History
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series A baby born blue was nothing new on Troublesome Creek. Neighbors had seen it before. The midwife knew the color would fade in a few days for some, but not for others. For certain families in this corner of eastern Kentucky, blue skin wasn’t a sign…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. Before there was a workshop, there was a pocketknife. And before there was a years-long waitlist, there was a teenage boy on a porch in Grayson County, Virginia, scraping curls of wood off a slab of spruce. Wayne Henderson didn’t have a band saw or a luthier’s bench,…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series You might not recognize the Mennonite family that lives a few blocks over. The clothes are modest, sure, but not old-fashioned. The car’s parked in the driveway. The kids play outside after supper. Like other Mennonites in Appalachia, their lifestyle isn’t what sets them apart. Lifestyle…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series You could hear the shop before you saw it. A steady rhythm of clinks and taps echoed from the open door—tin snips biting into metal, hammers flattening seams, the soft hiss of solder melting into a joint. Inside, the tinsmith bent over a worn bench lit…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series You can still hear them sometimes—those old voices. They live in stories passed across porches, handed from generation to generation, without being written down. Before people thought to call themselves storytellers, they just told. And someone else remembered. Back in Gaelic lands, those voices had a…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series My friend Vanessa Cole writes a history newsletter which graces my inbox regularly. Recently, she wrote a series of articles about how Southern families “made do” during the Civil War. It was so entertaining and informative, I asked her if I could reprint it here, and…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series In the mountains of Virginia during the Revolution, justice didn’t always wait for courtrooms. Sometimes, it showed up with a rope and a warning. That’s how the phrase “lynch law” got started—right here in Southwest Virginia. The lead mines near what’s now Wytheville were essential to…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series The British called it a gentleman’s war. That might’ve been true in the drawing rooms of Philadelphia or London. But out here—in the rolling hills of Botetourt (pronounced “baa-tuh-taat”) County, Virginia—it was anything but. That’s where you’d find John Wyatt, bending over hoop iron with his…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series When most people think of African Americans in the 19th century, two images dominate: Southern slaves or Northern abolitionists. But tucked deep in the hills and hollows of the mountain South, there lived thousands of men and women who didn’t fit either category. They were Freemen…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series We’re taught the Trail of Tears as an ending—a final march west, away from ancestral homelands. But what if it wasn’t the end? What if some never left? In 1838, under orders from the federal government, thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children were rounded up…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series In Jim Crow Virginia, the power of a single piece of paper could decide your future—or erase your past. In 1924, the Commonwwealth of Virginia passed a law that tried to nail down something as messy and human as race using bureaucratic language and the force…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series Editor’s Note: The following is a fictionalized letter inspired by Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) real-life words and activism. While this letter is imagined, the events it describes—the brutality of the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike, the suffering of the miners, and the role of…