Reprinted from Green Man Review.
Richard B. Drake’s A History of Appalachia struck many chords with me.
I am an Appalachian by blood. My mother was born and brought up on a subsistence farm. She didn’t see the nearest town till she was around 12. The house she grew up in got electricity in 1960 and a telephone in 1965. Indoor plumbing came in 1976. I remember all those milestones. My father grew up in a village called Helltown, where his father owned a store and woodlots. They both got out young — got a bit more education than most, worked “away,” made a decent livelihood for themselves. Except that they lived where the Appalachian Mountains touch the Atlantic Ocean, so that subsistence fishing was also part of their lives, they have a lot in common with Drake’s more southerly Appalachians.
I live in Appalachia. Half an hour’s drive east of me are coal fields that have been exploited consistently by Euro-Canadians since the very early 1600′s. There is even evidence that the local First Nations were on the verge of the technological breakthrough of using coal before the French arrived. Half an hour to the northwest are isolated rural communities (we don’t call them “hollers,” but they’re pretty much the same thing) with hillbilly reputations for alcohol, crushing poverty and ignorance, violence and incest. The economy is resource-based and the population is declining as our young people leave and immigrants find little to attract them. Unemployment in some communities is 50% in a bad year, 20% in a good one.
The rural Appalachia I moved back to in 1974 was still in many ways a subsistence, cashless way of life. I paid for part of my university education picking raspberries and knitting sweaters for a company that sold hand-knit goods. We would never have used the term to describe our fierce attachment to the land, but we were indeed living the “yeomanesque” lifestyle traditionally considered to be one of the bases of Appalachian society.
Even as American Appalachians are said to have preserved Elizabethan speech and oral traditions (tales and music), my own Acadian Appalachian people are believed to maintain remnants of a French dialect unchanged since we arrived here 400 years ago. Both peoples have been studied half to death by the folklorists, too!
What of the book itself? I find it fascinating on several counts, but why would someone who doesn’t share my roots want to read it?
Much of the mythos of American folklore, for good and for ill, is based in the Appalachians. Surely this brings A History of Appalachia within GMR’s mandate. The book casts a somewhat demythologizing look at the area, and this is all to the good. The culture of Appalachia, the “Appalachian Mind” as Drake and others call it, doesn’t need mythology to stand on its own. (I think it’s even stronger without the mythology, but that’s just me.)
First, this is a detailed history book. Drake starts with the Native peoples who lived in the area before the Euro-Americans (a cool new word I learned from him) arrived, examining their culture and, especially, their politics. If this is what I think it is, a new area of scholarship since I started studying history at university 30 years ago, it’s a welcome one. Drake methodically goes through the various waves of settlement and the many wars for control of the area, first among the French, English and Natives, then through the American Revolution and finally the Civil War.
Then Drake recounts post-Civil War Appalachia, the economic revolution springing from the exploitation of its natural resources, the Depression (funny how the people Drake quotes say exactly the same things as my mother did about the Depression in our corner of Appalachia) and the out-migrations of the 20th century.
Chapter 8, “The ‘Discovery’ of Appalachia,” will probably be the most interesting for readers who are less entranced by history than I am, because it goes into a fair bit of detail about Appalachian culture, both real and imagined (stereotyped, in other words — I’d never realized that “The Beverly Hillbillies” was racist).
My one quibble with this book is the maps, which come from the University of Kentucky Cartography Lab. They are at the same time too detailed and not detailed enough. They’re on a small-enough scale that colour, or at least better contrast, would be a real help to bifocal-clad eyes. Most of them include county boundaries, making them very cluttered. Hardest of all, cities are only identified to make a point, state names are omitted and state boundaries are only slightly darker than county ones. Sorry, but I’m a Canadian and I can’t always recognize American states from hazy outlines. I’m quite sure not all Americans can, either.
A History of Appalachia doesn’t have footnotes, endnotes or a bibliography as such. Instead it has a section almost 30 pages long of “Sources,” divided by chapter. There is also a good index.
So what do I think of A History of Appalachia? I like it. I learned a lot about U.S. history, but also about my own people. “Appalachia” in U.S. terms may cover a limited area of several eastern states, but geographically and (dare I say it?) socio-culturally it stretches much farther toward the northeast, all the way through the Atlantic Provinces of Canada.
(The University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
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