After Samuel Roberts' ill-fated attempt at forming a Welsh colony in Tennessee, others from Wales would help develop the state's fledgling iron and coal industry. This book tells how they became Knoxville's largest employer, started the Dixie Eisteddfod, and got involved in an armed insurrection over the use of convicts in the mines.

17th-19th c. memoirs cite meetings with "White" Indians, and linguistic, archeological, and anthropological evidence from Alabama to Kentucky suggest that Welshmen were among the first discoverers and settlers of America.

Young Gwen Thomas has her heart set on learning to play her grandfather's big harp in her living room. When she and her family leave the Rhondda Valley in Wales and sail for America in 1903, she convinces her mother to bring the harp along, but when they arrive in the coal mining area of Eastern Kentucky, she must learn many other things first—like how to deal with a hostile school environment, how to help her mother birth a baby, and how to survive a flood. Can she keep her dream of being a harpist alive? Or should she set more practical goals?

In 1971, Californian congressman Thomas M. Rees told the US House of Representatives that ‘very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life in the shaping of American history’. This book is the first systematic attempt to both recount and evaluate the considerable yet undervalued contribution made by Welsh immigrants and their immediate descendants to the development of the United States. Their lives and achievements are set within a narrative outline of American history that emphasises the Welsh influence upon the colonists’ rejection of British rule, and upon the establishment, expansion and industrialisation of the new American nation. This book covers both the famous and the unsung who worked and fought to acquire greater prosperity and freedom for themselves and for their nation.

First Families of Tennessee is a tribute to these men and women who established the state.

A lone man wanders from swamp to swamp searching for himself, a wolf-girl visits Wales and eats the sheep, a Welsh criminal marries an 'Indian Princess', Lakota men re-enact the Wounded Knee Massacre in Cardiff and, all the while, mountain women practise Appalachian hoodoo, native healing and Welsh witchcraft. These stories are a mixture of true tales, tall tales and folk tales, that tell of the lives of migrants who left Wales and settled in America, of the native and enslaved people who had long been living there, and those curious travellers who returned to find their roots in the old country. They were explorers, miners, dreamers, hobos, tourists, farmers, radicals, showmen, sailors, soldiers, witches, warriors, poets, preachers, prospectors, political dissidents, social reformers, and wayfaring strangers. The Cherokee called them: ' the Moon-Eyed People'.

The Welsh in America was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The Welsh formed a small but significant part of the great migration from Europe to the United States during the nineteenth century. In this volume they tell their own story in letters they wrote from America to their families and friends back home. The letters are highly readable, written, for the most part, in vivid and entertaining style which reveals the Welsh as an unusually literate people. The 197 letters are arranged chronologically and geographically, starting with letters that tell of the voyage across the Atlantic. Once in America, the immigrants described their experiences in the farming country of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and some of the other midwestern states. Later, as the frontier moved west, they wrote of their efforts to establish exclusive Welsh settlements on the Great Plains. From the industrial centers there are letters from coal miners and iron and steel workers. The fortune seekers who went to California in the gold rush or to the mines in Colorado are also represented. Still others tell of their search for salvation in the Mormon Zion of Utah. For each chapter or group of letters Mr. Conway has written an introduction giving the general background of the region or period and relating it to the Welsh settlers. Thus the events chronicled and the views expressed in the letters become significant in the history of the times. The majority of the letters were written in Welsh and they appear here in translation. Some were obtained from the files of old newspapers or denominational magazines; others came from the collections of the National Library of Wales or from individuals.