The Appalachian Region Of New York

Further from your home and closer to theirs. Elevated more than 3000 feet above sea level. The Appalachian Mountain range serves as a beacon for wildlife. Black bears, white-tailed deer, opossums, and a wide variety of rodents roam the range freely. Once standing atop a mountain you may scan in all directions as you may see many trees pulling against one another in an endless game of tug of war. The whip of the crisp breeze of hickory intertwined with oak trees would remind anyone fall is coming.

Being known as the region synonymous with destitution and home to some of the pauperized counties in the country, Appalachia has always been hidden from or sort of isolated from the rest of the world because of their geographic location. The people of Appalachia are often seen as unintelligent and less civilized than other Americans as they were less developed and not exposed to the commercial world. Because of

Appalachia is often portrayed as an arrested frontier, a geographically isolated subculture, and reservoir of culturally homogenous. Appalachians are pictured as proud, fiercely independent, and god-fearing southerners. But in all reality they are portrayed as fighting and feuding, barefooted and backward, ignorant degenerates, downtrodden by centuries of isolation, inbreeding, and poverty. So how was Appalachia discovered? Well Appalachia was prompted in the mid 1870s by local color writers such as Mary Murfee and John Fox Jr. who explored in fiction and travel sketches such mountain themes as conflicting Civil War loyalties, moon shining, and feuding. (Billings)

The collection consists of 15,000 pages of original historical material documenting the land, peoples, exploration, and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The collection is drawn from the holdings of the University of Chicago Library and the Filson Historical Society of Louisville, Kentucky.

In the world of Appalachia, stereotypes are abundant. There are stories told of mountaineers as lazy, bewildered, backward, and yet happy and complacent people. Mountain women are seen as diligent, strong, hard willed, and overall sturdy and weathered, bearing the burden of their male counterparts. These ideas of mountain life did not come out of thin air; they are the direct product of sensational nineteenth century media including print journalism and illustrative art that has continuously mislead and wrongfully represented the people of Appalachia. These stories, written and told by outsiders, served very little purpose to Appalachian natives other than means of humiliation and degradation. They served mostly to convince readers of the

Dwight B. Billings writes, "Appalachia has often been used as a symbol of rural poverty." Just last year President Bill Clinton visited Hazard, Ky. to offer new job opportunities to what he called, "an underdeveloped area that America can help develop." But many in Appalachia don't want the outside help. In his book of short stories titled Kinfolks, Gurney Norman describes the strong union that Appalachian families share with one another. An Appalachian himself, Norman depicts family life and the intertwining aspects of love, care, traditions, respect, and knowledge that are found in Appalachian families. It is this same bond that Norman refers to in his stories that keeps many in the area from moving away, from wanting more technology, from wanting change to occur. It is this concentration on not wanting to lose our heritage that makes us so different from the rest of society. "Anyone who is unlike the majority is looked at a little suspiciously, dealt with a little differently" (Asfahani 18). Because we seem to focus more on our traditions

Without the influences to the Appalachian people from the slaves, even though the circumstances were not a moral, Appalachian music and other aspects that make Appalachia unique would not be as

Daugneaux, Christine B. Appalachia: A Separate Place, A Unique People. Parsons: McLain Printing Company, 1981. Print.

Most of his attention is on the Native American Indian culture and events occurring in the west after the Civil War; a period when few remnants of their original culture remained. “My interest in Ohio of the seventeenth century is because many lived traditional lives. They were capable of living and largely surviving as spiritual, militarily and political entities on their own.”

History is comprised of actual accounts of things that happened, forces that have shaped us, and lessons that we gain. As stated in the introduction, ““Wee will have noe Lords, noe Landgraves noe Cassiques we renounce them all.” With these words, the earliest settlers of North Carolina declared their complete rejection of any social hierarchy in their colony” (I). In Noeleen McIlvenna’s book, A Very Mutinous People, McIlvenna discusses how North Carolina doing their own thing made North Carolina’s history much different from that of any other early North American colony. It is said that, “North Carolina’s story fits none of the familiar models of colonial American history” (14). As a whole, this book reviews the political struggles of the earliest settlers in North Carolina and their eventual loss of freedom. Many were there to escape debt, persecution, and indentured servitude. They became closely allied in the political and sometimes physical fight to retain their lack of connection to the gentrified world.

The Great Smoky Mountains are one of a kind mountains. I was on the top of one of mountains; the view was breathtaking and was an amazing to see. I relate to Dellarobia’s awe from the mountains and countryside. Appalachia is a mainly rural area, with distinct people and landforms. There is diversity in this area. In some places, technology thrives. In others however, are lacking up to date technology. From one perspective, this is understandable. Every town is different and may not have every object the next town has. These places are isolated from industrial cities; many jobs in this area include farming, coal mining, and lumbering. However, looking at this from another angle, this is unfair to the areas without up to date technology. These areas could be in poverty and may not be able to afford everything new. This novel gives us an example of this with the Turnbow family and their

In the Northeast portion of the United States there are many different cultures, some extravagantly different than others. Many of these are not fully understood by the average man such as the Amish and Mennonites. Within the 50+ miles between Harford County, Maryland and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania there are many differences but also many similarities. Family Time, transportation and lifestyle are a few examples. With many differences, both of these cultures are worthy of appreciation, respect and education of the ways of life all of which are about to be explored.

The Kentucky landscape is neither totally a pastoral ideal nor an antipastoral reality; it is marked by both, pastoral element and racial violence. Crab-apple trees are parallel to Afro-Americans; they populate and racialize the landscape: “most of the country beyond Vagermound Common was bunched with crab-apple trees, posing crookedly, like tired old Negroes against the sky” (BOF 7-8). They look as if to follow Big Mat like ancestral guardians: “against the dark sky the darker crab-apple trees kept pace with him as he walked” (16). The nighttime landscape looks like a color-blind society, an insight suggested by Melody: “at night the hills ain’t red no more. There ain’t no crab-apple trees squat in the hills, no more land to hoe in the red-hot

Many people have never heard of Appalachia, or the place I call home. Some people of never even heard of West by god Virginia. Some people call it Western Virginia because they think it don’t exist. This is the life story of Tree Man Thompson.

It began in a white clapboard cottage on the shores of Lake Huron with the heavy pinging of rain on the tin roof. It began with the remnants of a life long dead. It began when his father said, we'll go home to the Virginias.