Lewis The Appalachia created by the late-nineteenth-century local color writers was a “strange land and peculiar people,” as one of them wrote. Their construction emphasized spatial and cultural isolation and presented Appalachia as a remnant of America’s frontier.1 Whatever its literary merit, this view obscures the reality that industry has always played an important, if not always leading, role in the region’s history. Several historical paradigms seek to explain the industrial transition in Appalachia, but the perspective presented in this chapter is that industrial enterprises, such as coal, salt, timber, iron, and agricultural processing, have long been important to the Appalachian economy. The unprecedented capital investment in the railroad and basic industries in the last decades of the nineteenth century lifted the expansion to a crescendo and transformed much of the region from a rural agricultural economy to one in which major subregions became dependent on industry.
What do You think about High Mountains Rising (2004)?
