Photographs taken 1973-1997 in Perry, Letcher, Knott, Leslie, Floyd, and Breathitt Counties, Kentucky.

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Kentucky's Martin County to declare war on poverty. The following year he signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act,creating a state-federal partnership to improve the region's economic prospects through better job opportunities, improved human capital, and enhanced transportation. As the focal point of domestic antipoverty efforts, Appalachia took on special symbolic as well as economic importance. Nearly half a century later, what are the results? Appalachian Legacy provides the answers. Led by James P. Ziliak, prominent economists and demographers map out the region's current status. They explore important questions, including how has Appalachia fared since the signing of ARDA in 1965? How does it now compare to the nation as a whole in key categories such as education, employment, and health? Was ARDA an effective place-based policy for ameliorating hardship in a troubled region, or is Appalachia stillmired in a poverty trap? And what lessons can we draw from the Appalachian experience? In addition to providing the reports of important research to help analysts, policymakers, scholars, and regional experts discern what works in fighting poverty, Appalachian Legacy is an important contribution to the economic history of the eastern United States.

Appalachia's distinctive brand of Christianity has always been something of a puzzle to mainline American congregations. Often treated as pagan and unchurched, native Appalachian sects are labeled as ultraconservative, primitive, and fatalistic, and the actions of minority sub-groups such as "snake handlers" are associated with all worshippers in the region. Yet these churches that many regard as being outside the mainstream are living examples of America's own religious heritage. The emotional and experience-based religion that still thrives in Appalachia is very much at the heart of American worship. The lack of a recognizable "father figure" like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox compounds the mystery of Appalachia's religious origins. Ordained minister John Sparks determined that such a person must have existed, and his search turned up a man less literate, urbane, and well-known than Luther, Calvin, and Knox—but no less charismatic and influential. Shubal Stearns, a New England Baptist minister, led a group of sixteen Baptists—now dubbed "The Old Brethren" by Old School Baptists churches in Appalachia—from New England to North Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century. His musical "barking" preaching is still popular, and the association of churches that he established gave birth to many of the disparate denominations prospering in the region today. A man lacking in the scholarship of his peers but endowed with the eccentricities that would make their mark on Appalachian faith, Stearns has long been an object of shame among most Baptist historians. In The Roots of Appalachian Christianity, Sparks depicts an important religious figure in a new light. Poring over pages of out-of-print and little-used histories, Sparks discovered the complexity of Stearns's character and his impact on Appalachian Christianity. The result is a history not just of this leader but of the roots of a religious movement.

A collection of eighty photographs highlights the real Appalachia, distinguishing it from the popular mythology surrounding this impoverished region. By the author of Appalachian Portraits and Appalachian Legacy. (Social Science)

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.

This book collects and summarizes current scientific knowledge concerning coal-mined landscapes of the Appalachian region in eastern United States. Containing contributions from authors across disciplines, the book addresses topics relevant to the region’s coal-mining history and its future; its human communities; and the soils, waters, plants, wildlife, and human-use potentials of Appalachia’s coal-mined landscapes. The book provides a comprehensive overview of coal mining’s legacy in Appalachia, USA. It book describes the resources of the Appalachian coalfield, its lands and waters, and its human communities – as they have been left in the aftermath of intensive mining, drawing upon peer-reviewed science and other regional data to provide clear and objective descriptions. By understanding the Appalachian experience, officials and planners in other resource extraction- affected world regions can gain knowledge and perspectives that will aid their own efforts to plan and manage for environmental quality and for human welfare. Appalachia's Coal-Mined Landscapes: Resources and Communities in a New Energy Era will be of use to natural resource managers and scientists within Appalachia and in other world regions experiencing widespread mining, researchers with interest in the region’s disturbance legacy, and economic and community planners concerned with Appalachia’s future.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, a steady stream of Scots migrated to Ulster and eventually onward across the Atlantic to resettle in the United States. Many of these Scots-Irish immigrants made their way into the mountains of the southern Appalachian region. They brought with them a wealth of traditional ballads and tunes from the British Isles and Ireland, a carrying stream that merged with sounds and songs of English, German, Welsh, African American, French, and Cherokee origin. Their enduring legacy of music flows today from Appalachia back to Ireland and Scotland and around the globe. Ritchie and Orr guide readers on a musical voyage across oceans, linking people and songs through centuries of adaptation and change.