured in Barry's book have firsthand experience with the negative impacts of Big Coal in West Virginia. Through their work in organizations such as the Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, they fight to save their mountain communities by promoting the development of alternative energy resources. Barry's engaging and original work reveals how women's tireless organizing efforts have made mountaintop removal a global political and environmental issue and laid the groundwork for a robust environmental justice movement in central Appalachia.
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Hunting for Hides
Changes in Native American communities as they adapted to advancing Europeans. This volume investigates the use of deer, deerskins, and nonlocal goods in the period from A.D. 1400 to 1700 to gain a comprehensive understanding of historic-era cultural changes taking place within Native American communities in the southern Appalachian Highlands. In the 1600s, hunting deer to obtain hides for commercial trade evolved into a substantial economic enterprise for many Native Americans in the Middle Atlantic and Southeast. An overseas market demand for animal hides and furs imported from the Americas, combined with the desire of infant New World colonies to find profitable export commodities, provided a new market for processed deerskins as well as new sources of valued nonlocal goods. This new trade in deerskins created a reorganization of the priorities of native hunters that initiated changes in native trade networks, political alliances, gender relations, and cultural belief systems. Through research on faunal remains and mortuary assemblages, Lapham tracks both the products Native Americans produced for colonial trade--deerskins and other furs--as well as those items received in exchange--European and native prestige goods that end up in burial contexts. Zooarchaeological analyses provide insights into subsistence practices, deer-hunting strategies, and deer-hide production activities, while an examination of mortuary practices contributes information on the use of the nonlocal goods acquired through trade in deerskins. This study reveals changes in economic organization and mortuary practices that provide new insights into how participation in the colonial deerskin trade initially altered Native American social relations and political systems.
eBook
Combating Mountaintop Removal
Critically examining the fierce conflicts over an intense and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining, Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight against Big Coal documents the changing relationships among the coal industry, communities, environment, and economy from the perspective of local grassroots activist organizations and their broader networks._x000B__x000B_Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in Boone County, West Virginia, Bryan T. McNeil shows how Appalachian community coalitions have fostered important connections in their opposition to coal mining practices. Focusing on the grassroots activist organization Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), composed of individuals who have personal ties to the coal industry in the region, the study reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions. With the decline in membership and political power of the United Mine Workers union in West Virginia, citizens have turned to alternative forms of activism to coordinate opposition to mountaintop removal mining, centering mainly on the industry's effect on community and the environment._x000B__x000B_The shift towards community organizing, particularly around environmental concerns, represents an effort to address social issues in a new space outside of organized labor. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics, compared to that of labor. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, Combating Mountaintop Removal tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.
eBook
Center Places and Cherokee Towns
Examines how architecture and other aspects of the built
environment, such as hearths, burials, and earthen mounds, formed
center places within the Cherokee cultural landscape In
Center Places and Cherokee Towns , Christopher B. Rodning
opens a panoramic vista onto protohistoric Cherokee culture. He
posits that Cherokee households and towns were anchored within
their cultural and natural landscapes by built features that
acted as “center places.” Rodning investigates the
period from just before the first Spanish contact with
sixteenth-century Native American chiefdoms in La Florida through
the development of formal trade relations between Native American
societies and English and French colonial provinces in the
American South during the late 1600s and 1700s. Rodning focuses
particularly on the Coweeta Creek archaeological site in the
upper Little Tennessee Valley in southwestern North Carolina and
describes the ways in which elements of the built environment
were manifestations of Cherokee senses of place. Drawing on
archaeological data, delving into primary documentary sources
dating from the eighteenth century, and considering Cherokee
myths and legends remembered and recorded during the nineteenth
century, Rodning shows how the arrangement of public structures
and household dwellings in Cherokee towns both shaped and were
shaped by Cherokee culture. Center places at different scales
served as points of attachment between Cherokee individuals and
their communities as well as between their present and past.
Rodning explores the ways in which Cherokee architecture and the
built environment were sources of cultural stability in the
aftermath of European contact, and how the course of European
contact altered the landscape of Cherokee towns in the long run.
In this multi-faceted consideration of archaeology, ethnohistory,
and recorded oral tradition, Rodning adeptly demonstrates the
distinct ways that Cherokee identity was constructed through
architecture and other material forms.
Center Places and Cherokee Towns will have a broad
appeal to students and scholars of southeastern archaeology,
anthropology, Native American studies, prehistoric and
protohistoric Cherokee culture, landscape archaeology, and
ethnohistory.
eBook
My curious and jocular heroes : tales and tale-spinners from Appalachia
\"With this book, Jones introduces to new generations four scholars of Appalachian folkways who made major contributions to the arts, culture, and values of the Appalachian people. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, born in North Carolina, collected ballads, songs, tunes, and stories--before there were tape recorders--by committing them all to memory and later recording his \"memory collection\" for Columbia University (1935) and the Library of Congress (1949). Josiah H. Combs, a Kentuckian who got a doctorate at the Sorbonne, taught languages, collected stories and songs, gave ballad recitals, was an authority on Kentucky mountain speech, and was a great raconteur. Cratis D. Williams, another Kentuckian, was the father of Appalachian studies based on his massive dissertation, The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction. He was a scholar and teacher, a singer of the old ballads, and teller of folk tales. He became Jones's treasured mentor. And the master storyteller Leonard W. Roberts, also born in Kentucky, was a pioneer collector and publisher of Old World folktales, riddles, ballads, and lyric songs, too. Beyond mere biography, this book introduces the reader to some of the lore preserved and performed by Lunsford, Combs, Williams, and Roberts throughout their lives. The end of each biographical chapter is filled with collected stories, songs, and jokes representing the breadth of each man's research and repertoire. With \"My Curious and Jocular Heroes,\" Jones provides not only the historical and cultural contexts of the lives of four of his personal heroes, but also brings together significant texts and music from Appalachian folklore in order to make a contribution to the field of Appalachian studies\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed
Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being. Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--a number of them illustrated by personal photographs--describe obstacles, lawsuits, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism. Bell supplements each narrative with careful notes that aid the reader while amplifying the power and flow of the activists' stories. Bell's analysis outlines the interconnectedness of Appalachian women's activism and their roles as wives and mothers. Ultimately, Bell argues that these women draw upon a broader \"protector identity\" that both encompasses and extends the identity of motherhood that has often been associated with grassroots women's activism. As protectors, these women challenge dominant Appalachian gender expectations and guard not only their families, but also their homeplaces, their communities, their heritage, and the endangered mountains that surround them.
eBook