Appalachia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Appalachia ( or ) is a cultural region in the Eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York to northern Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. As of the 2. 01. 0 census, the region was home to approximately 2.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charleston, West Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; Huntsville, Alabama, and Asheville, North Carolina. Early 2. 0th century writers often engaged in yellow journalism focused on sensationalistic aspects of the region's culture, such as moonshining and clan feuding, and often portrayed the region's inhabitants as uneducated and prone to impulsive acts of violence. Sociological studies in the 1.
In the early 2. 0th century, large- scale logging and coal mining firms brought wage- paying jobs and modern amenities to Appalachia, but by the 1. Beginning in the 1. Appalachian region with a series of New Deal initiatives, such as the construction of dams to provide cheap electricity and the implementation of better farming practices. On March 9, 1. 96. Appalachian Regional Commission.
By 1. 99. 0, Appalachia had largely joined the economic mainstream, but still lagged behind the rest of the nation in most economic indicators. The most commonly used modern definition of Appalachia is the one initially defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1. Campbell published The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in which he modified Frost's map to include 2. A landmark survey of the region in the following decade by the United States Department of Agriculture defined the region as consisting of 2. In 1. 98. 4, Karl Raitz and Richard Ulack expanded the ARC's definition to include 4. Mississippi and added two in New Jersey.
Historian John Alexander Williams, in his 2. Appalachia: A History, distinguished between a . The name was soon altered by the Spanish to Apalachee and used as a name for the tribe and region spreading well inland to the north.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: And I'm Steve Inskeep with the view from Appalachia, exploring how national issues look from a local level. We're in Knoxville, Tenn.
The first cartographic appearance of Apalchen is on Diego Guti. A competing and often more popular name was the . The cultural region of Appalachia is pronounced /.
The occasional use of the . The earliest discovered site is the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County, Pennsylvania which some scientists claim is pre- Clovis culture. Several other Archaic period (8. Albans site in West Virginia and the Icehouse Bottom site in Tennessee. In the 1. 6th century, the de Soto and Juan Pardo expeditions explored the mountains of South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and encountered complex agrarian societies consisting of Muskogean- speaking inhabitants. De Soto indicated that much of the region west of the mountains was part of the domain of Coosa, a paramount chiefdom centered around a village complex in northern Georgia. The French based in modern- day Quebec also made inroads into the northern areas of the region in modern- day New York state and Pennsylvania.
Programs is committed to the well-being of children and youth here at home. We work to create environments where all children and youth are. In her critically-acclaimed book, Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, published in 1999, Cynthia M. Duncan explored why some families stay mired in. FAMOUS PEOPLE FROM CENTRAL APPALACHIA. Many famous scientists, authors, poets, musicians, actors and actresses, inventors, entrepreneurs, athletes, scholars, justice. Robert Greenstein, “Commentary: Ryan
Since Appalachia lacks definite physiographical or topographical boundaries, there has been some disagreement over what exactly the region encompasses. RELATED LINKS; Map Showing Floyd County and the Appalachian region of the U.S. Why Poverty Persists in Appalachia An interview with Cynthia M. Even a short glimpse at poverty in Ohio's Appalachia is enough to break hearts: Connie Schultz. Rural Poverty: 11 Myths and Realities. Zimmerman compiled eleven myths about poverty. I've compiled all eleven here from two separate articles.
By the mid 1. 8th century the French had outposts such as Fort Duquesne and Fort Le Boeuf controlling the access points of the Allegheny River valley and upper Ohio valley after exploration by Celeron de Bienville. European migration into Appalachia began in the 1. As lands in eastern Pennsylvania and the Tidewater region of Virginia and the Carolinas filled up, immigrants began pushing further and further westward into the Appalachian Mountains.
A relatively large proportion of the early backcountry immigrants were Ulster Scots. Between 1. 73. 0 and 1. Pennsylvania, Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia, and western Maryland. Thomas Walker's discovery of Cumberland Gap in 1. French and Indian War in 1.
NPR's Pam Fessler was told that Eastern Kentuckians would be reluctant to talk because they were tired of being depicted as the poster children of the War.
Tennessee, northwestern North Carolina, upstate South Carolina, and central Kentucky. Between 1. 79. 0 and 1. Cherokee and other Native American tribes opened up lands in north Georgia, north Alabama, the Tennessee Valley, the Cumberland Plateau regions, and the Great Smoky Mountains along what is now the Tennessee- North Carolina border.
A typical depiction of an Appalachian pioneer involves a hunter wearing a coonskin cap and buckskin clothing, and sporting a long rifle and shoulder- strapped powder horn. Perhaps no single figure symbolizes the Appalachian pioneer more than Daniel Boone (1. Like Boone, Appalachian pioneers moved into areas largely separated from . As many of these early settlers were living on Native American lands, attacks from Native American tribes were a continuous threat until the 1. Frontiersmen often bickered with lowland and tidewater . Two years later, a group of Appalachian frontiersmen known as the Overmountain Men routed British forces at the Battle of Kings Mountain after rejecting a call by the British to disarm.
People in Appalachia began to feel slighted over what they considered unfair taxation methods and lack of state funding for improvements (especially for roads). In the northern half of the region, the lowland . In 1. 83. 2, bickering between western Virginia and eastern Virginia over the state's constitution led to calls on both sides for the state's separation into two states.
The proposed state would have been known as . Sentiments in northern Appalachia had shifted to the pro- abolitionist. Republican Party. In southern Appalachia, abolitionists still constituted a radical minority, although several smaller opposition parties (most of which were both pro- Union and pro- slavery) were formed to oppose the planter- dominated Southern Democrats. As states in the southern United States moved toward secession, a majority of Southern Appalachians still supported the Union.
After Virginia voted to secede, several mountain counties in northwestern Virginia rejected the ordinance and with the help of the Union army established a separate state, admitted to the Union as West Virginia in 1. However, half the counties included in the new state, comprising two- thirds of its territory, were secessionist and pro- Confederate. Virginia and Tennessee show the public votes, while the other states show the vote by county delegates to the conventions. This caused great difficulty for the new Unionist state government in Wheeling, both during and after the war.
While there were two major theaters of operation in the region. The northernmost battles of the entire war were fought in Appalachia with the Battle of Buffington Island and the Battle of Salineville resulting from Morgan's Raid. Large numbers of livestock were killed (grazing was an important part of Appalachia's economy), and numerous farms were destroyed, pillaged, or neglected. By 1. 90. 0, the Chattanooga area and north Georgia and northern Alabama had experienced similar changes due to manufacturing booms in Atlanta and Birmingham at the edge of the Appalachian region. Railroad construction between the 1. Appalachia, making the economy in that part of the region practically synonymous with coal mining. As the nationwide demand for lumber skyrocketed, lumber firms turned to the virgin forests of southern Appalachia, using sawmill and logging railroad innovations to reach remote timber stands.
The Tri- Cities area of Tennessee and Virginia and the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia became major petrochemical production centers. Attempts by President Rutherford B.
Hayes to enforce the whiskey tax in the late 1. Appalachian . In an 1. The Atlantic, Berea College president William G. Frost attempted to redefine the inhabitants of Appalachia as .
Such discrimination has prompted some to seek redress under prevailing federal and state civil rights laws. They pitted the men in extended clans against each other for decades, often using assassination and arson as weapons, along with ambushes, gunfights, and pre- arranged shootouts. The infamous Hatfield- Mc. Coy Feud of the 1.
Some of the feuds were continuations of violent local Civil War episodes. In reality, the leading participants were typically well- to- do local elites with networks of clients who were fighting for local political power. In 1. 91. 1, Congress passed the Weeks Act, giving the federal government authority to create national forests and control timber harvesting. Regional writers and business interests led a movement to create national parks in the eastern United States similar to Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west, culminating in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee and the Blue Ridge Parkway (connecting the two) in the 1. The lack of jobs also led to widespread difficulties with outmigration.
Beginning in the 1. Tennessee Valley Authority began investing in the Appalachian region. The commission's efforts helped to stem the tide of outmigration and diversify the region's economies.
Most of these were from families who had been resettled in the Ulster Plantation in northern Ireland in the 1. While various 2. 0th century writers tried to associate Appalachia with Scottish highlanders, Highland Scots were a relatively insignificant percentage of the region's early European immigrants. Smaller numbers of Germans were also among the initial wave of migrants to the southern mountains.
African- Americans have been present in the region since the 1. ARC- designated region, mostly concentrated in urban areas and former mining and manufacturing towns. The Melungeons, a group of mixed African, European, and Native American ancestry, are scattered across northeastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia. Religion in Appalachia is characterized by a sense of independence and a distrust of religious hierarchies, both rooted in the evangelical tendencies of the region's pioneers, many of whom had been influenced by the . Many of the denominations brought from Europe underwent modifications or factioning during the Second Great Awakening (especially the holiness movement) in the early 1. A number of 1. 8th and 1.
Vast Stretches Of Impoverished Appalachia Look Like They Have Been Through A War. If you want to get an idea of where the rest of America is heading, just take a trip through the western half of West Virginia and the eastern half of Kentucky some time. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 3. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 5. Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “Oxy. Contin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1: 1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription- drug economy is about $1. Walmart prices. I would encourage everyone to read the rest of Williamson’s excellent article.
The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” — payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI — a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.“They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers Oxy.
Contin, fentanyl — 8. Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti- anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result. Of course this kind of thing is not just happening in the heart of Appalachia. While this is the worst start to a year in over 3.
Q3 2. 00. 8. Of course, the mainstream media will continue to ignore this dour index until it decides to rise once again, but for now, 9 days in a row of plunging prices is yet another canary in the global trade coalmine and suggests what inventory stacking that occurred in Q3/4 2. Soon economic conditions will get even worse for Appalachia and for the rest of the country.