Jeff Biggers,
The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America.
From the preface:
Beyond its mythology as a quaint backwater to the American imagination, Appalachia also needs to be embraced for its historic role as a vanguard region in the United States.
Vanguard Appalachia? The very word -- vanguard -- conjures up a plethora of images, though none in Appalachia. It's Thomas Jefferson at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; it's George Washington plotting his campaign at Yorktown. William Lloyd Garrison, the great New England abolitionist, was in the vanguard of the antislavery movement; his transcendentalist Boston neighbors stood in the forefront of nineteenth-century American literature. The New York Times, in an era of yellow journalism, typified the vanguard press; the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City provided the nations music innovators with its hallowed stage. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the front of the civil rights movement, would be its modern political symbol. Expatriate Gertrude Stein might be its literary icon.
These are all reasonable examples, of course. And yet, would you believe me if I said an Appalachian preceded, led or influenced every one of these historic events or gatherings? That years before Jefferson completed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, a backwoods settlement had already stunned the British Crown with its independence as a "dangerous example for the people of America." That an alliance of Southern Appalachian insurgents orchestrated their own attacks on British-led troops and turned the tide of the American Revolution. That a humble band of mountain preachers and writers published the first abolitionist newspaper in the nation and trained the radical Garrison. That a Cherokee mountaineer invented the first syllabary in modern times. That a back-hills young woman astounded Boston literary circles in 1861, with the first American short story of working-class realism to be published in the the Atlantic Monthly. That a young publisher from Chattanooga actually took over the New York Times and set its course for world acclaim. That the "high priestess of soul" put a spell on an audience at the Village Vanguard in 1959, with her blend of folk, jazz, gospel, country, and Bach-motif riffs she had learned in her Southern Appalachian hamlet. That a self-proclaimed "radical hillbilly" galvanized the shock troops of the civil rights movement and returned an African spiritual and labor song as its anthem. That the first American woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature was recognized for her family memoirs of West Virginia as much as for her literary contributions to the Far East.
