Capstone: The Community History Portfolio
Throughout this book, at the end of every chapter, you have been building something. A piece at a time, county by county, source by source, you have assembled the raw materials of a local history — the geology, the Indigenous foundations, the settlement patterns, the industrial transformation, the cultural life, the modern realities of one Appalachian county. Now it is time to put those pieces together.
The Community History Portfolio is the capstone project of this course. It asks you to do what this textbook has tried to do for the region as a whole: tell the story of a place with honesty, complexity, and respect for the people who lived there. Not a story that flattens. Not a story that romanticizes or pities. A story that reckons with what happened — who came, who was displaced, what was built, what was extracted, what was lost, what endures — and that gives voice to the people whose voices are usually left out of the official record.
You have been gathering materials all semester. Your geological and geographic profile from Part One. Your settlement and demographic research from Part Two. Your Civil War and post-war analysis from Part Three. Your industrial history from Part Four. Your account of federal intervention and resistance from Part Five. Your cultural portrait from Part Six. Your modern profile from Part Seven. Your synthesis and reflection from Part Eight. Each piece was designed to teach you a skill — archival research, census analysis, oral history, cultural documentation, critical interpretation — and each piece was designed to connect your county's story to the larger patterns of Appalachian history.
The final portfolio is a 15-to-25-page county history that weaves these components into a coherent narrative. It is not a scrapbook. It is not a collection of disconnected facts. It is a work of historical writing, grounded in evidence, structured by argument, and animated by the conviction that local history matters — that the story of what happened in one hollow, one county, one community is not small or insignificant but is, in fact, the scale at which history is actually lived.
Three tracks are available for the capstone, and your instructor will specify which are open in your section:
Track A: The Written Portfolio. A traditional research paper, 15-25 pages, with primary and secondary sources, a clear thesis, and a narrative structure. This is the default track and the one most suitable for students in history, English, and the social sciences.
Track B: The Digital Exhibit. A web-based or multimedia presentation that incorporates maps, photographs, oral history audio, data visualizations, and narrative text. This track is suitable for students with digital skills and is especially appropriate when source materials are visual or geographic in nature.
Track C: The Oral History Collection. A curated collection of three to five oral history interviews with residents of your chosen county, accompanied by a 10-page analytical essay that contextualizes the interviews within the themes of the course. This track requires access to interview subjects and should be chosen only with instructor approval. Appendix F, the Oral History Guide, provides detailed methodology.
Whichever track you choose, the capstone should demonstrate three things. First, that you can locate, evaluate, and synthesize primary and secondary sources about a specific Appalachian community. Second, that you can connect a local story to the larger themes of Appalachian history — extraction, resistance, diversity, cultural resilience, the relationship between mountains and power. Third, that you understand what it means to tell a community's story responsibly: whose voices you centered, whose you could not find, and what silences remain in the record.
The mountains are full of stories that have never been written down. Some of them are in your county. This is your chance to find them.