Change in Rural Appalachia
Change in Rural Appalachia

Author: John D. Photiadis

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1512805866

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Appalachia is a region in trouble. Even in the more remote coves and hollows, major social and economic changes are disturbing the traditional ways of life. The conditions which have made it a pocket of poverty cannot be easily eradicated; and the rapid changes of recent years have added further severe problems of adjustment which deeply affect the family, church life, education, the folk sub­culture, and, above all, the individual. Out­migration, psychological dislocation, and cultural alienation are the result. The nine contributing scholars have lived and worked in Appalachia; they know the people and their customs, their problems and their needs. They are thoroughly familiar with the programs now in operation, and are well qualified to evaluate their success or failure in terms of those needs. Furthermore, their findings can be applied to other regions and nations, wherever an isolated group has been abruptly incorporated into the mainstream of society while many of its peculiar problems remain unsolved. Rural Appalachia may in fact be considered a microcosm of the underdeveloped nations of the world; the issues raised here far transcend the importance of a regional study. The essays are grouped according to four general areas of research. The first part deals with the individual in his society; the second with six social institutions—economy, government, family, religion, education, and power structure; the third with methods and objectives of change; and the fourth with the aims of change agencies, particularly the Extension Service of the future. As the tangle of problems, strains, and tensions is explored, the focus remains steadily upon immediate and long­term effects on the individual. The book is dedicated to "the professional field workers in programs of directed change . . . struggling on the one hand with ideas, theories, and conceptual innovations, and on the other hand with the immediate realities of the local situations."

Hill Women
Hill Women

Author: Cassie Chambers

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1984818937

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After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.

Mountain Families in Transition
Mountain Families in Transition

Author: Harry K. Schwarzweller

Publisher: University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13:

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A result of almost three decades of research, this is a highly readable account of the people and families of an isolated mountain locality in eastern Kentucky as they struggled to adapt to the increasingly dismal economic and social conditions of Appalachia. Focusing with rare insight and compassion upon the families which finally moved from their subsistence-farming localities, this study details how they made the move and how they fared in the large industrial centers to the north. Mountain Families in Transition is a model study of the many ramifications, the intricacies, and the problems involved in the urban relocation of a mountain people long isolated from the mainstream of American society. In many ways this classic in the literature of sociology parallels accounts of the immigrant groups in America at the turn of the century.

Appalachia and America
Appalachia and America

Author: Allen Batteau

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0813194369

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In this collection of fourteen essays, scholars of Appalachian culture and society examine how the people contend with and adapt to the pressures of change thrust upon them. Appalachia and America will appeal to a broad range of people interested in the southern mountains or in the policy issues of social welfare. It deals cogently with the newest form of conflict affecting not only communities in Appalachia, but urban and rural communities in America at large—the struggle for local values and ways of life in the face of distant and powerful bureaucracies.

Hillbilly Elegy
Hillbilly Elegy

Author: J. D. Vance

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 0062300563

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.