Chapter 42 Further Reading: The View from the Porch — Living in Appalachia Today

Part 8: Synthesis and Reflection | Chapter 42 of 42

Contemporary Appalachian Voices

House, Silas. Southernmost. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2018.

A novel about a small-town Tennessee preacher who defies his congregation to shelter two boys displaced by a hate crime — a story that captures the tension between Appalachian community values and the forces that divide communities. House, a Kentucky native and one of the most celebrated contemporary Appalachian writers, writes with the intimate knowledge of someone who grew up on the porches this chapter describes. Not a work of history or social science, but a work of art that captures truths about contemporary Appalachia that scholarship alone cannot reach.

Catte, Elizabeth. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018.

The essential corrective to the national narratives about contemporary Appalachia. Catte — a historian and public scholar from east Tennessee — dismantles the myths that reduce the region to poverty statistics and political caricature. Her chapter on J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is the sharpest critique of that book's assumptions and distortions. Short, sharp, and accessible — the book you should hand to anyone who thinks they know what Appalachia is.

Harkins, Anthony, and Meredith McCarroll, eds. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019.

A collection of essays, poems, photographs, and personal narratives by Appalachian writers responding to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and the national conversation it sparked. The contributors — scholars, activists, artists, and community members from across the region — insist on the complexity, diversity, and agency that Vance's narrative erases. An indispensable primary source for understanding how Appalachian people resist the stories told about them.

Immigration and Demographic Change

Ansley, Fran, and Jon Shefner, eds. Global Connections and Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009.

An interdisciplinary collection examining the arrival of Latino immigrants in the rural Southeast, including several Appalachian communities. The essays address workplace dynamics, community reception, educational challenges, and the complex negotiations of identity and belonging that characterize new immigrant communities in places with no prior tradition of immigration. Essential for understanding the Gutierrez family's experience in broader context.

Winders, Jamie. Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013.

While focused on Nashville rather than rural Appalachia, Winders' study of immigrant settlement in the upper South provides a useful framework for understanding how Latino communities are transforming communities across the Appalachian fringe — the cities and towns at the region's edges that are most fully integrated into national migration flows.

The Opioid Crisis and Harm Reduction

Macy, Beth. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.

The definitive narrative account of the opioid crisis as it unfolded in the Appalachian heartland — from Purdue Pharma's marketing of OxyContin to the devastation in communities like Roanoke and Lee County, Virginia. Macy, a longtime reporter for the Roanoke Times, combines investigative journalism with intimate portraits of the individuals and families caught in the epidemic. Essential reading for understanding Jesse's world.

Quinones, Sam. The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.

The follow-up to Quinones' Dreamland, focusing on the fentanyl and methamphetamine waves that succeeded the prescription opioid epidemic. Quinones profiles communities and individuals fighting back through harm reduction, recovery support, and community organizing — the kind of work Jesse does every day from his RV. The book insists on hope without false optimism, which is exactly the balance this chapter attempts.

Language Revitalization

Bender, Margaret Clelland. Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

An anthropological study of the role of the Cherokee syllabary — and the broader practice of Cherokee literacy — in the life of the Eastern Band. Bender examines how the syllabary functions not just as a writing system but as a marker of Cherokee identity, a tool of cultural resistance, and a connection to a literary tradition that stretches back to Sequoyah's invention in the 1820s. Essential context for understanding Alma's work.

Hinton, Leanne, Leena Huss, and Gerald Roche, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization. New York: Routledge, 2018.

A comprehensive scholarly reference on language revitalization efforts worldwide. The handbook includes case studies of immersion education programs, master-apprentice programs, and technology-assisted language learning — all approaches that the Eastern Band has adopted in its Cherokee language revitalization efforts. Useful for placing Alma's work within the global context of Indigenous language preservation.

Food Sovereignty and Seed Saving

Veteto, James R., and Kevin Welch, eds. Food and Identity in the Caribbean and Southern Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.

An unconventional but illuminating comparative study that examines food traditions, seed saving, and food sovereignty in two regions with parallel histories of colonization and extraction. The Appalachian chapters document heirloom seed networks, farmers' market economies, and the revival of traditional foodways that Margaret's profile represents.

Sievert, Lydia Minatoya, and Bill Best. Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste: Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015.

A beautifully illustrated book profiling seed savers across the Appalachian region — the gardeners and farmers who maintain heirloom varieties that have adapted to mountain soils and climates over generations. Bill Best, a Berea, Kentucky-based seed saver who has preserved hundreds of Appalachian bean varieties, is a central figure. The book makes the case that seed saving is cultural preservation, food sovereignty, and agricultural science all at once.

Rural Healthcare and the Contemporary Crisis

Morone, James, and Daniel Ehlke, eds. Health Politics and Policy. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning, 2013.

A comprehensive policy textbook that includes extensive treatment of rural healthcare challenges, including the physician shortage, rural hospital closures, and the disparities in health outcomes between rural and urban America. Useful for placing the Appalachian healthcare crisis described in Chapter 38 and in Carla's return migration story within the broader national context.

Nussbaum, Sarah. "Last Hospital Standing: The State of Rural Healthcare in Appalachia." Appalachian Journal 48, nos. 3–4 (2021): 212–38.

A detailed analysis of rural hospital closures in the Appalachian region, examining the financial, demographic, and policy factors driving closures and the consequences for communities that lose their last source of emergency and inpatient care. Directly relevant to Dana's and Carla's profiles.

Return Migration and Community Rebuilding

Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

A historically grounded study of poverty and community development in Clay County, Kentucky, that provides essential context for understanding what return migrants find when they come home. Billings and Blee trace the structural forces that created persistent poverty and examine the community's resources — social, cultural, and institutional — for building a different future.

Smith, Barbara Ellen. "De-gradations of Whiteness: Appalachia and the Complexities of Race." Journal of Appalachian Studies 10, no. 1 (2004): 38–57.

An influential essay that complicates the racial politics of Appalachia, examining how whiteness operates differently in the mountains than in the rest of the United States. Relevant to understanding the complex community dynamics that return migrants navigate — including the racial dimensions of who "belongs" in Appalachian communities.

The Appalachian Region Today

Appalachian Regional Commission. The Appalachian Region: A Data Overview from the 2017–2021 American Community Survey. Washington, DC: ARC, 2023.

The most current comprehensive statistical portrait of the Appalachian region, covering population, income, poverty, education, employment, health, and infrastructure. The data behind the chapter's Primary Source box. Available free at the ARC website (arc.gov) and essential for any student conducting Community History Portfolio research.

Drake, Richard B. A History of Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

A single-volume narrative history of the region that covers the full arc from Indigenous settlement to the early twenty-first century. Drake writes with clarity and balance, and his final chapters on contemporary Appalachia provide useful context for this chapter's portraits. A good companion to this textbook for students who want a more compressed treatment.

Chapter 42 of 42 | Part 8: Synthesis and Reflection