Tag

Appalachia

Appalachian Murder Ballads Blog

Appalachian Murder Ballads

October is a time when folks put a skeleton on the porch and call it a personality. Plastic gravestones, jack-o-lanterns, spider webs, fog machines, and a playlist that treats death like a party favor. However, the Southern mountains don’t need October for that, because they’ve already got the murder ballads. There are songs about a girl who walked into the…
Tom Daniel
October 13, 2026
Hillfolk History Blog

Hillfolk History

All-too-often, seemingly buried in the myriad dates and statistics of history, lies the human experience that should do more to make up that history in the first place. These eyewitness accounts and anecdotes seem to speak to us, across the ages, in ways that numbers do not (something historians might want to pick up on, if they want a revived…
Travis Archie
December 9, 2020
The Old South’s Poor Whites Blog

The Old South’s Poor Whites

There was a time, before universal white male suffrage and the closing of the frontier, when the poor whites of the South were considered shiftless and without caste. If we were to look at the South as a hierarchical system, it could be argued that the poor whites were a kind of pariah. There’s a common misconception that all whites…
Michael Martin
October 11, 2018
Moonshiners Blog

Moonshiners

Stewart, Bruce E. Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2011. Interest in southern Appalachian history and culture is growing in the academy. Moonshining is one particular area that is beginning to fascinate both the scholar and history buff. From the popular Discovery Channel show “Moonshiners,” to the growing number of…
Samuel C. Smith
April 30, 2014