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The author's travels through northern Georgia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and the valley of Virginia.
Bonded Leather binding
The Oconaluftee Valley, located on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, is home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). This seemingly isolated valley has an epic tale to tell. Always a desirable place to settle, hunt, gather, farm, and live, the valley and its people have played an integral role in some of the greatest dramas of the colonial era, the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War era. The experiences of turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrial logging alongside the national park movement show how land-use trends changed communities and families. Though the valley saw its share of conflict, its residents often lived like neighbors, sharing resources and acting cooperatively for mutual benefit and survival. They demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of threats to their existence. Elizabeth Giddens offers a deeply researched and elegantly written account of Oconaluftee and its people from Indigenous settlements to the establishment of the national park by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. She builds the tale from archives, census records, property records, personal memoirs, and more, showing how national events affected all Oconaluftee's people—Indigenous, Black, and white.
Appalachia first entered the American consciousness as a distinct region in the decades following the Civil War. The place and its people have long been seen as backwards and 'other' because of their perceived geographical, social, and economic isolation. These essays, by fourteen eminent historians and social scientists, illuminate important dimensions of early social life in diverse sections of the Appalachian mountains. The contributors seek to place the study of Appalachia within the context of comparative regional studies of the United States, maintaining that processes and patterns thought to make the region exceptional were not necessarily unique to the mountain South. The contributors are Mary K. Anglin, Alan Banks, Dwight B. Billings, Kathleen M. Blee, Wilma A. Dunaway, John R. Finger, John C. Inscoe, Ronald L. Lewis, Ralph Mann, Gordon B. McKinney, Mary Beth Pudup, Paul Salstrom, Altina L. Waller, and John Alexander Williams
Interweaving social, political, environmental, economic, and popular history, John Alexander Williams chronicles four and a half centuries of the Appalachian past. Along the way, he explores Appalachia's long-contested boundaries and the numerous, often contradictory images that have shaped perceptions of the region as both the essence of America and a place apart. Williams begins his story in the colonial era and describes the half-century of bloody warfare as migrants from Europe and their American-born offspring fought and eventually displaced Appalachia's Native American inhabitants. He depicts the evolution of a backwoods farm-and-forest society, its divided and unhappy fate during the Civil War, and the emergence of a new industrial order as railroads, towns, and extractive industries penetrated deeper and deeper into the mountains. Finally, he considers Appalachia's fate in the twentieth century, when it became the first American region to suffer widespread deindustrialization, and examines the partial renewal created by federal intervention and a small but significant wave of in-migration. Throughout the book, a wide range of Appalachian voices enlivens the analysis and reminds us of the importance of storytelling in the ways the people of Appalachia define themselves and their region.