FERRUM
COLLEGE
NEH INSTITUTE SCHOLARS
REGIONAL STUDIES FOR LIBERAL ARTS LEARNING:
AN APPALACHIAN EXEMPLAR
JUNE 3-28, 2002
PROJECT
SUMMARIES
ANN
ALEXANDER
My primary task during
the NEH Summer Institute at Ferrum College was to develop my online course in
the History of Appalachia, which I offer each year to adult students (mainly
women) who are returning to college. These
students come from all parts of Virginia, but most are from the western part of
the state. I usually have between
15 and 20 students in my class. The
software that I use is Blackboard.
While at Ferrum I made major improvements to the course, both in content and presentation. I expanded and improved the directions so that students new to online instruction will feel less intimidated. I added a unit on Appalachian music and included audio files for the first time. I developed a unit on Appalachia and the Civil War and tried a new technique for helping students read difficult scholarly articles: I inserted the article into the unit and then included—in another font—comments that I hope will make the argument easier to understand. Having learned from sad experience that simply “pasting” in lecture notes is seldom effective, I worked to make all the units more attractive and accessible, with better use of images and links. Because the field trips were such an important part of our experience at the Institute, I included a requirement that the students make an independent field trip and report on it to their fellow students. Finally, I worked on ways to connect web-based assignments to assessment and grades.
My
experiences at the Institute made it possible for me to make significant
improvements in the course, and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn more
about Appalachia and regionalism in such a collegial setting.
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LAURI
ANDERSON
I plan to offer a
literature class about the northern mining region of Michigan/Minnesota and use
both fiction and non-fiction texts. The
mining regions are iron in Marquette County, copper on the Keweenaw Peninsula,
and iron in the Iron Range of Minnesota. To
create a kind of cluster of my own, I hope to use a local labor historian (Larry
Lankton) who has written a history of the Copper Country and a local journalist
who has written a history of the Michigan logging industry (John Gagnon).
I plan to take the class to an exhibition mine and to a local graveyard
in Calumet where miners were dumped after they were killed in the mines. Some
friends who are folk musicians could come to class to sing mining songs, local
labor-dispute songs, some by Guthrie.
To
show a connection to a larger world and to show that the lives of northern
Midwest literary characters have universality, I’d like to use Giardina’s The
Unquiet Earth and to show the films of Luokinen and Sayles.
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BECKY
BAILEY
I have made great strides in designing a course in Appalachian history, with a
special focus on Appalachian Georgia, for my home university.
By using a Georgia-based approach my students and I will take a case
study approach to analyzing and assessing what has been an overarching theme of
Appalachian Studies—“Appalachian Exceptionalism.”
Strong possibilities for core organizational themes include: The Land,
Contact, Cherokee Dislocation, and White Settlement; Upcountry Georgia in the
Sectional Crisis, Civil War and Reconstruction; Industrialization, cash-crop
farming, missionaries and other reformers, and Urbanization; Post-War (WWII)
Crises and Challenges: second-wave industrial transformation, the War on Poverty
and grassroots reform; Contemporary Appalachia: Confronting stereotypes and
systemic problems, such as environment versus the economy.
Assignments will include: (1) Each
student will volunteer to conduct their own case study of one Appalachian
Georgia County; drawing upon county histories and contemporary newspaper and
other media sources, the student’s will contribute to the class discussion by
reporting on the impact/influence of the theme under discussion on their county.
(2)As a class we will look at a central “story” in each them period, for
example, the Murder of Mary Phagan, and assess it from a variety of
perspectives.
Challenges
to the completion of my project center around the dearth of secondary sources
which address the issue of “Appalachian” Georgia, which in and itself
provides inspiration for discussion. However,
in the year or so I have to develop this course, I would appreciate any input
from colleagues in the following areas: their opinion of the use of the John
Alexander Williams text, Appalachia as an undergraduate reading assignment,
Appalachian Georgia fiction, and Appalachian Georgia films (other than
Deliverance).
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HUGH
BARTLING
Proposal for a Minor in Regional Studies
The University of Central Florida has recently established the Metropolitan
Center for Regional Studies to help understand the challenges facing Central
Florida as the region experiences high rates of growth and uncertainty about the
capacity of our natural resources to accommodate the increase in population. In an effort to assist our students in responding to the
complex and dynamic relationships affecting the region, I am proposing the
establishment of a Minor in Regional Studies for UCF undergraduates.
Understanding
Central Florida as the site for the interplay of multiple forces comprising the
region’s history, ecology, community, politics and economy, the Minor in
Regional Studies will be an interdisciplinary endeavor drawing on the broad
talents of UCF’s faculty. The
Metropolitan Center for Regional Studies has also made service to the community
one of its major foci. Thus, the
minor will also contain an element of community based learning where students
partner with local community groups to define and execute a major research
project. A particular emphasis will be placed on Central Florida’s
connection to global processes of integration and migration, situating the
region within an international context.
Core Courses:
RST 3000 Introduction to Regional Studies (3 credit hours)
This course introduces students to the concept of regionalism by looking at
theories of regionalism, attempts to define regions, and the relationships
between regions, localities, and globalization.
RST 3001 Central Florida
Studies (3 credit hours
This course looks in-depth at Central Florida.
Interrelationships are explored between the ecology, history, and
contemporary development of Central Florida.
RST 4000 Capstone Course (3
credit hours)
This is course consists of an independent research project, executed under the
guidance of a faculty advisor, and developed by the student with a community
partner in Central Florida.
Electives:
PCB 4xxx Florida Natural History
PCB 3442 Florida Aquatic Ecology
Proposal for a Minor in
Regional Studies
History of Florida to 1845
AMH 3423 History of Florida 1845 to Present
AML 4265 Florida Writers
PUP 4xxx Urban Environmental Policy
POS 3122 State Government and Policy
POS 4142 Metropolitan Politics
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KEVIN COLE
For the most part, my project is complete.
I developed a one-semester special topics course devoted to a
multidisciplinary, regional study of the
Dakotas. Although the course will be listed as an upper-level English
course, I intend for it to be cross-listed as a history and sociology course.
I have tried to integrate the following modes and/or disciplines:
literature, memoir, history, sociology, autobiography, and ecology.
In light of Dan's presentations on religion in Appalachia, though, I
would like to integrate in some way a unit on religion in the Dakotas.
I have yet to acquire the resources that will allow me to do that.
These are the texts currently listed on my syllabus.
I expect to make at least two changes, however:
Erdrich, Love Medicine; Mary Crow Dog,
Lakota Woman; Frazier, On
the Rez; Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie; Norris, Dakota: A
Spiritual Geography; O'Brien, Equinox:
Life, Love, and Birds of Prey; and selected passages from the autobiography of
Oscar Micheaux Era Bell Thompson, two African Americans living and writing on
the Dakota frontier. The weaknesses of the syllabus are as follows.
First, I need to integrate a unit on the development of religion in the
region. Second, I need to integrate
more sources that will allow for a more thorough treatment of issues related to
American Indians, namely, the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota Sioux people.
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BILL
CONLOGUE
"Jane Brox's Five Thousand Days Like This One: Giving Voice to Lived
Experience"
In her memoir, Jane Brox imagines community as a fabric of people and place,
industry and agriculture, rural and urban. She brings this community to life by
joining in conversation belletristic writing, court testimony, government
documents, and workers' diaries and letters. For example, Brox weaves the making
of meaning among women in Massachusetts' nineteenth-century textile industry
with Henry David Thoreau's search for meaning in his journey on the Merrimack
River.
Brox's book is structured in three parts. In part one, she examines how her father's death leads her to a renewed sense of relationship to the family farm. Part two ties family and farm history to nearby Lawrence and its textile mills, and part three returns us to the present-day farm. The book concludes with Brox's commitment to carrying on an apple-growing tradition, despite knowing that she lives in the end time of her region's agriculture.
In
Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the
U.S. and Beyond (2001), Lawrence Buell offers a critical framework for
understanding the significance of Brox's poetic meditation on the Merrimack
River Valley. Buell juxtaposes depictions of
"'green' and 'brown' landscapes" to argue that environmental
writers and critics must attend to a single, complex environment that
interweaves the found and the human-made (7). Using his work as a guide, my
essay argues that Five Thousand Days Like This One is a model for exploring how
our relationships with the past, the natural world, and each other constitute an
unbroken tapestry.
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HUGO
FREUND
I
have been charged with the responsibility of integrating a second stage of
Appalachian materials into the new core curriculum of
Union College. My
participation in the NEH Summer Institute at Ferrum College has clarified a
number of key issues. They are
outlined as follows:
(1) To address the subject of Appalachia in the classroom, I am compiling a list of audiovisual materials. These include feature-length releases as well as documentaries. In this regard, I have developed a new teaching module and study guide for the film Songcatcher. A number of audiovisual materials are clearly best for the Appalachian culture course. These would include: (a) Mountain Man, (b) a videotape highlighting the research of Cratis Williams; and (c) a videotape of a joint lecture by Loyal Jones and John Sparks. These three works will provide the opportunity to explore the role of song collectors and those who wish to encourage traditions whether they are indigenous to an area; the role of Appalachian dialect in the formation of identity; and the performance of religious culture in contemporary Appalachia.
(2) In the introductory course, Appalachian explorations, I have now carefully reconsidered how I will introduce students to Appalachian as a physical region. Thanks to the Summer Institute, I now have additional tools for introducing the complexity of the physiographic regions that constitute Appalachia. This includes using such titles as Eliot Porter's Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains.
(3) In the 200-level course, Appalachian Culture, I will review and further discuss the physical character of Appalachia region. This will be the point where I will emphasize the difficulty of containing and framing "Appalachia." Is it a singular place? Is it an identity embraced by any or all? How do locals refer to themselves? What role does ethnography play in our understanding of current conditions in Appalachia for those who live there?
(4) I have identified key texts that will propel the Appalachian culture course. Firstly, students will read Lynwood Montell's The Saga of Coe Ridge to highlight the changing character of Appalachian communities. It will also enable me to discuss and use retrospective ethnography, oral histories and available historical documents to reconstruct the vitality of a long-disappeared community mostly populated by African Americans as well as those not welcomed in neighboring communities. A second book, Durwood Dunn's Cades Cove will provide the opportunity for discussions of how government policies can radically transform communities.
(5) In addition, the Appalachian culture course will highlight the migration of peoples to Appalachia. Are current peoples of Appalachia a minority group, an ethnic group, or a people rooted in a place? In this regard, the Oxford English Dictionary, The Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups and other references will support a discussion of these issues. Why for instance, would Appalachians be included in the The Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups? I will with care and reservations employ the useful insights of Rodger Cunningham's Apples on the Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience in order to explore the cultural legacy the Scotch-Irish contributed to the cultural geography of Appalachia.
(6) As part of the course outline for Appalachian culture, I have compiled a detailed Appalachian bibliography that will start students on their writing assignments. This bibliography will be supplemented by Becky Bailey's more complete bibliography that she is currently compiling.
(7) As part of the Appalachian culture course, students will visit the local historical museum. This visit will provide an opportunity to discuss the shape of Knox county culture. The museum tour will also introduce students to possible research topics for the course as well as the chance to complete service learning.
(8) Students will also be expected to review primary source documents and begin the long process of developing an index for the notes of a newspaper reporter who filed columns on the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky.
(9) Finally, I have decided that I am now ready to begin an ethnographic
study of an Appalachian community.
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American
Folklife Course
The course segment is for incorporation into a senior level American Folklore
course highlighting the regions of New England, Appalachia, the South, the
Midwest and the West. As an upper level survey, this course addresses central
issues concerning the interstices of traditional culture creation, use,
perception and presentation within both specific communities and the region.
Underlying the examination of these manifestations of cultural engagement are
central issues such as affects created through appropriation, and
re-appropriation of culture due to economic status, and ethnic or regional
affiliation.
Opening with a consideration of the terms region, sub-region, folk group, and locale, the course highlights several New England customs and transitions into a focus on the Appalachian area through a consideration of American balladry and scholarship. Subsequent, presentation of The Songcatcher and focused discussion highlight the possible role of scholarship cultural presentation and local community dynamics.
The
second week builds knowledge of the historic influences on the Appalachian
region through readings presenting the role of industrialization in dictating
the landscape of daily life. The
central theme of discussion is, how does a community propagate ownership of
place, expression and culture when the material landscape of town, and home, are
dictated by outsiders. Readings are:
Chapters 1, “Paupers,” and 2, “Balance and
Disturbance”.
Chapters 4, “Appalachia and the War on Poverty,” and 10,
Cultural Values and Regional Development,” from Whiznant’s Modernizing
the
Mountaineer.
Sherry Cable’s “From Fussin’ to Organizing,” and Mary Beth
Bingham’s “Stopping the Bulldozers.”
Discussion includes a lecture on material culture objects of the region and objects that reflect group experiences. Included here will be presentation of German tombstone art traditions and musical instruments created from recontextualized items such as cigar boxes.
Week three addresses and then further problematizes the theme of community expression through a consideration of “old timey” music. This perception of Appalachian folklore (folk music) is then broadened through presentation of more recently documented African American music traditions in the region, specifically fiddlers and banjo players, ultimately considering the role of syncretism in fostering distinctly American folk traditions such as bluegrass. A reflective paper is assigned at this point to consider the role of collectors (academic and amateur) in stereotype creation, institutionalization, or promotion at the level of region.
Regional
Studies paradigm
Over the last year, two plans have been submitted for consideration by the
Ozarks Studies Committee, one for a minor and one for a major in Ozarks studies.
This institute has offered several other possible approaches. Two will be added
to those currently under consideration at SMSU: the creation of a for-credit
cluster that will be documented on the transcript and the creation of an Ozarks
studies capstone course tied to a service learning component that focuses on
reflective, community based learning.
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BILL
HAGEN
"The Oklahoma Experience: Starting Over”
This is a provisional title and introduction for a “Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma” book discussion series, hopefully to be funded by the Oklahoma Humanities Council, whereupon it will join over 30 other series offered to public libraries statewide. My task is to select up to five titles from recently published fiction or memoirs that would appeal to nonacademic adult readers and reflect different periods of Oklahoma history. Then I must generate specific proposal/pamphlet language and possibly conduct an orientation workshop for librarians and discussion leaders (scholars). My tentative list includes the following:
Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears by Diane Glancy (Harvest Books, 1996), is organized by the states along the trail, all mapped, and told through the many voices of the Cherokee and the soldiers that accompanied them.
The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew (Penguin, 1997) follows a family from Kentucky to the Territory, where the members attempt to scratch out a living and maintain their humanity.
Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Verso, 1997) is one woman’s account of her poor white origins in Piedmont, Oklahoma, where she confronted both family dysfunction and social prejudice. If this title is unavailable, there is a narrower gauge memoir of a Depression year in a boy’s life in the Eastern hill country, From Hillback to Boggy (1991) by Bonnie Speer.
The last book(s) will come from the following list: Billie Letts, Where the Heart Is (1995); LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker (2001); A. B. Holllingsworth, Flatbellies (2001); Stanley W. Beesley, Sweetwater, Oklahoma (2000).Required
Texts: Community Writing: Researching Social Issues Through
Composition by Paul Collins (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ, 2001);
The New St. Martin’s Handbook; The Dallas Morning News (M-F); American
Short Story; Billie Letts, Where the Heart Is or LeAnne Howe, Shell
Shaker.
Course Structure: Community Writing
is a programmed rhetoric, which instructs each student to select his or her
community, defined broadly as “any group bound by a common interest or
condition.” I expect locality will be a unifying factor in most students’
communities. Through interviews, freewriting, journal reflections, analysis,
position papers and subsequent research, students build segments for two major
papers—one analyzing an issue important to the community and different stances
taken; the other focusing on a problem within or for the community and proposed
solutions. While CW contains
good examples for each of the assignments, I will use the Dallas newspaper—probably
the best in the South-Central region—to enlarge context or update some of the
issues or problems that emerge, to provide models of investigative journalism,
and to confront the students with the diversity of opinion possible on issues
and solutions. A part of the course
must include writing thesis essays on fiction: stories, such as
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “Soldier’s Home,” and “A&P,” as well
as a novel, can emphasize individuals negotiating choices in the face of
community expectations. Hopefully,
the fiction will reinforce the need to empathize as a way of understanding
oppositional points of view, so as to find common ground.
Special Challenges: 1) Getting students to see themselves in a defined community
that has issues worth talking about; their religious and social
discourses tend to be absolutist, foreclosing debate; 2) Getting students to the
point where they can use diverse kinds of materials—from interviews to
academic articles-- within a structure of analysis and argument; 3) Committing
to the structure of Community Writing, without limiting
discussion/writing options that will naturally emerge through use of a daily
newspaper; 4) Developing resource people within local area who would be willing
to come into class and/or talk to students; 5) Developing techniques and
resources (including available tape recorders) to enable students to carry out
interviews or oral history projects.
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BENNETT
M. JUDKINS
Building Community from Diversity: Lessons from Appalachia
I am currently involved in an analysis of how local communities address issues
of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity.
There are three threads to this research:
(1) projects initiated in the last decade in the U.S., often supported by
national organizations and foundations (I have several interviews and
substantial descriptive [and some analytical] information from NEH, The Study
Circles Project, One America, Teaching Tolerance, The American Association of
College and Universities, and others, (2) similar efforts in western Europe,
especially Great Britain (where I spent six months interviewing people
affiliated with the Commission on Racial Equality and local community relations
councils), and (3) intensive analysis of one project in the Catawba Valley
region of North Carolina, which I directed for several years.
Appalachia provides (perhaps) a fourth focus for this research in at least two respects. First, industrialization in the late 1800s, especially the coming of coal, brought tremendous racial and ethnic diversity to the region. Although two world wars and economic downturns frequently altered the population heterogeneity, Appalachia as a region provides an important historical and contemporary place to view the dynamics of racial, ethnic and cultural relations. Second, Appalachians themselves are a recognized ethnic group in America. The historic development of Appalachian stereotypes and their impact upon images of the region’s people – by economic developers, policy planers, and even the people themselves - are an important and continuing story. Both windows on the region provide important perspectives on the broader questions of diversity with which America, and the world, continues to struggle.
Building on the works of Ronald L. Lewis, William H. Turner and Edward Cabbell, John C. Inscoe, Crandall A. Shifflett, Ronald D. Eller, James T. Laing, Dwight Billings, Joe William Trotter, Robert M. Armstead, David Hsiung, and others, the picture that emerges of the early coal camps suggests a less positive image than one might expect, given the nature of work in which they engaged. More recent research reveals the institutionalization of patterns of racial and ethnic inequality. Although perhaps not unique to Appalachia, these patterns reveal important foundations for contemporary racism.
Building on additional work of the above mentioned authors, as well Henry Shapiro, David Whisnant, Stephen Fisher, Denise Giardina, Sally Maggard, Phil Obermiller, and several authors in Billings, Norman and Ledford’s Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region, I am looking at how the use of mythical mages of Appalachia to create and maintain economic institutions, policy organizations, as well as inequality in general provides a useful model for other regions of the country that struggle with similar problems in racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and sexual orientation.
I
have been able to complete about ten pages of a paper addressing these issues. However, much of this research will be used more anecdotally
to reinforce other findings in the broader work.
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This course will explore the concept of regionalism through a variety of sources dealing with Iowa and the upper Midwest. Our investigations will include material from the Luther College Collections.
Week
1: Introduction
- This session will provide a short introduction to Iowa with an emphasis
on the political and economic history of the state, along with a general
introduction to the Luther College Collections and their role in the course.
Week 2: Geology collection – (With emphasis on Iowa
geology.)
Week 3:
Natural history collection – (With emphasis on local ecology.)
Week 4:
Radio (Play segments from A Prairie Home Companion or Whad’Ya
Know in class.) – This session will explore the ways in which mass media
(radio) represents and influences perceptions of life in the upper Midwest and a
sense of place.
Week 5:
Art (Grant Wood and the Regionalists) – This session will look at the
role of regional art in the United States during the 1930s and ‘40s.
Week
6:
Fine arts collection – (With emphasis on Iowa artists.)
Week 7:
Literature (selections from Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint
Narratives) – This session will use contemporary Native-American
literature as a representation of the Iowa experience.
Week 8:
Ethnographic collection – (With emphasis on Native-American artifacts.)
Week 9:
Music (Beth Rotto or Bill Musser & Footnotes) – This session will
use local musicians to explore the musical heritage of the area with an emphasis
on Norwegian folk traditions.
Week 10: Archives
– (With emphasis on Linka Preus, Elizabeth Koren, Civil War Letters, and WWII
letters.)
Week 11: Oral histories (selected
essays from Robert Wolfe’s Heartland Portraits) – This session will
introduce the authentic voice of ordinary area residents to our discussions.
Week 12: Film (view Field of
Dreams before class) – This session will look at Iowa through the lens of
Hollywood.
Week 13: Presentation of
projects
Week 14: Presentation of
projects
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I
had two goals for this seminar, one each for my manifestations as teacher and
scholar. For my class next Spring
on Southern roots music, I have purchased ten recordings from the Blue Ridge
Institute and collected a number of articles and visual images that will
complement the instruction. Progress
toward my other goal is less concrete but no less meaningful.
My plans were (and remain) to expand a paper I gave last Fall into a
publishable article. The article
addresses my perspective on country music research, which relates to Appalachia
both as a real place and as a notion. I
have gathered many materials and insights that will enable this process, but I
have saved the actual rewriting for my return to Atlanta.
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This institute has been a great success for me. One of my goals was to become familiar with the literature and core issues associated with Appalachian studies, which will help me to place my study of the American chestnut trade within a larger context. The institute has been very helpful in this regard. I had two projects in mind and have made some progress in both.
First, I wanted to develop educational strategies and resources that will support interdisciplinary regional studies at Goddard College. The resources and pedagogical models provided as part of the institute have supported this goal. I am coordinating faculty efforts at the college to establish an environmental studies concentration within a new M. A. Institute for Transcdisciplinary Studies, which will begin its first semester this autumn. I've received general support for incorporating a regional studies component into the concentration. This will be done by requiring each student to do a field study that integrates ecological and cultural issues. In support of this, a 1-2 week workshop will be conducted each summer in a different region of the United States. Once this requirement is formally adopted, the first workshop will probably be conducted in southwestern Virginia. I've also made initial contacts that may lead to a second workshop focusing on issues impacting Native Americans in Kansas.
Second, I wanted to find models for ways to study natural resource commons that will help me in my study of the chestnut trade and the impacts of the blight upon the southern Appalachians. (In a natural resources commons, the community shared a resource and the cost of its overexploitation, but individuals benefit from its use. Chestnuts were a commons because, in general, people could collect them and their hogs could graze upon them with little regard for property lines.) I've not yet found models useful to my research. The published studies I've found focus on commons that were destroyed by overexploitation or privatization. The chestnut commons appears not to have been overexploited. There were beginning efforts to privatize them by grooming (and protecting) private natural stands of chestnut trees as "orchards," but this accounted for a very small percentage of available nuts.
This institute has made me aware of a new source of data supportive of my study of the chestnut trade--changing patters of land ownership and tenant farming. Since chestnuts were an important source of food, cash and trade for lower income mountain residents, one can expect the size of the trade to be correlated with levels of land ownership. A preliminary check of U. S. census data suggests that there was a substantial level of land tenancy in counties were their chestnut trade was greatest. However, I will need to use county records to distinguish between tenant farming on the Piedmont and in the mountains were chestnuts were found.
I
expect this project to lead to a published paper on the chestnut trade in the
southern Blue Ridge of Virginia.
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Prior to this Institute at Ferrum College, my Appalachian Literature for the English Department and the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, emphasized the literary contributions of late 20th century authors and required students to build group webpages that illuminated and contextualized a text for the course. For example see http://www.georgetown.edu/users/parishk/Webpages/index.htm .
From this institute and its emphasis on regionalism and modernization and my research into local archives, I plan to add a requirement to the web project that students reproduce and analyze a pertinent primary document or artifact of material culture: actual diary entry; plat of land; sample of deed; appraisement; will; marriage record; pension record; tombstone design; cemetery record, store record; etc. To introduce this methodology early in the course I will use sample artifacts from Blue Ridge Institute materials and Wythe and Tazewell County, Virginia, court, library, and historical society records of a wagon maker migrant from Ireland who settles in iron-rich Wythe Co., Virginia and whose sons move to coal-rich Pocahontas, Virginia as samples for their perusal.
I will have them engage in discussions of the documents to become better ‘readers’ of material culture such that they will engage in a historical search into place through its change over time as seen through the artifacts. They will then re-contextualize the artifact within the novel or book, and across course texts in their webspace. They will be asked to relate this item to larger constructs of industrialization and market economies that affect national and global issues of power and change that play out in the family space. (This also fits into a larger work I am writing on “The Role of Homeplace in Appalachia.”)
In the classroom, using a page from a cemetery record from Pocahontas, Virginia, students will see in the column for “color” of the deceased, references not only to white, or “colored,” but a designation of those who were foreign born. They will notice that place of origin as well as place in social structure determine one’s burial location in the large mountainside cemetery there. They will notice that many men in their teens though forties of various races and ethnicities die on the same day. This will lead them to research newspaper and mining safety records to connect the day of death with mine explosions, thus raising issues of worker safety and unionization that then foment in the mountains in the 20th century. This information will connect up with scenes in the literature in Giardina’s Storming Heaven and Unquiet Earth and in the short stories of Breece Pancake (as illustrated in the website above).
Thus,
I will require research into the particularities of one worker’s life, using
Ellis Island migration lists, online ship rosters from east coast harbors and
U.S. Census records and National Archives in D.C. Through the particular, then,
I want them to extrapolate an understanding of the paths of migration that have
led to the mountains. The goal here is to connect an individual death in a coal
region into the stream of family, local, regional, national and international
forces that come to bear on an event and then to notice how the author has
integrated (or failed to) the backgrounding and focalization necessary for a
reader to grasp onto and connect the meaning embedded in the particularities of
a character’s experience. I see
future outcomes that could be given back to the community through creating
mini-profiles of these deceased miners and contributing these to a growing
archive of materials for the Pocahontas Exhibition Mine and Museum.
We might also use a “Spring Break” trip for onsite community based
research into several nearby coal county records (McDowell & Mercer Counties
in West Virginia and Tazewell County in Virginia). The retirement facility in
Pocahontas might become a site for oral history collections in other phases of
this project, especially, if I can interest other faculty from my home
institution or other researchers from this Institute in collaborating on such a
project.
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JACK
PAYDEN-TRAVERS
NEH
Appalachian Experience:
As a result of this Institute, I plan on incorporating a study of the Appalachian region into my World Civilizations History 102 course. Colonialism, imperialism and globalization are foci of this course, which covers the chronological period of 1500 CE until the present day. I would hope that a month-long study of Appalachia at the beginning of the course would then allow for a comparative study of other parts of the world in relation to what the students have already learned about Appalachia. In addition I hope to use the geologic history of the Appalachians as part of the World Civilizations History 101 course. In this study we look at the world from the beginning of time until the end of the 15th century. As I look at the “Big Picture” of history rather than just the history of man, I will use the Appalachian Region as a vehicle to look at the physical geography of the world including the formation of continents and the formation of the various mountain ranges such as the Appalachians.
I
utilized the time at Ferrum College to work on a bibliography focusing on
Globalization and to read the literature of the region. When I next teach these
courses, I will be incorporating many of the materials, which I was introduced
to at the Institute.
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My project coming in was to develop Appalachian/Global connections for a new Interdisciplinary Studies senior seminar on "Global Futures," to be taught at Virginia Tech for the first time in the coming year. Since my application, however, several new opportunities arose in my department, which have made my experiences at the Institute even more relevant to my professional development than I had originally imagined. I'll now be even better positioned to bring Appalachian regionalism into dialogue with the other areas in which I teach, including Religious Studies, Popular Culture, and Black/Africana Studies.
One specific area which will benefit is my design of a new syllabus for our Leadership courses, which I plan to organize around regional and global issues, emphasizing cultural and resource politics. Meeting and speaking with Stephen Fisher may prove to be crucial to this effort. Several Institute participants offered me excellent support as well, and the field trip has inspired a number of ideas and potential sites for student projects.
Another specific area which will benefit is our Intro to Appalachian Studies course, which I will begin teaching as early as Spring 2003, and for which the Institute has been especially timely. I'm now well-grounded in the literatureof the field, and have many good contacts on which to draw. Among the faculty I would single out Dan Woods, whose work on Pentecostalism and modernization is outstanding and truly eye-opening. Institute participants like Cece Conway, Ralph Lutts, and Becky Bailey have also been wonderful resources.
Finally,
I've made some great friends here, with whom I anticipate years of good
conversation. It's been a
memorable, valuable experience.
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DONNA
SUMMERLIN
The Influence of Geography on Racial Attitudes: The Civil Rights Era in One
Appalachian Corridor
This research project proposes to examine three Appalachian regional types in
relation to Civil Rights activity from the 1950s to the 1970s, looking
specifically at the Knoxville-Chattanooga corridor.
Dr. Donna Summerlin and Dr. Mary Waalkes hope to publish their findings
as a result of this research.
In “Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Southern Appalachia: Myths, Realities, and Ambiguities” John C. Inscoe, in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, describes two opposing stereotypes regarding racism in Appalachia. According to one stereotype, Appalachians were more racially tolerant than Southerners outside the Appalachian region; the other stereotype identifies white Appalachians as irrevocably hostile to blacks. However, Inscoe suggests a more complex model, indicating that mountaineers shared similar racial values with other Southerners. While we concur that, taken as a whole, the Appalachian region does exhibit the same general pattern as the rest of the South, we find that geographic distinctions within Appalachia are linked with significant patterns of racial tolerance or intolerance. Preliminary study indicates that rural Appalachians were significantly more resistant to the presence of African Americans than their counterparts who lived within Appalachia but in more accessible areas.
If we were to construct a model, preliminary findings would indicate the following:
The larger metropolitan areas of Knoxville and Chattanooga with significant black populations consisting of 15% or more of the total population exhibited the full range of Civil Rights activity along a spectrum that ranged from race riots at one end to peaceful negotiations at the other and that included scattered incidents of violence. Compared with cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, integration occurred in a generally more peaceful atmosphere.
Smaller towns within the corridor that were easily accessible via major highways and that had smaller black populations, generally under 10% of the total population, negotiated integration with relative ease. Unexpectedly, the smaller cities were more likely to negotiate racial change with little hostility than larger, more accessible cities like Chattanooga, for example.
More remote counties adjacent to but outside the corridor largely ignored the Civil Rights movement and maintained reputations of hostility toward African Americans, who made up less than 5% of the total population.
This
will be an interdisciplinary study, combining statistical and historical
information with narrative. We will
examine local records, including census data and court records and newspapers,
to illustrate how integration was received in our study area.
We will also conduct interviews to hear the stories that are used today
to justify the past and compare this anecdotal information with documented
narratives of the Civil Rights movement.
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GARY
VAN BROCKLIN
My
major project will consist of an examination of folk religion in Southern
Appalachia in my class on cultural anthropology.
Folk religion in general is discussed in Mircea Eliade's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
RELIGION and Don Yoder's "Toward a Definition of Folk Religion".
Folk religion in Southern Appalachia is discussed by Charles R. Wilson in
JUDGMENT AND GRACE IN DIXIE and more specifically by Howard Dorgan in AIRWAVES
OF ZION. I will lecture on the definitions of folk religion and depend on
Dorgan's work to provide some specific examples.
I will assign students to look for three or more examples of folk
religion as they observe its expression in Western North Carolina.
The students can use the twelve defining characteristics given by Dorgan
as a guide for their observations. Each
student will be expected to give a ten to fifteen minute presentation on their
observations and the class will discuss how the expressions of folk religion
relate to Appalachian stereotyping as well as how the expressions connect with
basic themes of the biblical message. I
am also considering the possibility of taking a field trip to Cherokee County,
North Carolina where there are some church facilities of the Church of God that
commemorate key historical events of that Pentecostal denomination.
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