Appalachian Studies Book List ·

An American Vein

Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature

The blossoming of Appalachian studies began some thirty years ago. Thousands of young people from the hills have since been made aware of their region's rich literary tradition through high school and college courses.…

Beyond Hill and Hollow

Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies

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.…

Coal and Culture

Opera Houses in Appalachia

Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Most towns and cities had at least one opera house during this golden age. Coal mining and railroads brought travelers, money, and change to the region.…

Extracting Appalachia

Images of the Consolidation Coal Company 1910–1945

As a function of its corporate duties, the Consolidation Coal Company, one of the largest coal-mining operations in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, had photographers take hundreds of pictures of nearly every facet of its operations.…

Face to Face

The Photography of Lloyd E. Moore

Face to Face: The Photography of Lloyd E. Moore is a remarkable collection of photographs by an ex-Marine who worked as a lawyer in Lawrence County, Ohio, for around thirty-six years. As Moore himself tells us, “An attorney who practices family, jury, and criminal law meets a lot of interesting people.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

The Handywoman Stories

Sometimes it's possible to pick up a book and hear the words being spoken by the characters as if you were sitting across the table from them. This is the sensation you'll have as you read through The Handywoman Stories by Lenore McComas Coberly.…

Loving Mountains, Loving Men

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.

Memphis Tennessee Garrison

The Remarkable Story of a Black Appalachian Woman

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.…

Mountain People in a Flat Land

A Popular History of Appalachian Migration to Northeast Ohio, 1940-1965

In the early 1940s, $10 bought a bus ticket from Appalachia to a better job and promise of prosperity in the flatlands of northeast Ohio. A mountaineer with a strong back and will to work could find a job within twenty-four hours of arrival.…

Mountains of Injustice

Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia

Foreword by Donald Edward Davis Afterword by Jedediah Purdy Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories.…

Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment

Appalachian Women’s Literacies

In many parts of Appalachia, family ties run deep, constituting an important part of an individual’s sense of self. In some cases, when Appalachian learners seek new forms of knowledge, those family ties can be challenged by the accusation that they have gotten above their raisings, a charge that can have a lasting impact on family and community acceptance.…

Out of the Mountains

Appalachian Stories

Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.…

Power in the Blood

A Family Narrative

Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative traces Linda Tate’s journey to rediscover the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of her family and provides an unflinching examination of the poverty, discrimination, and family violence that marked their lives.…

Prosperity Far Distant

The Journal of an American Farmer, 1933–1934

Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University, but unable to find work, Charles Wiltse returned to his family’s 42-acre farm in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, wood, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Red, White, Black & Blue

A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

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.…

The River Home

A Memoir

The death of her father begins Dorothy Weil’s search for what causes the family’s “spinning of in all directions like the pieces of Chaos.” She embarks on a river odyssey, traveling the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers by steamboat, towboat, and even an old-fashioned flatboat.…

Sarah’s Girls

A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek

Situated in a remote outpost in West Virginia at the turn of the last century, the story that Lenore McComas Coberly tells in Sarah's Girls is one of place, people, and unquenchable spirit. In this fictionalized account of her recent ancestors, Coberly masterfully traces the journeys of their lives, their dreams, and their hardships over the course of the twentieth century.…

Standing Our Ground

Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal

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.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music

Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music is a treasury of American traditional music and Ohio’s folklife heritage. Traveling along the highways and byways of Ohio in the 1950s as a folksinger and collector of traditional music, Anne Grimes encountered people from many different backgrounds who opened up their homes to her to share their most precious family heirlooms—their songs.…

The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature

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.…