The United States of Appalachia How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America

Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence and a hotbed for labor and civil rights movements and groundbreaking science, literature, and music. Far from being in the backwash of American history, Appalachia has produced some of our country's most important innovators. To name only a few: Cherokee inventor Sequoyah; Black History Month founder Carter Woodson; jazz and country music legends Bessie Smith, W.C. Handy, Nina Simone, and the Carter Family; New York Times Publisher Adolph Ochs; authors Pearl S. Buck, Thomas Wolfe, Edward Abbey, Cormac McCarthy, Henry Louis Gates, and Rebecca Harding Davis; and social activists John Rankin, Martin Delany, Myles Horton, and Walter Reuther. With humor, intelligence, and clarity, Jeff Biggers shows us that to properly understand American history it is essential to know the history of Appalachia. Book jacket.

Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, radio correspondent, and educator across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico. His award–winning stories and programs have aired on NPR and PRI and have appeared in various magazines and newspapers. Author of In the Sierra Madre, he also coedited No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West, which won an American Book Award.