Study Grant Proposal
Summer II 2010
The Highland South in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Progress or Loss?
Brett Adams, Professor of History
Brett Adams
972 377 1604
The Highland South in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Progress or Loss?
I would like to propose a study grant project to research the history of the highland south during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Specifically this region would include the southern Appalachians and the Arkansas Ozark and Ouachita mountains. I have had an interest in this region for a number of years and would like to expand my knowledge of both the region and time period. I am curious to learn how the people who lived in some of the most isolated communities in the United States responded to the new economic and political imperatives that emerged as a result of industrialization and Progressive reform.
From the end of the American Civil War through World War I people living in the highland south were buffeted by the same great economic, political, and social changes as the nation as a whole. For example, improved transportation brought the railroads into the highlands, which in turn encouraged timber and mining companies to expand operations in the area. Large scale timbering and mining operations brought jobs, but also took workers off the land and caused widespread environmental damage.
During this time period progressive politicians enacted new conservation measures to regulate the use of natural resources on public lands and provide environmental protection to certain areas through the creation of national parks. The new policies often restricted local access to land and resources that had been taken for granted by the highland population. These developments disrupted the traditional lifestyles of the highland residents and changed their relationship with both their immediate environment and the larger world.
The purpose of this project is to learn more about how these changes impacted the residents of this region and whether they experienced these changes differently than other southerners or residents of highlands outside the South. To that end I will begin with more general works on rural America and the South as a region, move toward more specific works on the highland south, and end with two works that examine highland residents of the northeast.
If my proposal is approved I will do the reading for the study grant during Summer II, 2010. I would then present the findings of this study grant to interested faculty during the next academic year.
Week 1-2:
I will begin the project with David Danbom’s book, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, Edward Ayers’, The Promise of the New South, and Wayne Flynt’s Dixie’s Forgotten People: the South’s Poor Whites. Danbom’s book will provide an overview of rural America while the Ayers and Flynt books will aid me in placing the highland areas into the context of the South as a whole.
Week 3:
In week three I will read John Williams’ Appalachia: A History to begin narrowing my focus more directly on the Southern Highlands. I will also read Donald Davis’ book, Where There are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians.” This book should give me a perspective on how economic and political changes contributed to altering the physical environment of the southern Appalachians, and especially how those changes forced the residents of the area to redefine their relationship with the natural world
Week 4:
Margaret Brown’s The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains will begin week four. Brown, like Davis focuses on environmental change, but much of her book concentrates on the people who lived in the region, and changes to their way of life as a consequence of the establishment of Smoky Mountain National Park. I will also move into more specific studies of the region this week by reading Brook Blevins’ Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and their Image along with John Otto’s articles “The Decline of Forest Farming in Southern Appalachia” and “Slash and Burn Cultivation in the Highlands South: A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History.”
Week 5:
The focus on the Arkansas highlands will continue in week five with two articles covering highland agricultural practices, “Traditional Agricultural Practices in the Arkansas Highlands,” and “The Banks Family of Yell County, Arkansas: A ‘Plain Folk’ Family of the Highlands South,” both by John Otto, one of the few historians who have written extensively on the topic. I will finish by looking at a work by environmental historian Karl Jacoby. His book, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation studies the impact of Progressive conservation policies on poor rural people with a significant section on the impact of forest laws and game regulation in the Adirondack mountains.
Books
Ayers, Edward L., The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Blevins, Brooks, Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image, Chapel Hill: University of North Caronia Press, 2002.
Brown, Margaret Lynn, The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Danbom, David B., Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Davis, Donald Edwards, Where There are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Flynt, Wayne, Dixie’s Forgotten People: the South’s Poor Whites, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Jacoby, Karl, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Williams, John Alexander, Appalachia: A History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
ARTICLES
Jacoby, Karl, “Class and Environmental History: Lessons from ‘the War in the Adirondacks,” Environmental History, Vol. 2, No. 3 (July, 1997), pp. 324-342.
Otto, John Solomon and Augustus Marion burns III, “Traditional Agricultural Practices in the Arkansas Highland,” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 94, No. 372 (Apr – June, 1981), pp. 166-187.
Otto, John Solomon, “The Decline of Forest Farming in Southern Appalachia,” Journal of Forest History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan 1983), pp18-27.
Otto, John Solomon, “Slash-And-Burn cultivation in the Highlands South: A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 131-147.
Otto, John Solomon and Ben Wayne Burks, “The Banks Family of Yell County, Arkansas: A ‘Plain Folk’ Family of the Highlands South,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 146-167.
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