Appalachia

Appalachia in the Classroom
Teaching the Region
Edited by Theresa L. Burriss and Patricia M. Gantt

Appalachia in the Classroom presents topics and teaching strategies for a twenty-first century dialogue about Appalachia that reflect the diversity found within the region. It offers a critical resource and a model for engaging place in various disciplines and at several different levels in a thoughtful and inspiring way.

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
By Bill Best
· Foreword by Howard L. Sacks

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter—these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them.

Mountains of Injustice
Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia
Edited by Michele Morrone and Geoffrey L. Buckley
· Foreword by Donald Edward Davis
· Afterword by Jedediah Purdy

Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.

Face to Face
The Photography of Lloyd E. Moore
Edited by Rajko Grlić
· Photography by Lloyd E. Moore

A remarkable collection of photographs by an ex-Marine who worked as a lawyer in Lawrence County, Ohio, for around thirty-six years.

Standing Our Ground
Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal
By Joyce M. Barry

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

Prosperity Far Distant
The Journal of an American Farmer, 1933–1934
By Charles M. Wiltse
· Edited by Michael J. Birkner

Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University in 1933, but unable to find work, Charles M. Wiltse joined his parents on the small farm they had recently purchased in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact.In wry and often affecting prose, Wiltse recorded a year in the life of this quintessentially American place during the Great Depression.

Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment
Appalachian Women’s Literacies
By Erica Abrams Locklear

Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment blends literacy studies with literary criticism to analyze the central female characters in the works of Harriette Simpson Arnow, Linda Scott DeRosier, Denise Giardina, and Lee Smith.

Mountains of Injustice
Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia
Edited by Michele Morrone and Geoffrey L. Buckley
· Foreword by Donald Edward Davis
· Afterword by Jedediah Purdy

Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.

Out of the Mountains
Appalachian Stories
By Meredith Sue Willis

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.Willis’s

Thirsty
A Novel
By Kristin Bair O’Keeffe

It is 1883, and all of Klara Bozic’s girlish dreams have come crashing down as she arrives in Thirsty, a gritty steel town carved into the slopes above the Monongahela River just outside of Pittsburgh. She has made a heartbreaking discovery. Her new husband Drago is as abusive as the father she left behind in Croatia.

Power in the Blood
A Family Narrative
By Linda Tate

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.

Out of the Woods
A Bird Watcher’s Year
By Ora E. Anderson
· Edited by Deborah Griffith
· Foreword by Jean Andrews

Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher’s Year is a journey through the seasons and a joyous celebration of growing old. In fifty-nine essays and poems, Ora E. Anderson, birder, bird carver, naturalist, and nature writer, reveals the insights and recollections of a keen-eyed observer of nature, both human and avian.

Teller Tales
Histories
By Jo Carson

“All my work fits in my mouth,” Jo Carson says. “I write performance material no matter what else the pieces get called, and whether they are for my voice or other characters’ voices … they are first to be spoken aloud.” Following an oral tradition that has strong roots in her native Tennessee, the author of Teller Tales invites the reader to participate in events in a way that no conventional history book can.Both

Sarah’s Girls
A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek
By Lenore McComas Coberly

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.At

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.

An American Vein
Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature
Edited by Danny L. Miller, Sharon Hatfield, and Gurney Norman

An American Vein is an anthology of literary criticism of Appalachian novelists, poets, and playwrights. The book reprises critical writing of influential authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Cratis Williams, and Jim Wayne Miller. It introduces new writing by Rodger Cunningham, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and others.

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

Coal and Culture
Opera Houses in Appalachia
By William Faricy Condee

Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. The only book on opera houses that stresses their cultural context, Condee’s unique study will interest cultural geographers, scholars of Appalachian studies, and all those who appreciate the gaudy diversity of the American scene.

Extracting Appalachia
Images of the Consolidation Coal Company, 1910–1945
By Geoffrey L. Buckley

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. Whether for publicity images, safety procedures, or archival information, these photographs create a record that goes far beyond the purpose the company intended.In

Red, White, Black, and Blue
A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia
By William M. Drennen Jr. and Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr.
· Edited by Dolores Johnson

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.

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.

The Handywoman Stories
By Lenore McComas Coberly

Lenore McComas Coberly has woven together a bittersweet community of strong Appalachian women and men in this remarkable collection. Moving and joyful, these stories are made from the stuff of life.

The River Home
A Memoir
By Dorothy Weil

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. The river brings her family back, as she records the stories of her fellow “river rats”: steamboat veterans, deckhands, captains, and cooks.The

Memphis Tennessee Garrison
The Remarkable Story of a Black Appalachian Woman
Edited by Ancella R. Bickley and Lynda Ann Ewen

This oral history, based on interview transcripts, is the untold story of African American life in West Virginia, as seen through the eyes of a remarkable woman: Memphis Tennessee Garrison, an innovative teacher, administrative worker at US Steel, and vice president of the National Board of the NAACP at the height of the civil rights struggle.

West Virginia Quilts and Quiltmakers
Echoes from the Hills
By Fawn Valentine

Tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, preserved for generations, handmade bed quilts are windows into the past. In 1983, three West Virginia county extension agents discussed the need to locate and document their state’s historic quilts. Mary Nell Godbey, Margaret Meador, and Mary Lou Schmidt joined with other concerned women to found the West Virginia Heritage Quilt Search.The

Mountain People in a Flat Land
A Popular History of Appalachian Migration to Northeast Ohio, 1940–1965
By Carl E. Feather

First popular history of Appalachian migration to one community—Ashtabula County, an industrial center in the fabled “best location in the nation.”

Athens, Ohio
The Village Years
By Robert L. Daniel

In a lively style peppered with firsthand accounts by the people who made Athens, author Robert L. Daniel narrates his tale with wry humor and a sharp eye for detail.