"This organized narrative, based on the Fee and Berea manuscripts, constitutes a remarkably clear insight into on of Kentucky's most troubling and dramatic moments. The documentary materials reveal a new dimension to the complex matter of emancipation of slavery in the South and to the absorption of freedmen into a regional economy and society. This material will stimulate a re-examination and rewriting of a vital chapter in Kentucky Civil War and Reconstruction history. Implications of this well-chosen and -edited text extend beyond the chronological moment of the narrative"--Back cover
Appalachia first entered the American consciousness as a distinct region in the decades following the Civil War. The place and its people have long been seen as backwards and 'other' because of their perceived geographical, social, and economic isolation. These essays, by fourteen eminent historians and social scientists, illuminate important dimensions of early social life in diverse sections of the Appalachian mountains. The contributors seek to place the study of Appalachia within the context of comparative regional studies of the United States, maintaining that processes and patterns thought to make the region exceptional were not necessarily unique to the mountain South. The contributors are Mary K. Anglin, Alan Banks, Dwight B. Billings, Kathleen M. Blee, Wilma A. Dunaway, John R. Finger, John C. Inscoe, Ronald L. Lewis, Ralph Mann, Gordon B. McKinney, Mary Beth Pudup, Paul Salstrom, Altina L. Waller, and John Alexander Williams
The motto of Berea College is "God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth," a phrase underlying Berea's 150-year commitment to egalitarian education. The first interracial and coeducational undergraduate institution in the South, Berea College is well known for its mission to provide students the opportunity to work in exchange for a tuition-free quality education. The founders believed that participation in manual labor blurred distinctions of class; combined with study and leisure, it helped develop independent, industrious, and innovative graduates committed to serving their communities. These values still hold today as Berea continues its legendary commitment to equality, diversity, and cultural preservation and, at the same time, expands its mission to include twenty-first-century concerns, such as ecological sustainability. In Berea College: An Illustrated History, Shannon H. Wilson unfolds the saga of one of Kentucky's most distinguished institutions of higher education, centering his narrative on the eight presidents who have served Berea. The college's founder, John G. Fee, was a staunch abolitionist and believer in Christian egalitarianism who sought to build a college that "would be to Kentucky what Oberlin was to Ohio, antislavery, anti-caste, anti-rum, anti-sin." Indeed, the connection to Oberlin is evident in the college's abolitionist roots and commitment to training African American teachers, preachers, and industrial leaders. Black and white students lived, worked, and studied together in interracial dorms and classrooms; the extent of Berea's reformist commitment is most evident in an 1872 policy allowing interracial dating and intermarriage among its student body. Although the ratio of black to white students was nearly equal in the college's first twenty years, this early commitment to the education of African Americans was shattered in 1904, when the Day Law prohibited the races from attending school together. Berea fought the law until it lost in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908 but later returned to its commitment to interracial education in 1950, when it became the first undergraduate college in Kentucky to admit African Americans. Berea's third president, William Goodell Frost, shifted attention toward "Appalachian America" during the interim, and this mission to reach out to Appalachians continues today. Wilson also chronicles the creation of Berea's many unique programs designed to serve men and women in Kentucky and beyond. A university extension program carried Berea's educational opportunities into mountain communities. Later, the New Opportunity School for Women was set up to help adult women return to the job market by offering them career workshops, job experience on campus, and educational and cultural enrichment opportunities. More recently, the college developed the Black Mountain Youth Leadership Program, designed to reduce the isolation of African Americans in Appalachia and encourage cultural literacy, academic achievement, and community service. Berea College explores the culture and history of one of America's most unique institutions of higher learning. Complemented by more than 180 historic photographs, Wilson's narrative documents Berea's majestic and inspiring story.
Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties, and the brutal guerrilla warfare and home front traumas that stemmed from those divisions. The essays here embrace both facts and fictions related to those issues, often conveyed through intimate vignettes that focus on individuals, families, and communities, keeping the human dimension at the forefront of his insights and analysis. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe considers this multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. He devotes attention to how the truths derived from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations of novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians with differing agendas over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His cast of characters includes John Henry, Frederick Law Olmsted and John Brown, Andrew Johnson and Zebulon Vance, and those who later interpreted their stories—John Fox and John Ehle, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier, Emma Bell Miles and Harry Caudill, Carter Woodson and W. J. Cash, Horace Kephart and John C. Campbell, even William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Their work and that of many others have contributed much to either our understanding—or misunderstanding—of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination.
Arranged alphabetically from "Alice of Dunk's Ferry" to "Jean Childs Young," this volume profiles 312 Black American women who have achieved national or international prominence.
