I came across this student website, which is a compilation of interviews that explore why Appalachia lags behind the rest of the country. You can see the entire series here at Ralph B. Davis’ website. Educating Appalachia Teach for America receives grant to help local schools, via the Hazard Herald One of the big themes in the […]
Each Wednesday, I spend time sifting through various social media streams so that I can find interesting people and projects who may not appear in the news. Yesterday, I came across The Monkey Do Project, which seeks to partner with groups working in Appalachia. As I read about the project, I was reminded of what […]
I came across this map at Business Insider, and I had to share it. Linguists have looked at the speech patterns associated with 22 different words, and mapped dialects in the U.S. This is a wonderful way to illustrate how different we are despite our common heritage.
Poverty is one of the big themes in So Far Appalachia, particularly how the relationship between local, state, and national governing bodies impacts the region. In The Road to Poverty, researchers found that as rural areas were pulled into the national economy, the long-term effects (at least in Clay County) undermined the local economy. One […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my friend, Lali, with whom I shared a very intense friendship twenty years ago. We had one of those inexplicable connections that tethered us together for years. As I was traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I wondered if maybe her family was from here since this is Mennonite country […]
The most common question I ask myself while researching: Why? This seems like an easy question, but it’s precisely the easiness of it that causes you to continually return to it. If you can answer a series of repeated whys (along with a few whens) you can construct a meaningful timeline of not just what […]
“If you do it will be, in the writer’s opinion, almost a copy of the German jaeger rifle because these Bakers were making guns from 1717-1754 — the earliest gunsmiths I have found in this area of Pennsylvania.” — Sam Dyke, 1972. “The Baker Family of Gunsmiths in Lancaster, County 1717-1754 The problem with history […]
I arrived in Lancaster just a little after noon today after surviving a drive that took me through the foggy Appalachia mountains, torrential rain down pours, and hours of driving time without mobile cell service. As some severe weather is headed my way, I skipped some of the preliminary research today and instead got my […]
While the subject of the Clay County feuds is often seen nowadays as something akin to old west nostalgia, as per the Hollywood treatment of the Hatfield/McCoy variety, or even a History Channel presentation a few years ago of Clay County’s “Hundred Year War’ it is to many local people a subject of the untwist […]
This Sunday, I’m packing up my car and heading east to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the home of American gun making. The reason: before the Bakers settled in Clay County, Kentucky, the family lived in Lancaster, where they helped make the Pennsylvania Rifle (also known as the Kentucky Rifle or the hog rifle). According to […]
The Reverend John Jay Dickey was a traveling minister who spent a good deal of time both chronicling his journeys through the mountains of early America and his attempts to set up churches in schools in towns. The Dickey Diaries paint an amazingly clear picture of the daily life (and frustrations) he observed. Each time […]
“I arrive at the age of fifteen, at this period I had learned only in a moderate degree to read write and cipher having like most children neglected to improve the opportunities afforded me at the common schools. And not being able to appreciate the great advantages derived from education and an improved mind, however […]