Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 110 / Number 1
ABSTRACT:
Appalachia Before Mr. Peabody: Some Recent Literature on the Southern Mountain Region
- By Kenneth W. Noe, pp. 5–34
Over the last thirty years, while American popular culture's view of the region called Appalachia have remained stagnant,
scholarly interpretations have evolved. Rejecting assessments that blamed Appalachian poverty on mountain culture, scholars
created in the 1970s and early 1980s a "Revisionist" school of thought that championed native ways while focusing on the
ruthless outside exploitation of mountain resources as the reason for regional problems. In focusing on industrialization in the
mountains, however, the early Revisionists failed to fully delineate the character of mountain culture during the pre-industrial
period, roughly that era before 1880. A new generation of scholars, largely becoming active in the 1980s, have done much
to fill that gap in the literature. This bibliographic essay explores their writings, with special emphasis on works written over
the last ten years. The view of Appalachia that emerges is a complex one. The region contained both self-sufficient farmers
and nascent industrialists, although scholars debate the relative importance of each. The presence of Native Americans and
African American slaves created a tri-racial society. As slavery existed in antebellum mountain communities, so did the politics
of slaveholding. Never isolated from the rest of the United States, mountaineers watched the gathering sectional crisis with
growing alarm. When the Civil War came, they responded in equally complex ways, many supporting the Union but many
others aligning themselves with the Confederacy. While scholarship has answered many questions about pre-industrial
mountain life, much work remains to be done.
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