Richard B. Drake | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Richard B. Drake | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. By Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv, 434 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-521-65229-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-521-65546-3.)

This is a long-awaited book; it represents the work of several generations of scholars, beginning in 1942, who have traced the story of the mountain community of Beech Creek. James S. Brown began the study as a Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University. It was continued by Harry K. Schwarzweller and J. J. Mangalam through the 1960s, and now it has been greatly enhanced by Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee. The result is a remarkable record of this community, now traced back to 1810. 1

This massive study of a rural community in Clay County, Kentucky, presents us with a useful yardstick with which to measure various generalizations about Appalachia. Billings and Blee frequently point out how many stereotypes about Appalachia are erroneous. Much of their text, in fact, deconstructs such stereotypes as the "culture of poverty" model and the "internal colonialism" model as explanations of the region's poverty, as well as the "Jeffersonian Eden model" for rural existence. . . .

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