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A History of Appalachia, by Richard B. Drake
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" Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.
- Sales Rank: #557758 in Books
- Brand: Brand: The University Press of Kentucky
- Published on: 2003-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .72" w x 5.98" l, 1.16 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2002."―
About the Author
Richard B. Drake, professor emeritus of history at Berea College, is one of the founding members of the Appalachian Studies Association.
Most helpful customer reviews
42 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Appalachia Defined
By E. E Pofahl
A HISTORY OF APPALACHIA is a well-written, history of Appalachia. The introduction notes that "....there are those who reserve as Appalachia only those areas of the Southern Appalachians that are `real mountains." The author's definition is broader including "all of the provinces of the Southern Appalachian" and extends to western Pennsylvania.
The book is organized in three parts. Part 1, titled THE CONTEST FOR APPALACHIA, covers the period from the Indians through the American Revolution. The author writes "The principal class who migrated to America after 1715 were mostly folk who shared a....desire for land to support their basically simple lives." These migrants passed through the coastal area and settled in the backwoods where small acreages were cleared and became basically a predominately yeoman (farm) economy.
Part 2, THE NEW NATION AND THE APPALACHIAN BACKWOODS, covers the period through the Civil War. While Appalachia supported the Revolution, they had no representation at the constitutional debates of 1787-1789. "By 1800 quite a different European-derived society had developed along the Appalachian frontier" and the author notes that a "snug little rivalry" developed between the east and west sections of the eastern states. Appalachia supported the War of 1812 when loyalty soared in the Appalachian backwoods but divisive issues would soon appear.
The text notes "most small farmers in East Tennessee, northern Georgia, West Virginia and eastern Kentucky usually identified more strongly with the....Union." These areas were often identified with the Radical Republican during Reconstruction.; however, by 1876 the ex-Confederates had again assumed control. The text briefly discusses the feuds of the era noting many were active "before the Civil War."
The author notes that after the Civil War in the remoteness of mountain regions far from adequate transportation ", a remarkable similar way of life developed in Appalachia's most isolated sections" which resulted in increased isolation reinforcing a stereotype about a `strange and peculiar people."
MODERN APPALACHIA, Part 3, narrates the period from Post-Reconstruction to the year 2000 covering the Industrial Revolution, the Depression, the War on Poverty, and finally the dawning of the Information Age. As the text notes "Appalachia has always been a complex area." From "1865 to 1920, Appalachia was discovered" and defined "by literate America who were northern writers. The picture that emerged was often grossly inaccurate, based on stereotype and self-serving characteristics." For example, "....the word hillbilly did not appear until 1900 when a New York Journal reporter defined such people as `free and untrammelled white' citizens living in the hills' with `no means to speak of, `who dresses as he can,'drinks whiskey, and fires off his revolver as fancy takes him."
During the machine age the mineral exploitation of the area took place and in many areas of the Great Valley significant industrial developments followed the railroads with an area like the Kanawha Valley in West Virginia becoming what was called "the American Ruhr. "By 1900 all the coalfields in West Virginia....were in full production." Lumbering also became an important Appalachian industry.
Tourism was another commercial activity that invaded the cultural traditional of Appalachian society, aided by the development of the National Forests of Appalachia and the emergence of The Great Smoky Mountain National Park.. However, the exploitation of region's fossil fuels was the major industrial invasion.
The author states that Appalachia went from a plutocracy to the Welfare State and back again to the present governing by the rich and powerful. With the collapse of the country's market system during the Depression new life came into the yeoman system of self-sufficient agriculture. "Because of the great economic maladjustments in Appalachia's major industries....large numbers of people were able to qualify for welfare benefits"....with the nations welfare system growing out of New Deal reform measurers. The War on Poverty, 1964 to 1968, resulted in 1965 of the formation of the Appalachian Regional Commission which remains active today benefiting the region. Regarding welfare reform, the author makes the interesting observation that "Even yet in Appalachia, it may be that the only reform that can succeed must be seen through the lens of yeomanry."
The text notes "...the region's society is far more diversified than the traditional picture painted as a stable enclave of Anglo-Saxon, Scotch-Irish, and Germans." The 1930s and WWII brought important changes to the Appalachian culture. During WWII, there was a mass migration of Appalachians north for employment. Also, there was the wartime industrial growth in Appalachian fossil fuel extraction and the development of the chemical industry in West Virginia. Unfortunately, the text notes "The regional picture in Appalachia since the 1980s has been generally gloomy."
Chapter 13 discusses the Appalachian Mind noting that "....the area began to find its own scholarly voice soon after World War II" and states this scholarship betrays a strong anger against American corporate capitalism and "....attests to the kind of tragic picture that Appalachian history presents."
The final chapter discusses the future of Appalachia noting "As coal and agriculture,...., move into further decline, the essentially insatiable industries of education, health services, recreation, and tourism will provide the major job opportunities in the future." Regarding the future, the text concludes " There is, and in fact has always been, a place for a viable, yeomanesque-style of life that is attractive to those unwilling or unable to join the mainstream's affluence." Shades of today's politician's statements about "the family farm."
The Source listing for this book is excellent. Instead of a long alphabetical and/or type listing of sources, sources are listed separately for each chapter so that the reader can determine the author's sources plus read in further depth if desired.
The only technical error I noted is on page 200 where the author stated that the nuclear fuel for the atomic bombs was processed "At its vast Centrifugal Plant, Oak Ridge...." The fuel for these bombs was processed at the Oak Gaseous Diffusion Plant NOT at a Centrifugal Plant. An Oak Ridge Centrifugal test loop wasn't built until the 1970s
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A place and a people apart
By Harry Eagar
From Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, on a clear day you can see most of Appalachia: See Seven States is the slogan. From my grandmother's porch on "The Brow" nearby on Signal Mountain, you could see six states.
But is Appalachia even a place? It is surely an ecological province, and a very interesting one. For its size, it has more tree species than any other part of the temperate zone, for example. But is it a specific historical zone?
Richard Drake, who was a historian at Berea College, takes this question seriously. Some other scholars have averred that Appalachia was an invention of outsiders. As an Appalachian myself, I never had any doubts that we were different from other folks, and Drake concludes the same.
Geographically, Appalachia extends nearly to Canada, but in human terms it divides fairly cleanly into northern and southern sections, and it is the southern part that is usually thought of when the word is used. For most purposes, Drake takes Appalachia to run south from Pittsburgh.
The original residents of Appalachia do not seem to have formed a distinctive zone. Indian cultures, so far as we know them, were not coterminous with the several hundred counties in 10 states that make up Drake's Appalachia. The reason, not identified by Drake, is simple. Uncomplicated Indian material culture was not constrained by rugged mountains. One could hunt, fish and grow a little corn and pumpkins as easily in the mountains as in the bottoms. (Hawaii, where I live now, shows a similar situation. Places, such as valleys on the north shore of Molokai, that today are so remote that people scarcely visit them, were populated in premodern times, because they were nearly self-sufficient.)
It was the irupution of iron, gunpowder and woven cloth into the southeast that allowed the evolution of a distinctive Appalachian cultural zone. Mountain people were necessarily going to be poorer than residents of the Piedmont. Drake distinguishes three kinds of Appalachians: the educated, politically dominant county seat townsfolk, the prosperous farmers in the bottoms and the ones he cares most about, who have been called Branchwater Mountaineers: Largely unschooled, with unproductive farms and, until radio came, spotty contact with the rest of the world.
Drake defines these backwoodsmen as inheritors of a "yeomanesque" outlook, derived from their ancestors in (mostly) Britain and Germany (although he frequently reminds his readers that Africa was the origin about about 10 percent of Appalachia's non-native population), who yearned for their own land and a chance to live on their own. They had little hankering for money income and so no inclination to commercial agriculture.
As often happens when people are in no position to become wealthy, they developed a system, of esteem and respect that was not based on money. That alone made Appalachians outsiders in the American culture.
By an historical accident, the people who settled Appalachia were largely from what David Hackett Fischer calls the British Borderlands of northern England, lowland Scotland and northern Ireland, an area without effective central government but with a culture of honor, blood feuds, primitive agricultural methods and violence. Drake specifically says these "Scotch-Irish" were good farmers, but he is wrong and Fischer is right. The Germans, largely from the Palatinate, were good farmers, but the English-speakers were, and are, not.
The biggest flaw in Drake's otherwise admirable book is his rejection of what might be called the Fischer premise (stated in his "Albion's Seed"), that Appalachia was (and is) more violent than the American general level. Drake says the stereotypical version of the feudin', fightin', cousin-marryin' highlander is exaggerated.
Not by much. As a Kentucky writer, he has to address the Hatfield-McCoy legend and some other aspects of Southern mountain violence (like the Saltville massacre), but he downplays its pervasiveness.
In order to do this, he has to overlook some serious kinds of organized and unorganized violence. The Night Riders of Kentucky in 1907-08, the Siege of Athens (Tennessee) and the Homestead strike, for example, which he doesn't mention.
On the other hand, he is right to emphasize the almost crazed land hunger that marks the southern highlander. The fierceness with which the typical Appalachian defends his property line, especially from the occasional agent of public law, is no stereotype.
Drake is also under the influence of Immanuel Wallerstein and World System Theory and tends to favor some recent scholarship that treats Appalachia as an internal colony for resource extraction in the larger country. This is defensible but unpersuasive. Drake, judicious throughout, sympathizes with the economic plight of the Branchwater Mountaineer but draws back from the forthright anger of a Harry Caudill ("Night Comes to the Cumberlands").
I find Caudill more persuasive.
"A History of Appalachia" reads as if it were written as a text for an introductory level college course, and in a few pages tries to be comprehensive. I think he underdoes mountain religion and music and overdoes the printed part of mountain culture.
Southern Appalachia is a strange and beautiful place, populated by a strange and prideful people, too exuberant, idiosyncratic and standoffish to be limned in a volume of fewer than 300 pages. But as a thoughtful introduction, "A History of Appalachia" covers, or at least touches upon, all the bases.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Informative and packed with economic details, but could have used some editing and more detail about the backwoods people
By Christopher Culver
Richard B. Drake's "A History of Appalachia" describes this mysterious part of the eastern United States from the pre-European era to the end of the 20th century. Although published by the University Press of Kentucky, this is meant for a general audience. There are no footnotes or in-text citations, and references are cited at the end of the book.
There are many definitions of Appalachia, and some scholars have questioned whether it even makes sense to speak of one such region. Drake sees Appalachia as the mountainous areas of northern Alabama and northern Georgia, the west of South Carolia, Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, part of the west of Virgina and finally western Pennsylvania. What unifies this whole region, Drake claims, is the feature of yeomanry: a society where a family owns and farms its own land. The earliest settlers came from portions of Great Britain and Germany whose inhabitants were hungry for land, wanting that sort of security and unwilling to work on larger commercial farms. Though Appalachian society has diversified and yeomanry involves a minority of Appalachians, Drake believes this phenomenon has continued to the present day.
The economic history of Appalachia also interests Drake. He notes that for centuries this part of the United States was fairly self-sufficient. The industrialization of the US brought the area into the capitalist system. A heavy demand for coal and timber meant that the region was exploited for its natural resources, with results that weren't entirely fair for locals. The book closes with some musings on how Appalachia can prosper economically without losing the traditional values that Drake admires.
A HISTORY OF APPALACHIA is certainly informative on many levels. Unfortunately, this work isn't all that enjoyable and doesn't live up to its potential. Another reviewer called this a "cut and paste" effort, and it's easy to see why. It reads like Drake was just copying whole bits out of earlier sources and then never went back and ironed the text out. I lost count of how many times a factoid is given and then repeated in slightly different wording on the following page. What is also tiresome is that on one hand Drake claims that the stereotype of the violent, illiterate mountain man is unfair, perhaps an invention of outsiders, but on the other hand he sometimes notes that there exist such Appalachians. He fails to give a deeper description of such people, whose psychology would be genuinely interesting to readers from other parts of the United States. Finally, the text may be dated already: the only problem backwoods folk seem to face is poverty, but the issue of methamphetamine use is never presented.
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