Bitterness and Pride

On the wall of my office at the little mountain college where I teach is a faded quotation — "This Land Is Home to Me" — from the early '80s from the Catholic Bishop's statement on Appalachia. Like the other memorabilia in the room — pictures of my sons, a mountain quilt, the bust of an old miner carved from a chunk of eastern Kentucky coal — that quotation reflects a great deal of my personal and professional life. It speaks to commitments which bridge my private and public worlds and symbolizes the ties that bind many other Southerners to a place and a people. I find it almost impossible to separate my roots from my involvement in regional history and my professional life from my commitment to peace and justice in the mountains and elsewhere. I am a Southerner because of heritage; I am a historian because of my concern for the present and the future. 

I became curious about my "ethnic" heritage as an undergraduate in a small Northern college. Being the first of my family ever to attend college, I was disheartened to learn that a tuition increase would far exceed my scholarship assistance and that I could not remain in school past my sophomore year. When I told the dean of my decision to go home to West Virginia, he assured me that additional assistance would be forthcoming because the institution liked to retain people like me "to provide balance to the student body." Since the college was already an elite academic institution, I quickly realized that it was cultural rather than intellectual balance that my scholarship was to provide. Along with a handful of black and international students, I was part of a cultural and economic minority being integrated into the American mainstream. The dean's words came as a shock to a white Protestant male who had spent much of the preceding few years trying to ignore and disguise his hillbilly heritage. His words sparked bitterness, pride, and curiosity, and it was then that my real education began. 

Earlier that semester, I had enrolled in a course in Southern history taught by Jim Hodges, a young Alabaman who had recently joined the college faculty. I knew that my ancestors were Southerners. They had settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina in the 1790s before migrating to the coal fields of southern West Virginia after the turn of the twentieth century. But little in the books I read spoke to their history. They had not owned slaves and had fought for the Union in the Civil War. They seldom appeared in Southern history texts except as savages, ignorant poor whites or quaint romantic anachronisms in a New South. Jim Hodges had already demonstrated more sensitivity to history of the poor and disinherited than I had encountered in any other course, and after my conversation with the dean I asked Jim about the history of my people. He admitted that he knew little about the Southern mountains and like a good teacher challenged me to find out for myself. 

I found that little had been written about the history of the mountains and almost nothing by historians. A plethora of books and articles by local color writers, journalists, and social scientists described Appalachia as a region beset by social and cultural pathologies, but most accounts described the mountains as a static land where years of isolation had generated poverty, and poverty had generated a strange and peculiar culture. Nothing I read spoke to the reality I knew, and such accounts stirred more anger and frustration. Then I discovered a new book by a young lawyer from eastern Kentucky who for the first time placed the region's poverty in perspective and provided the first historical explanation for the region's problems. For the next two years, I read and re-read Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands and carried a copy into remote coves and hollows as I worked as a case worker in child welfare at home during the summers. 

As graduation neared, my friend and mentor Jim Hodges encouraged me to pursue my studies in graduate school and to test Caudill's analysis by providing documentation for the rest of the Appalachian South. After teaching high school history for three years, I entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study Southern history and to write the history of the mountain South. Despite the skepticism of a few professors (after all, as one senior professor lamented, he had seen a copy of the Foxfire Books), I was able to demonstrate that Appalachia too had a history of struggle and change — one that was deeply integrated into the history of the South and indeed the nation. During those years of graduate study, George Tindall, my mentor at Chapel Hill, taught me how to write, and Larry Goodwyn, a friend at Duke, taught me how to write with passion. Peter Wood, first with the Rockefeller Foundation and later at Duke, taught me how to know what to write about. These fellow historians helped a fellow Southerner understand and interpret his part of the South. 

Since 1970 the historiography of Appalachia has undergone dramatic revision which has not only opened a door previously closed to historians but has also almost completely redrawn much of the popular image of the region. This new history is partly the result of new methodologies, especially oral history techniques which have allowed mountain people a voice in portraying their own past. But it is also the result of a new generation of scholars, many of them native to the region, who have applied their skills to interpreting the social and economic experience of the mountains. A selective bibliography on Appalachia since the Civil War follows; I would particularly recommend John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness, David Corbin's Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields, David Whisnant's All That Is Native and Fine, Harry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind, and my own Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers. Older books that have stood the test of time include John Stephenson's Shiloh, John C. Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, and of course the book that affected me so deeply, Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands.