Appalachia: A History.

By John Alexander Williams. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xx], 473. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5368-2; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2699-5.)

Given the proliferation of scholarship on Appalachia over the last twenty-five years, the time is ripe for a comprehensive synthesis of it all. Two able historians have risen to the challenge with very solid works that have appeared within a year of each other: Richard B. Drake's A History of Appalachia (Lexington, Ky., 2001), and John Alexander Williams's equally simply titled Appalachia: A History, which is under review here.

Williams's book is a tour de force: a beautifully written and remarkably thorough chronicle of Appalachia's complex and varied past. His narrative is as fully inclusive geographically--with balanced coverage of all parts of the region from western Pennsylvania to northern Alabama--as it is chronologically, moving from the Spanish exploration of the highlands in the sixteenth century to an incisive analysis of the challenges and changes facing Appalachians today. Most admirable is how seamlessly Williams weaves together political, social, cultural, economic, environmental, literary, and historiographical aspects of the highland past. While he fully utilizes the recent outpouring of published work by historians and other scholars, Williams makes it his own, both stylistically and interpretively, by infusing the whole with his own insights and ideas.

Thematically, Williams applies to his vast subject "a postmodern approach to regionalism" (p. 12), portraying Appalachia as a fluid and dynamic entity defined by the interactions of its people and their relationship to the environment. Yet it is in the particularities of life experienced within the region, rather than in any theoretical overlay, that Williams's narrative proves most effective. With a real eye--and ear--for telling detail, he never loses sight of the personal or the local, which not only makes his book engaging to read but reminds us of how difficult--and pointless--it is to apply generalities to this multifaceted and diverse whole. The book is filled with concise portraits of mountain residents and observers, known and unknown, who are often allowed to tell their stories in their own words. Francis Asbury, Daniel Boone, Stonewall Jackson, "Anse" Hatfield, John Henry (factual and fictional), Alvin York, Ella May Wiggins, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest "Pop" Stoneman, and Henry Louis Gates are but a few of the massive cast of characters whose lives and opinions Williams uses to reveal larger truths about the Appalachian experience.

The power of place--symbolic and real--is also conveyed in wonderfully rendered vignettes on locales such as Fort Chiswell, Virginia, a crossroads claimed by Cherokees, Shawnees, and white land speculators in the 1760s; Spruce Pine, North Carolina, where a recent influx of Latinos, the primary workforce for Christmas-tree farms and mica mines, has transformed its commercial and cultural makeup; and Williams's hometown of Adrian, West Virginia, in whose cemetery "New Englanders, Irish Catholics, and mountain Methodists [lie] buried in the churchyard on the Coal and Coke Line" (p. 234), reflecting the ethnic mix created by the railroad.

Williams's coverage of the recent past is among his most insightful. He conveys the widespread deindustrialization and massive outmigration experienced by many parts of Appalachia in the 1950s and 1960s in striking terms: The number of coal miners in West Virginia sank from 150,000 in 1945 to just over 17,000 in 1999. Nurses and telemarketers now outnumber miners in the state, and Wal-Mart employs more people than any coal company. In sharp contrast, other parts of the region--most notably northern Georgia and western North Carolina--face problems of unregulated growth as tourism, second-home owners, and Latino immigrants have reshaped both the land and local economies. Federal intervention has long cast a vast bureaucratic shadow over the region--from TVA and Oak Ridge to the National Park Service and LBJ's War on Poverty--but Williams demonstrates how new uses of federal funding have spurred the recent redevelopment of distressed communities from Huntsville, Alabama, to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

A brief review cannot do justice to the full range of information and insights that Williams packs into this vast mosaic, nor to the many pleasures his work offers to readers, whether casual browsers or serious students. It is a book that should be studied and savored by every Appalachian resident who cares at all about his or her homeland, and it will stand as a touchstone for studies of the region for many years to come.

JOHN C. INSCOE

University of Georgia