Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920

399 Pages·1978·20.923 MB·English

by  Henry D. Shapiro

Appalachia on Our Mind
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Appalachia
on Our Mind
The Southern Mountains and
Mountaineers in the American
Consciousness, 1870-1920
by Henry D. Shapiro
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
Copyright © 1978 by
The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 0-8078-1293-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-2301
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shapiro, Henry D.
Appalachia on our mind.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
i. Appalachian Mountains, Southern. I. Title.
F217.^65 £52 30i.29'74 77-2301
ISBN 0-8078-1293 -5
THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.
For my great teachers,
Joseph Shapiro and Harry Wolf son
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Contents
Preface / ix
1 The Local-Color Movement and the "Discovery" of
Appalachia / 3
2 Protestant Home Missions and the Institutionalization
of Appalachian Otherness / 32
3 Solving the "Problem" of Appalachian Otherness: The
Role of History and Environment / 59
4 Solving the "Problem" of Appalachian Otherness: The
Role of Ethnicity and Culture / 85
5 Naming as Explaining: William Goodell Frost and the
Invention of Appalachia / 113
6 Region as Community and the Transformation of
Mountain Benevolence / 133
7 Economic Modernization and the Americanization of
Appalachia / 157
8 The Southern Highland Division and the Institu-
tionalization of Appalachian Regionalism / 186
9 Creating Community and Culture in Appalachia: Folk
Schools and the Crafts Revival / 213
10 The Folksong Revival and the Integration of the
Mountaineers into Modern American Civilization:
The Triumph of Pluralism / 244
Notes / 267
Bibliography / 309
Index / 369
Preface
This is not a history of Appalachia. It is a history of the idea
of Appalachia, and hence of the invention of Appalachia. It attempts
to examine the origins and consequences of the idea that the moun-
tainous portions of eight or nine southern states form a coherent
region inhabited by an homogeneous population possessing a uni-
form culture. It argues that the emergence of this idea, between 1870
and 1900, involved an attempt to understand reality, or more pre-
cisely reality perceived in a particular way from a particular point of
view, and it seeks to explicate the manner in which the idea of Appa-
lachia came to be used as a way of dealing with the "strange land and
peculiar people" of the southern mountains. It is thus a history of
America and of the American consciousness, for its concern is with
the attempts of Americans to understand the nature and meaning of
their civilization, and to develop modes of action which to them seem
consonant with this understanding. And as such it is itself an attempt
to understand the nature and meaning of American civilization, and
hence part of a larger work in which Americans have been engaged
for some two hundred years.
At another level, the concern of this book is with the taxonomy of
reality, the process by which experience is defined, ordered, organ-
ized into coherent and actionable schemes, the process by which a
new reality or reality newly perceived is integrated into existing
knowledge, the process by which taxonomic schemes are rearranged
to make space for new knowledge, the process by which knowledge
becomes the basis for public action. Because this is an essay in intel-
lectual history, it begins with the assumption that the way people
view the world determines how they will act in it. It attempts, how-
ever, to go beyond conventional studies of the history of ideas and of
the history of "influences" by recognizing that the pattern of relation-
ships between ideas and action is significantly more complex than the
cause-and-effect model we often use in talking about the role of ideas
[ix]