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"Biggers has fashioned a masterpiece of popular history....Revelations abound." Citizen-Times, North Carolina
"If your vision of Appalachia is that of a backward,inbred region of the country, then you need to read Jeff Biggers's new book."
Rebecca Bain, Nashville Public Radio, Fine Print
"Rich narrative......a respectful ode."
Mary Leonard, St.Louis Post-Dispatch
"Jeff Biggers has written a book that makes me proud of my East Tennessee roots and helps me understand why my well-educated and world-traveled family never left......"
Phaedra Hise, Richmond Times-Dispatch
APPALACHIA NEEDS NO DEFENSE.
IT NEEDS MORE DEFENDERS.
Beyond its mythology in the American imagination, Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-—a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence, and a hot bed for literature and music. Some of the most quintessential and daring American innovations, rebellions, and social movements have emerged from an area often stereotyped as a quaint backwater. In the process, immigrants from the Appalachian diaspora have become some of our nation's most famous leaders.
∑ Appalachians formed the first District of Washington as a defiant outpost outside of British control
∑ Southern mountain insurgents orchestrated their own attacks on British-led troops, turning the tide of the American Revolution in the South
∑ From an Appalachian hamlet in North Carolina came Nina Simone, who went on to become an international diva with her blend of folk, jazz, and Bach-motif riffs
∑ Adolph Ochs, a young publisher from Chattanooga, took over the New York Times and set its course for world acclaim
∑ Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, one of the 20th century's most important labor leaders, drew from a long-time activist family in West Virginia
∑The first antislavery newspaper in America was founded in Tennessee, and Appalachians trained New England's legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
∑ Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was recognized for her memoirs of West Virginia as much as for her literary contributions to the Far East
∑ Appalachia produced America's first woman muckraker Anne Royall, pioneering social realism author Rebecca Harding Davis, and literary innovators Martin Delany, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, James Still, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, among many others
∑ Sequoyah, a Cherokee mountaineer, invented the first syllabary in modern times
∑ Blues icons, Bessie Smith and WC Handy, emerged from Appalachia's rich African American musical traditions
∑ Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee galvanized the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement
Few regions in the United States confound and fascinate Americans like Appalachia, and yet no other region has been so misrepresented by the mass media. With humor, intelligence, and clarity, Jeff Biggers's groundbreaking work shows how a remarkable procession of innovators from the hills of Appalachia have defined and shaped America
Interview and Excerpt on National Public Radio's
All Things Considered
Read an excerpt in The Atlantic
Appalachian Hardship: Life in the Iron Mills
Interviews with Jeff Biggers
From These Mountains/ Mountain Xpress
Our American Mountains/ Tucson Weekly
Fine Print/ Nashville Public Radio
CSPAN Book TV - Virginia Book Festival
Studio 848 Chicago Public Radio
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Shoemaker and Hoard
ISBN:1593760310
Buy at:
Book Sense
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
“The shameless caricatures—‘hillbilly’ and ‘redneck’—have in popular thought defined the people of Appalachia, in the mountains of the Cumberlands. If ever there were a folk most enlightened in the world of haves and have-nots, exercising their first amendment rights with more guts than our ‘respectable media,’ it is the heroic survivors in the hills and hollows.
Among those that have long gone were Joe and Gaynell Begley, who ran a general store in a Kentucky ghost town made so by strip miners and corporate lawyers, and Myles Horton, one of our great educators, whose Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee taught students, black and white, among whom were Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They learned at Highlander where the body was buried and who was doing what to whom.
There have been so many others, including Nina Simone, the black singer, and Florence Reece, a miner’s daughter who wrote, ‘Which Side Are You On?’ Jeff Biggers’s inspiring book should be a best seller immediately. It is a ‘how-to’ book—how to assert your fundamental rights and how to speak out in the manner of t he American Revolution footsloggers, whose descendants they are. Read it and your faltering hopes will rise.”
--Studs Terkel
“Jeff Biggers opens a new window on the complex history of the region called Appalachia. He takes a hard but affectionate look at both the myths and the facts, and what he finds is by turns sobering and thrilling. Drawing on the contradictions, layers, and range of what is known as mountain culture, he shows that nothing is quite what it seems, and that to understand American history it is essential to know Appalachian history. Biggers tells his story with verve and vivid detail, a story that will at once provoke and inspire.”
-- Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies
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Jeff Biggers • United States of Appalachia