Joe Clark's photographs are going into a bigger album, for many people to see and to discover in his book, Tennessee Hill Folk, a book I predict will be around for a long time to come. His book is one for libraries, schools, and people of all ages--not merely in Appalachia and Tennessee, but all over the United States.

In the first comprehensive social history of the Arkansas Ozarks from the early 19th century through the end of the 20th century, Blevins examines settlement patterns, farming, economics, class, and tourism. He also explores the development of conflicting images of the Ozarks as a timeless arcadia peopled by quaint, homespun characters or a backward region filled with hillbillies.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in America's folk heritage, as Americans began to enthusiastically collect, present, market, and consume the nation's folk traditions. Examining one of this century's most prominent "folk revivals--the reemergence of Southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 1930s--Jane Becker unravels the cultural politics that bound together a complex network of producers, reformers, government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers, all of whom helped to redefine Appalachian craft production in the context of a national cultural identity. Becker uses this craft revival as a way of exploring the construction of the cultural categories "folk" and "tradition." She also addresses the consequences such labels have had on the people to whom they have been assigned. Though the revival of domestic arts in the Southern Appalachians reflected an attempt to aid the people of an impoverished region, she says, as well as a desire to recapture an important part of the nation's folk heritage, in reality the new craft production owed less to tradition than to middle-class tastes and consumer culture--forces that obscured the techniques used by mountain laborers and the conditions in which they worked.

A greedy emperor demands an impossible task from Lao Lao, a peasant woman who makes beautiful shapes from paper. Includes instructions for making traditional Chinese paper-cuts.

Selkies, fairies, gnomes, hill folk, river sprites--do you believe in them? Perhaps among the flowers, beside a mountain, or near deep waters you’ve caught a glimpse, once or twice, of what you thought might be the silvery shadow of a dwarf, or a hint of a fairy’s wing, or the tail of the water horse. Or was it just the odd light of dusk or dawn playing tricks? As Lise Lunge-Larsen’s magical, timeless stories reveal and Beth Krommes’s enchanting scratchboard illustrations capture, the hidden folk are there, all right: you just have to know where--and how--to look.