The Ozark Mountains reach into Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, forming a region with great natural beauty and a distinctive cultural and historical landscape. This comprehensive volume, a fully updated edition of a beloved classic, reaches into history, anthropology, economics, and geography to explore the complex relationships between the Ozarks' people and land through times of profound change. Drawing on more than thirty years of research, field observations, and interviews, Rafferty examines this subject matter through a range of topics: the settlement patterns and material cultures of Native Americans, French, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the region; population growth; the guerrilla warfare and battles of the Civil War; the cultural transformations wrought by railroads, roads, mass media, and modern communication systems; the discovery, development, and decline of the great mining districts; the various forms of agriculture and the felling of the region's vast forests; and the built landscape, from log cabins to Victorian mansions to strip malls. This new edition also explores the new and potent forces which have reshaped the region over the last twenty years: tourism and the growing service industry, suburbanization, rapid population growth and retirement living, and agribusiness. Lavishly illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, maps, and charts.

"Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins is a collection of essays from Brooks Blevins that explore southern history and culture using [the] author's native Ozarks region as a focus. From migrant cotton pickers and fireworks peddlers to country store proprietors and shape-note gospel singers, Blevins leaves few stones unturned in his insightful journeys through a landscape 'wedged betwixt and between the South and the Midwest - and grasping for the West to boot"--

A groundswell has been steadily building in America among citizens who are fed up with seeing our country overrun by millions of illegal aliens foreign invaders who defy our laws, disrespect our culture, and refuse to learn our language. These citizens became activists when they saw that, if America is to survive as a nation and culture, her people will have to save her, because an out-of-touch Washington establishment has grown too corrupt to defend the land and Constitution that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to preserve. Fighting Immigration Anarchy focuses on the struggles of eight citizen activists to awaken their fellow Americans to the encroaching danger. Through the individual stories, readers learn about the recent history of illegal immigration in America the political victories and defeats as citizens awoke and fought back against the open-borders juggernaut. Like the patriots of the American Revolution, todays citizen activists refuse to cower before powerful foreign tyrants like those in Mexico City demanding America accept their surplus people. Modern patriots also confront domestic business interests grown addicted to exploitable foreigners now doing formerly American jobs at near-slave wages. This book is a warning for all Americans of the chaos spreading rapidly from the southwestern border zone to every corner of the nation. In its wake have come massive job displacement for American workers, increased crime, schools overwhelmed by non-English-speaking students, bankrupt hospitals, and other serious problems. And these newcomers have not come to join the American community through assimilation, as did legal immigrants in the past, demanding instead that we change our culture to fit them.

The story of Growing Up Hillbilly near Branson Missouri takes place less than ten miles from where the book, the Shepherd of The Hills was written and begins during the same year as it was published. This book will further enhance your knowledge about the people that chose to call these hills their home.

Brings together the childhood memories of a hundred men and women, young and old, who reflect on family life, interaction with the gentile world, and the meaning of peace

In Down on Mahans Creek, Benjamin Rader provides a fascinating look at a neighborhood in the Missouri Ozarks from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He explores the many ways in which Mahans Creek, though remote, was never completely isolated or self-sufficient. The residents were deeply affected by the Civil War, and the arrival of the railroad and the timber boom in the 1890s propelled the community into modern times, creating a more fast-paced and consumer-oriented way of life and a new moral sensibility. During the Great Depression the creek’s residents returned to some of the older values for survival. After World War II, modern technology changed their lives again, causing a movement away from the countryside and to the nearby small towns. Down on Mahans Creek tells the dynamic story of this distinctive neighborhood navigating the push and pull of the old and new ways of life.