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"The enigmatic figure of John Jacob Niles, collector, songwriter, composer, and scholar, receives its due in this new biography from Pen (director, John Jacob Niles Ctr. for American Music, Univ. of Kentucky)." --Library Journal.
Weaving centers led the Appalachian Craft Revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. Soon after settlement workers came to the mountains to start schools, they expanded their focus by promoting weaving as a way for women to help their family's financial situation. Women wove thousands of guest towels, baby blankets, and place mats that found a ready market in the women's network of religious denominations, arts organizations, and civic clubs. In Weavers of the Southern Highlands, Philis Alvic details how the Fireside Industries of Berea College in Kentucky began with women weaving to supply their children's school expenses and later developed student labor programs, where hundreds of students covered their tuition by weaving. Arrowcraft, associated with Pi Beta Phi School at Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the Penland Weavers and Potters, begun at the Appalachian School at Penland, North Carolina, followed the Berea model. Women wove at home with patterns and materials supplied by the center, returning their finished products to the coordinating organization to be marketed. Dozens of similar weaving centers dotted mountain ridges.
No Small Lives: Handbook of North American Early Women Adult Educators, 1925-1950 contains the stories of 26 North American women who were active in the field of adult education sometime between the years of 1925 and 1950. Generally, women’s contributions have been omitted from the field’s histories. No Small Lives is designed to address this gap and restore women to their rightful place in the history of adult education in North America. The primary audience for this book is adult education professors and their graduate students. This book can be used in courses including history and sociology of adult education, the adult learner, courses specific to exploring women’s contributions and activities. The secondary audience is the broader fields of women’s studies, feminist history, sociology and psychology or those fields that include an examination of women in the early twentieth century. It could also be useful to those focusing on more specific topics such as gender and race studies, prejudice, marginalization, power, how women were sometimes portrayed as invisible or as central figures, and women in leadership and policy making.
Scotland and Southern Appalachia have always shared a strong connection. Many of the first people to permanently settle in the Appalachian mountains came from the Scottish highlands seeking religious and other freedoms. Many descendants of those first settlers from Scotland still make their homes in Southern Appalachia and attribute many aspects of their culture to their Scottish heritage. This book explores the parallels and connections between Scotland and Southern Appalachia, with special attention to the interplay between revivals of folk culture, native languages, and dialects in Scotland and Appalachia since the 1970s. It covers contemporary Scottish and Appalachian cultural movements, particularly the links between cultural revivals and identity politics, and contains substantial references that increase its value as an authoritative scholarly work on the convergence of the cultures.
Bestselling reflections on fifty years of interaction with the people, places, wildlife, and folkways of Alabama by an Alabama writers and scholar
Focusing on the cultural conflicts between social reformers and southern communities, William Link presents an important reinterpretation of the origins and impact of progressivism in the South. He shows that a fundamental clash of values divided reformers and rural southerners, ultimately blocking the reforms. His book, based on extensive archival research, adds a new dimension to the study of American reform movements. The new group of social reformers that emerged near the end of the nineteenth century believed that the South, an underdeveloped and politically fragile region, was in the midst of a social crisis. They recognized the environmental causes of social problems and pushed for in...
By the twentieth century, North Carolina’s progressive streak had strengthened, thanks in large part to a growing number of women who engaged in and influenced state and national policies and politics. These women included Gertrude Weil who fought tirelessly for the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to women, and founded the state chapter of the League of Women Voters once the amendment was ratified in 1920. Gladys Avery Tillett, an ardent Democrat and supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal, became a major presence in her party at both the state and national levels. Guion Griffis Johnson turned to volunteer work in the postwar years, becoming one of the state's most prominent female...
In the American imagination, "Appalachia" designates more than a geographical region. It evokes fiddle tunes, patchwork quilts, split-rail fences, and all the other artifacts that decorate a cherished romantic region in the American mind. In this classic work, David Whisnant challenges this view of Appalachia (and consequently a broader imaginative tendency) by exploring connections between the comforting simplicity of cultural myth and the troublesome complexities of cultural history. Looking at the work of ballad hunters and collectors, folk and settlement school founders, folk festival promoters, and other culture workers, Whisnant examines a process of intentional and systematic cultural intervention that had--and still has--far-reaching consequences. He opens the way into a more sophisticated understanding of the politics of culture in Appalachia and other regions. In a new foreword for this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Whisnant reflects on how he came to write this book, how readers responded to it, and how some of its central concerns have animated his later work.
In 1908 and 1909, noted social reformer and "songcatcher" Olive Dame Campbell traveled with her husband, John C. Campbell, through the Southern Highlands region of Appalachia to survey the social and economic conditions in mountain communities. Throughout the journey, Olive kept a detailed diary offering a vivid, entertaining, and personal account of the places the couple visited, the people they met, and the mountain cultures they encountered. Although John C. Campbell's book, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, is cited by nearly every scholar writing about the region, little has been published about the Campbells themselves and their role in the sociological, educational, and cultural history of Appalachia. In this critical edition, Elizabeth McCutchen Williams makes Olive's diary widely accessible to scholars and students for the first time. Appalachian Travels only offers an invaluable account of mountain society at the turn of the twentieth century.
Meandering plots, dead ends, and repetition, diaries do not conform to literary expectations, yet they still manage to engage the reader, arouse empathy and elicit emotional responses that many may be more inclined to associate with works of fiction. Blurring the lines between literary genres, diary writing can be considered a quasi-literary genre that offers a unique insight into the lives of those we may have otherwise never discovered. This edited volume examines how diarists, poets, writers, musicians, and celebrities use their diary to reflect on multiculturalism and intercultural relations. Within this book, multiculturalism is defined as the sociocultural experiences of underrepresent...