Book Review

Canada and the United States

Except for Richard B. Drake's recent awkward and disappointing effort, there has never been a comprehensive, one-volume history of the Appalachian region. John Alexander Williams's new volume will appeal both to scholars and to a broader public long befuddled by repetitions of the tiredest of myths about the southern mountains. It is a compelling example of the synergistic economies of the expanding and maturing scholarship that has been undertaken on the region during the past four decades.	1
Beginning with probes by Spanish conquistadores into the Blue Ridge and Great Smokies and reaching to the recent environmental grotesqueries of "mountaintop removal," Williams skillfully constructs a tightly structured, cogently argued, gracefully written narrative and analysis of the most important sectors and dynamics of Appalachian history: the structuring and modulating effects of geography and environment; exploration, immigration, and outmigration; major processes of social, economic, political, and cultural development; demographic change; the turbulent relations of region and nation; the successive waves of rapacious entrepreneurial adventure; the evolution and interaction of local, state, regional and federal institutions; the challenge posed by Appalachia's complexity to national ideology and policy; and the origins, permutations, and uses of popular images, icons, and myths about the region.	2
To his great credit, Williams walks a tight line between comprehending the region as region and blurring a myriad of long overlooked intraregional differences. Similarly, he examines both what sets the region apart and what makes it, in some important ways, not very different from the larger South, the Midwest, or the nation as a whole. Hence an Appalachia too often imaged as homogeneous, static, rural, white, Protestant, violent, premodern, and above all different and separate emerges as varied and dynamic, racially and culturally diverse, both traditional and modern (even postmodern), and complexly linked to all of the world outside—a palimpsest of our collective past and a map of where we as a nation may be headed. Extended passages of structural and systemic analysis are balanced by concrete illustrative detail and brief segments focused on local cases and specific individuals and institutions. From a cultural studies perspective, the palpable realities of regional history are effectively counterposed with the complexities of representation.	3
Williams's new history of Appalachia is in so many ways so excellent that I pass only reluctantly to raising some problems of particular interest to historians in general and to the many Appalachian specialists upon whose work it draws. In the first place, it is not clear whether this volume is intended primarily as a popular or a scholarly history. It bears marks of the former (sprightly style, relative sparseness of documentation, comprehensiveness). As a popular history, however, it has some weaknesses. Long stretches of discussion on topography, trade and transportation routes, and other subjects call for clarifying maps, but there are only five in the entire volume. Of the thirty-one photographs (quite skimpy for a popular history), some are rather idiosyncratically chosen. One of the four coal industry photographs is a Ben Shahn close-up of several rail cars full of coal; its caption emphasizes "the play of light upon textures." Only three photographs (pp. 356, 359, 365) illustrate tourism and urbanization. A single photograph of a logging camp (p. 248) stands for the whole of non-coal-related industrialization. Readers expecting a popular history may also find numerous long sections of heavily detailed text to be tough going (e.g. modernization theory, pp. 321–26). As popular history, then, Williams's account offers both too little and too much.	. . .