Series in Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Loving Mountains, Loving Men

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

Loving Mountains, Loving Men

By Jeff Mann

Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities.

In memoir and poetry, Mann describes his life as an openly gay man who has remained true to his mountain roots. Mann recounts his upbringing in Hinton, a small town in southern West Virginia, as well as his realization of his homosexuality, his early encounters with homophobia, his coterie of supportive lesbian friends, and his initial attempts to escape his native region in hopes of finding a freer life in urban gay communities. Mann depicts his difficult search for a romantic relationship, the family members who have given him the strength to defy convention, his anger against religious intolerance and the violence of homophobia, and his love for the rich folk culture of the Highland South.

His character and values shaped by the mountains, Mann has reconciled his homosexuality with both traditional definitions of Appalachian manhood and his own attachment to home and kin. Loving Mountains, Loving Men is a compelling, universal story of making peace with oneself and the wider world.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Loving+Mountains%2C+Loving+Men.
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Beyond Hill and Hollow

Sat, 15 Jan 2005

Beyond Hill and Hollow
Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies

By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Women’s studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow, the first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia’s women. Featuring the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women.

The chapters in Beyond Hill and Hollow examine the hidden lives of Appalachian prostitutes, urban Appalachian women in the 1800s, rural women in company towns, and an African American Appalachian poet from the 1900s. Contributors look at Appalachian opera houses, Jewish women in the coalfields, the writings of Wilma Dykeman and Sharyn McCrumb, and activists in out-migrant communities like Cincinnati. With an introduction by editor Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Beyond Hill and Hollow firmly establishes the field of Appalachian Women’s Studies.

Appropriate both as a reference and as a classroom text, Beyond Hill and Hollow expands our understanding of Appalachian women’s lives. Readers, whether from the region or beyond, may recognize themselves or women they know in its pages.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Beyond+Hill+and+Hollow.
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Red, White, Black & Blue

Thu, 15 Jan 2004

Red, White, Black & Blue
A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

Edited by Dolores Johnson

Red, White, Black, and Blue began as a collaborative memoir by William M. "Bill" Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. As boys they played on the same Little League baseball team and experienced just one year together as schoolmates after the all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated in 1955. After that, class, race, and choice separated their life experiences for forty-five years.

In 1992 both had returned to Charleston from lives mostly lived elsewhere. They decided to work together on a memoir of growing up through the trauma of desegregation. Their aim was to foster understanding between their distinct cultures for themselves and for their own and future generations. Dolores Johnson, in editing the two texts, observed two very different modes of expression: Bill Drennen's narrative is threaded with references that connote wealth, status, and personal privilege; Kojo Jones's memoir is interwoven with African American signification, protest, and moral outrage.

The stories of their Appalachian upbringing in homes less than a mile apart are anecdotal in nature, but their diverse uses of the English language as they endeavor to communicate shared memories and common meanings reveal significant cultural connotations that transform standard American English into two different languages, rendering interracial communication problematic. Dr. Johnson's analysis is to the point.

Red, White, Black, and Blue is a groundbreaking approach to studying not only cultural linguistics but also the cultural heritage of a historic time and place in America. It gives witness to the issues of race and class inherent in the way we write, speak, and think.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Red%2C+White%2C+Black+%26+Blue.
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The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature

Mon, 29 Dec 2003

The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature

By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell Miles, witness to poverty, industrialization, and violence against women, wrote poignant and insightful critiques of her Appalachian home.

In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in all four women's writings the origins of what we recognize today as ecological feminism—a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and nonhumans and works for social and environmental justice.

People and the land in Appalachia were also the subject of women authors with radically different approaches to mountains and their residents. Authors with progressive ideas about women's rights did not always respect the Appalachian places they were writing about or apply their ideas to all of the women in those places—but they did create hundreds of short stories, novels, letters, diaries, photographs, sketches, and poems about the mountains.

While The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature ascribes much that is noble to the beginnings of the ecological feminism movement as it developed in Appalachia, it is also unyielding in its assessment of the literatures of the voyeur, tourist, and social crusader who supported status quo systems of oppression in Appalachia.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Tangled+Roots+of+Feminism%2C+Environmentalism%2C+and+Appalachian+Literature.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Memphis Tennessee Garrison

Sat, 30 Jun 2001

Memphis Tennessee Garrison
The Remarkable Story of a Black Appalachian Woman

Edited by Ancella R. Bickley and Lynda Ann Ewen

As a black Appalachian woman, Memphis Tennessee Garrison belonged to a demographic category triply ignored by historians.

The daughter of former slaves, she moved to McDowell County, West Virginia, at an early age and died at ninety-eight in Huntington. The coalfields of McDowell County were among the richest seams in the nation. As Garrison makes clear, the backbone of the early mining work force—those who laid the railroad tracks, manned the coke ovens, and dug the coal—were black miners. These miners and their families created communities that became the centers of the struggle for unions, better education, and expanded civil rights. Memphis Tennessee Garrison, an innovative teacher, administrative worker at U.S. Steel, and vice president of the National Board of the NAACP at the height of the civil rights struggle (1963-66), was involved with all of these struggles.

In many ways, this oral history, based on interview transcripts, is the untold and multidimensional story of African American life in West Virginia, as seen through the eyes of a remarkable woman. She portrays a courageous people who organize to improve their working conditions, send their children to school and then to college, own land, and support a wide range of cultural and political activities.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Memphis+Tennessee+Garrison.
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