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Appalachian Studies Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Appalachian Studies

Coal, Land, And Ideology: Inventions Of Appalachia In The Mind Of The American Ruling Class, Zachary Harris May 2022

Coal, Land, And Ideology: Inventions Of Appalachia In The Mind Of The American Ruling Class, Zachary Harris

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Appalachia, itself a difficult to resolutely define region, has undergone the economic forces of colonialism and industrializing capitalism which allow for an excellent case study to apply Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. No American region’s national conception is likely to have been as varied and often misrepresented as that of Appalachia. From the Revolutionary American State’s invention of early white settlers as the virtuous yeoman of the Republic to the modern perception of Appalachia as backwards, conservative, and drug-addled, shifting national economic conditions resulted in a constant invention of Appalachia in congruence. Whenever the people residing in Appalachia, whether Black, …


The Vanishing Frontier: Economic And Social Change In Western North Carolina, 1945-1970, Elisabeth Avery Moore Jan 2022

The Vanishing Frontier: Economic And Social Change In Western North Carolina, 1945-1970, Elisabeth Avery Moore

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation works to integrate the growth of regional tourism into the existing historiography of economic development in Appalachia and the postwar American South. Regional leaders introduced an economic transition throughout western North Carolina that emphasized the growth of regional tourism. By centering this study on the growth of regional tourism, this research also analyzes regional boosters’ efforts to manufacture and commodify a racialized and classed folk culture within the region for tourist consumption. In the late nineteenth century, journalists and folklorists had emphasized the deviance of mountain life and simultaneously romanticized the area as a land of rugged, white …


A Forgotten Shade Of Blue: Support For The Union And The Constitutional Republic In Southeastern Kentucky During The Civil War Era., Howard Muncy May 2020

A Forgotten Shade Of Blue: Support For The Union And The Constitutional Republic In Southeastern Kentucky During The Civil War Era., Howard Muncy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Southeastern Kentucky’s political and military support for the Union during the Civil War era. In the decades prior to the 1860 election, Kentucky developed deep social and economic ties with all sections of the country. After the secession winter that followed Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election, the statewide population divided and pockets of significant Confederate sympathies emerged. Kentucky’s southeastern counties aligned with the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War because of a strong national identity and the absence of a large slave population. As the war unfolded, Southeastern Kentuckians played an important role in the disruption …


Forging A Bluegrass Commonwealth: The Kentucky Statehood Movement And The Politics Of The Trans-Appalachian West, 1783–1792, Christopher L. Leadingham Jan 2017

Forging A Bluegrass Commonwealth: The Kentucky Statehood Movement And The Politics Of The Trans-Appalachian West, 1783–1792, Christopher L. Leadingham

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner first presented his frontier thesis to a group of historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition, a fair honoring the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ expedition, in Chicago, Illinois. Since then, scholars have long debated the role that the frontier played in shaping the development of the United States. The Kentucky statehood movement emerged at a critical juncture in the early republic’s history, and, when viewed in a transatlantic context, becomes much more important to the development of the United States and larger Atlantic world than what has generally been recognized. Kentuckians found themselves at …


An Appeal For Racial Justice : The Civic Interest Progressives' Confrontation With Huntington, West Virginia And Marshall University, 1963-1965, Bruce A. Thompson Jan 1986

An Appeal For Racial Justice : The Civic Interest Progressives' Confrontation With Huntington, West Virginia And Marshall University, 1963-1965, Bruce A. Thompson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In 1963, the shock waves of the sit-in movement and the growing black unrest throughout the country reached Huntington. This growing discontent with the status quo of segregation and racial discrimination and the impulse from the sit-in movement for direct, non-violent protest combined to mobilize several students at Marshall University who formed the Civic Interest Progressives (CIP), a biracial civil rights group.