Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio

Capstone Project 1: The Community History Portfolio

"The history of a place is not what happened there. It is what happened there as told by the people who remember, the documents that survived, and the questions that someone finally thought to ask." — Regional historian, Appalachian Studies Association conference, 2018

Overview

Throughout this textbook, you have been building something. Chapter by chapter, checkpoint by checkpoint, you have researched a single Appalachian county — its geology, its Indigenous history, its settlement, its transformation, its culture, its present. You have gathered primary sources and secondary sources, asked hard questions and sat with incomplete answers, traced the arc of extraction and resistance across decades and sometimes centuries. You have done the work of a historian.

Now it is time to assemble that work into something whole.

The Community History Portfolio is the primary capstone project for The History of Appalachia: Mountains, People, and Power. It asks you to produce a complete county history — a 15-to-25-page narrative that traces your chosen Appalachian county from its geological foundations through its contemporary reality. This is not a research paper in the traditional academic sense, though it requires rigorous research. It is a county history — a work of narrative scholarship that tells the story of a place and its people across time, grounded in evidence, attentive to diverse voices, and honest about what has been lost and what persists.

The best county histories produced by students in courses like this one have been donated to local libraries and historical societies, where they become part of the community's self-knowledge. Some have been read aloud at county historical society meetings. Some have been shared with the very families whose stories they tell. That possibility — that your work might matter to the people it describes — should inform every sentence you write.

What You Have Already Done

If you have completed the portfolio checkpoints across all forty-two chapters, you already possess the raw material for a substantial county history. Here is what your accumulated research should include:

Part I: The Land Before (Chapters 1-4)

Checkpoint 1: Geological portrait of your county — physiographic province, terrain, waterways, geological resources, and predictions about how geology shaped human history
Checkpoint 2: Indigenous presence — archaeological evidence, cultural phases, pre-contact population and land use
Checkpoint 3: Cherokee or other Indigenous nation history specific to your county — governance, agriculture, spiritual relationship with the land
Checkpoint 4: Contact, colonization, and removal — what happened to the Indigenous people of your county

Part II: Settlement and the Frontier (Chapters 5-10)

Checkpoints 5-10: Settlement patterns — who came, when, where from; presence of slavery; early economy; religious and community institutions; women's roles; relationship to the new American nation

Part III: The Civil War and Its Aftermath (Chapters 11-14)

Checkpoints 11-14: Civil War alignment and experience — was your county divided? What happened during the war? Emancipation and its aftermath. Whether and how the "feud" and "outsider discovery" narratives applied to your county

Part IV: Industrialization and Extraction (Chapters 15-21)

Checkpoints 15-21: Industrial transformation — coal, timber, railroad, company towns, labor conflict, immigrant communities, out-migration, human cost of extraction

Part V: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty (Chapters 22-26)

Checkpoints 22-26: Federal programs and their effects — New Deal, War on Poverty, mountaintop removal, education history, resistance traditions

Part VI: Culture and Identity (Chapters 27-31)

Checkpoints 27-31: Cultural portrait — music, literature, religion, foodways, craft, language and dialect

Part VII: Modern Appalachia (Chapters 32-38)

Checkpoints 32-38: Contemporary reality — economic transition, opioid crisis, political alignment, stereotypes and identity, new demographics, energy transition, healthcare access

Part VIII: Synthesis and Reflection (Chapters 39-42)

Checkpoints 39-42: Indigenous persistence, intersectional analysis, extraction framework application, contemporary voices

Not every checkpoint will have produced the same volume of material. Some chapters connected more directly to your county than others. A county in the Virginia Blue Ridge will have a different relationship to the coal chapters than a county on the West Virginia Appalachian Plateau. A county in northern Georgia will have a different Civil War story than a county in eastern Tennessee. That unevenness is not a problem. It is part of the story. The places where your county does not fit the textbook's general narrative are often the most interesting places in your history.

The Final Deliverable

Length and Format

Your completed county history should be 15 to 25 pages of polished narrative prose, double-spaced, in 12-point font with standard margins. This page range is a guideline, not a prison. A tightly written 14-page history that covers every era with depth and specificity is better than a padded 25-page history that repeats itself. But a 10-page history almost certainly lacks the depth that forty-two chapters of research should produce.

In addition to the narrative, your portfolio should include:

A title page with the county name, state, your name, and the date
A table of contents listing your major sections
A bibliography of all sources consulted, formatted in Chicago Manual of Style (Notes-Bibliography system preferred, but Author-Date is acceptable)
At least one map of your county (topographic, historical, or both)
Optional appendices — photographs, reproductions of primary source documents, data tables, family histories, or other supplementary material that enriches the narrative but would interrupt its flow

Required Structure

Your county history should follow the arc of this textbook — from the deep past to the present — but it should read as a continuous narrative, not as a collection of disconnected checkpoint responses stitched together. The transition from one era to the next should feel natural, because the history of a place is one continuous story, not a series of isolated episodes.

The following eight sections provide the required structure. You may adjust section titles to reflect the specific character of your county, but all eight dimensions of the county's history must be addressed.

Section 1: The Land

Approximate length: 1-2 pages

Begin with the physical place. Describe the terrain, the waterways, the geological resources, the climate. Explain which physiographic province your county occupies and what that means for the landscape. This section should establish the material foundation on which all subsequent history rests.

Do not treat this section as mere background. The geology of your county determined what could be grown, what could be extracted, where people could build, and how isolated or connected communities would be. The land is not the setting for the story. The land is one of the story's protagonists.

Draw from: Checkpoint 1

Section 2: The Original Inhabitants

Approximate length: 1-2 pages

Who lived here before European settlement? What Indigenous nations occupied, hunted, traded, or traveled through this land? What is the archaeological evidence? What do we know about their governance, agriculture, and spiritual relationship with the land?

This section should also address what happened to the Indigenous people of your county during the era of contact, colonization, and removal. Were they displaced? Removed? Did any remain? Is there an Indigenous presence today?

Do not treat Indigenous history as a brief prelude to "real" history that begins with European settlement. The Indigenous history of your county is the longest chapter in the county's story — thousands of years of human presence that was violently interrupted. Honor that.

Draw from: Checkpoints 2, 3, 4, and 39

Section 3: Settlement

Approximate length: 2-3 pages

When did European settlers arrive in your county? Where did they come from — Scotch-Irish, German, English, African (enslaved or free), or other origins? What were the migration routes? What was the early economy — subsistence farming, ginseng, salt, iron, livestock? Was there slavery, and if so, what forms did it take?

This section should also address the early community institutions — churches, schools, the informal networks of mutual aid — and the relationship between your county and the broader American nation during the Revolutionary and early Republic period.

Draw from: Checkpoints 5-10

Section 4: The Civil War and Its Aftermath

Approximate length: 1-2 pages

How did your county experience the Civil War? Was it divided between Union and Confederate sympathies, or was sentiment more uniform? What happened during the war itself — were there battles, raids, bushwhacker activity, destruction? What happened after — how did emancipation affect the county, and what were the experiences of newly freed Black residents?

This section may also address the post-war construction of Appalachian identity — the feud narratives, the "local color" writers, the outsider gaze — if these are relevant to your county's history.

Draw from: Checkpoints 11-14

Section 5: Industrial Transformation

Approximate length: 2-4 pages

This section covers the period that, for many Appalachian counties, was the most transformative: the arrival of industrial capitalism. If your county was a coalfield county, this section will be extensive — railroads, land agents, broad form deeds, company towns, labor wars, the human cost of extraction. If your county was a timber county, the story is different in detail but similar in structure — outside capital, rapid resource extraction, environmental devastation, community transformation.

If your county was not heavily industrialized, this section should explain why and describe what the county's economy looked like while neighboring counties were being transformed by coal or timber. Not every Appalachian county fits the extraction narrative, and the counties that do not fit it are valuable precisely because they complicate the story.

This section should also address out-migration. Did your county lose population during the great Appalachian out-migration of the mid-twentieth century? Where did people go? What was left behind?

Draw from: Checkpoints 15-21

Section 6: Reform, Resistance, and Federal Intervention

Approximate length: 1-2 pages

How did New Deal programs affect your county? What about the War on Poverty and the Appalachian Regional Commission? Has mountaintop removal affected the county's landscape? What has the history of education looked like? Most importantly, what is the county's tradition of resistance — have there been strikes, protests, legal challenges, community organizing?

This section connects your county's story to the national policy frameworks that shaped Appalachia in the twentieth century.

Draw from: Checkpoints 22-26

Section 7: Cultural Portrait

Approximate length: 2-3 pages

What are the distinctive cultural traditions of your county? What music is played and listened to? What food traditions have persisted? What religious communities anchor social life? What does Appalachian English sound like in this specific place? Are there craft traditions, storytelling traditions, festivals, or community gatherings that define the culture?

This section should treat culture as living — not as a museum exhibit of things people used to do, but as a set of practices that persist, evolve, and define community identity today.

Draw from: Checkpoints 27-31

Section 8: The Present and the Porch

Approximate length: 2-4 pages

What does your county look like right now? What is the economy? The demographics? The health outcomes? The political landscape? What are the major challenges — economic transition, healthcare access, broadband, housing, substance abuse? What are the sources of hope — community organizations, new industries, cultural vitality, the return of young people?

This section should also address the hard questions that the textbook's final chapters raised. Does the extraction pattern apply to your county? Has it been a sacrifice zone? Whose stories have been told, and whose have been left out of the historical record? What would John Gaventa's three-dimensional power analysis reveal about the political dynamics of this place?

End this section — and your county history — on the porch. What does this county look like from the perspective of the people who live here, right now, today? What are they proud of? What are they struggling with? What do they want the rest of the country to know?

Resist the impulse toward a triumphant ending or a tragic one. The story of an Appalachian county is not a redemption arc, and it is not a decline narrative. It is an ongoing, unfinished story. Honor that by letting the ending breathe.

Draw from: Checkpoints 32-38, 40, 41, 42

Assembly Instructions: From Checkpoints to Narrative

The transition from a collection of checkpoint responses to a coherent county history is the most challenging part of this project. Here is a process that works.

Step 1: Gather and Inventory

Collect all of your checkpoint responses in one place. Print them out if you work well on paper, or organize them in a single digital document. Read through them in order, making notes about:

Recurring themes — What patterns appear across multiple eras? Does the extraction pattern show up? The resistance tradition? The tension between insider identity and outsider perception?
Key turning points — What are the moments when your county changed dramatically? The arrival of the railroad? The coal boom? The mine closure? The opioid crisis?
Gaps — Where is your research thin? Which checkpoints produced less material, and what additional research might you need to do?
Surprises — What did you learn that contradicted your expectations? The surprises are often the most interesting parts of the story.
Missing voices — Whose experiences are underrepresented in your research? What can you do about that in the time remaining?

Step 2: Create a Timeline

Before you write a word of the final narrative, create a simple chronological timeline of your county's history. It does not need to be formal or beautiful — a handwritten list of dates and events on a sheet of paper will do. The timeline forces you to see the full arc of the county's story and to identify the moments of transition that will structure your narrative.

Step 3: Draft an Outline

Using the eight required sections as a framework, draft a section-by-section outline of your county history. Under each section heading, list the specific content you plan to include — the stories, the data, the primary source excerpts, the analytical arguments. This outline is your blueprint.

Step 4: Write the First Draft

Write your first draft without stopping to polish. The goal of the first draft is to get the story down on paper in a continuous narrative. You will revise later. For now, focus on the arc — on the feeling of one era flowing into the next, of a county's story unfolding across time.

A crucial principle: Do not simply paste your checkpoint responses together in order. Your checkpoints were written as discrete assignments, each responding to a specific chapter's prompt. Your county history needs to be a unified narrative — a story that reads as if it were written all at once, by someone who knows the whole story and is choosing how to tell it. That means rewriting, reorganizing, and synthesizing your checkpoint material into something new.

Step 5: Revise for Narrative Coherence

Read your first draft aloud. (This is not optional. Reading aloud catches problems that silent reading misses.) Listen for:

Repetition — Are you saying the same thing in multiple sections? Consolidate.
Abrupt transitions — Does the shift from one era to the next feel natural, or does it feel like you are jumping between disconnected assignments? Add transitional passages that connect the eras.
Tonal consistency — Does the whole document sound like it was written by the same person? If some sections are formal and analytical while others are narrative and personal, decide on a consistent approach and revise accordingly.
The thread — Is there a through-line that connects your county's past to its present? The best county histories have a central argument or theme — a sentence or two that captures what this particular county's story reveals about Appalachian history. Find your thread and make sure it is visible throughout.

Step 6: Fact-Check and Source

Before you submit, verify every factual claim against your sources. Check dates, names, population numbers, and event descriptions. Make sure every claim that is not common knowledge is supported by a cited source.

Your bibliography should include:

At least five primary sources — census records, land deeds, newspaper articles, oral histories, government reports, photographs, letters, or other original documents
At least five secondary sources — scholarly books, journal articles, county histories, or theses written by historians
Additional sources as needed — websites, databases, documentary films, museum exhibits, or other materials you consulted

Use Chicago Manual of Style citation format. Footnotes or endnotes are preferred for a work of narrative history, but parenthetical author-date citations are acceptable if your instructor permits them.

Formatting Guidelines

Font: 12-point serif font (Times New Roman, Garamond, or similar)
Spacing: Double-spaced body text; single-spaced block quotations and bibliography entries
Margins: 1-inch on all sides
Headings: Use clear section headings that reflect the content (e.g., "Harlan County Before Coal" rather than "Section 5: Industrial Transformation")
Maps and images: At least one map is required. All images should be captioned with source attribution. Place images near the relevant text, not in a separate appendix, unless they are supplementary.
Block quotations: Use for primary source excerpts longer than three lines. Introduce each quotation with context — who is speaking, when, and why it matters.
Page numbers: Required. Include a header or footer with your name and the county name.

Suggested Additional Sources

Your checkpoint research drew primarily on the sources suggested in each chapter's Further Reading section. For the final assembly, you may want to consult additional sources that provide county-level detail. The following are generally available and extremely useful:

Census and Demographic Data

U.S. Census Bureau (census.gov) — Historical census data by county, including population, race, occupation, and economic data, available from 1790 onward
American Community Survey — Five-year estimates provide detailed contemporary demographic, economic, and social data at the county level
National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) (nhgis.org) — Aggregated historical census data with mapping tools

Land and Property Records

County clerk's office — Deed books, mineral rights records, and land transactions (some now digitized)
Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force data — If your county was included in the 1981 study, the data on absentee ownership is invaluable

Newspaper Archives

Chronicling America (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) — Library of Congress database of digitized historical newspapers
Local newspaper archives — Many Appalachian newspapers have digitized back issues through local libraries or state archives

Oral History Collections

Appalachian Oral History Project at Alice Lloyd College and Lees-McRae College
Foxfire archives — Particularly strong for material culture and community traditions in southern Appalachia
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky — Extensive Appalachian oral history holdings
West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University

State and Regional Archives

State historical societies and archives for Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia
Appalachian Regional Commission (arc.gov) — County-level data on economic indicators, health, education, and infrastructure
University special collections — Virginia Tech, East Tennessee State University, Berea College, Appalachian State University, and Marshall University all hold significant Appalachian collections

Key Secondary Sources for County-Level Research

County histories published by local historical societies (check your county library and WorldCat)
Richard B. Drake, A History of Appalachia (2001) — Strong on county-level variation
John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (2002) — Excellent maps and geographic analysis
Ronald D. Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (2008) — Essential for the modern era
The Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2006), edited by Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell — County and topic entries

See also Appendix G: County Research Toolkit for a comprehensive guide to locating county-level sources across all eras.

Rubric Preview

Your county history will be assessed on five dimensions. (The full rubric is provided in the Capstone Rubric document.)

Historical Accuracy and Depth — Are your claims factually correct? Does the history cover all eight required sections with sufficient depth? Is the chronological arc complete?
Source Use and Evidence — Do you draw on at least five primary and five secondary sources? Are claims supported by evidence? Are sources cited properly? Do you evaluate the reliability and perspective of your sources?
Narrative Quality — Does the county history read as a unified, coherent narrative? Is the writing clear, specific, and engaging? Are transitions between eras smooth? Is there a discernible through-line or argument?
Thematic Connections — Does the history connect to the textbook's recurring themes — the extraction pattern, the resistance tradition, diversity, stereotype construction, Appalachian agency, living culture? Does it apply analytical frameworks (internal colonialism, Gaventa's three dimensions of power) where appropriate?
Inclusive Perspectives and Community Engagement — Does the history attend to diverse voices — Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, LGBTQ+, working-class? Does it identify whose stories are missing from the historical record? Does it treat the people of the county as protagonists of their own history, not objects of study?

The Community Impact Option

The best student work should not stay in a professor's filing cabinet.

If your county history meets the standards of accuracy, depth, and respectful representation, you are strongly encouraged to donate a copy to your county's public library or historical society. Many county libraries maintain local history collections, and a well-researched county history written by a student who spent a semester learning the methodology of Appalachian history is a genuine contribution to a community's self-knowledge.

How to Pursue the Community Impact Option

Contact the institution first. Call or email your county's public library, county historical society, or local heritage center. Explain the project and ask whether they would be interested in receiving a copy. Most will say yes. Some will be enthusiastic. A few may offer to help you with additional research.
Prepare a clean copy. Revise your history one additional time with a public audience in mind. Remove academic jargon that a general reader would not recognize. Add brief explanatory notes for concepts that are familiar to Appalachian Studies students but not to a general audience. Consider adding a brief author's note that explains the project and your connection to the county.
Format appropriately. A printed and bound copy (even from a campus print shop) signals that you take the work seriously. A PDF submitted by email is also acceptable. Ask the receiving institution which format they prefer.
Respect privacy and sensitivity. If your history discusses living individuals or recent events that are sensitive (opioid deaths, family conflicts, ongoing legal disputes), take extra care. Use pseudonyms for living individuals unless they are public figures or have given permission to be named. Consult your instructor if you are unsure.
Follow up. After donating, check in with the institution. Ask if they have questions or feedback. Ask if they know of other sources you might have missed. The relationship between a researcher and a community should not be extractive — you should give back more than you take.

A Note on Positionality

If you are researching a county that is not your home county — if you are an outsider studying someone else's place — be aware of the dynamics that Chapter 14 described. The history of Appalachia includes a long tradition of outsiders arriving with notebooks and cameras, extracting stories and images, and leaving with material that served the outsider's purposes while doing nothing for the community. You do not want to reproduce that pattern.

This does not mean outsiders cannot write good county histories. They can. But it does mean that you should be transparent about your position, humble about what you do not know, and genuinely interested in whether your work serves the community you are writing about.

If you are researching your own home county, a different challenge applies: the temptation to tell the story you already believe, rather than the story the evidence supports. Home counties come with inherited narratives — family stories, community pride, long-held grievances. These narratives are valuable sources, but they are not the same as history. Your job as a historian is to test the inherited narrative against the evidence and to tell the story that emerges, even when it is not the story you expected.

Final Counsel

You have spent a semester with one county. You know its ridgelines and its river systems, its founding families and its forgotten people, its moments of crisis and its traditions of endurance. You know more about this place than most people who have never lived there — and perhaps more about certain aspects of its history than many people who have lived there all their lives.

That knowledge is a responsibility.

The people whose stories you have researched were real. They were born, they worked, they loved, they suffered, they resisted, they created, they died. Some of their names are in the historical record and some are not. Some had power and some did not. Some were treated with dignity and some were not. Your county history is an act of recovery — an attempt to reconstruct, from the fragments that survive, the full complexity of human life in a particular place across a long span of time.

Tell the story honestly. Tell it with specificity — names, dates, places, evidence. Tell it with compassion — for the people who built the county and for the people who were harmed by how it was built. Tell it with humility — acknowledging what you do not know and cannot recover. And tell it with the conviction that this place matters, that its story is worth telling, and that the people who lived it deserve to be remembered accurately and whole.

The mountains were here before the county was named. They will be here after. But the human story of what happened in those hollows and on those ridges — that story is now yours to tell.

Tell it well.

Capstone Project 1 of 3 | Part 9: Capstone