Night Comes To The Cumberlands A Biography Of A Depressed Area

“At the time it was first published in 1962, it framed such an urgent appeal to the American conscience that it actually prompted the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency that has pumped millions of dollars into Appalachia. Caudill’s study begins in the violence of the Indian wars and ends in the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s. Two hundred years ago, the Cumberland Plateau was a land of great promise. Its deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands. The surrounding mountains were teeming with game and covered with valuable timber. The people who came into this land scratched out a living by farming, hunting, and making all the things they need-including whiskey. The quality of life in Appalachia declined during the Civil War and Appalachia remained “in a bad way” for the next century. By the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Appalachia had become an island of poverty in a national sea of plenty and prosperity. Caudill’s book alerted the mainstream world to our problems and their causes. Since then the ARC has provided millions of dollars to strengthen the brick and mortar infrastructure of Appalachia and to help us recover from a century of economic problems that had greatly undermined our quality of life.”-Print ed.

2019 Reprint of 1963 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. The biography of the Cumberland Plateau in Appalachia begins in the violence of the Indian Wars and ends in the despair of the idle miners living off Welfare. Two hundred years ago the plateau was a land of promise. The deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands; the mountainsides, teeming with game, produced mighty timer. The people who settled this land in the eighteenth century were the sweepings of the English slums--but they produced great explorers like Simon Kenton and Jim Bridger. They lived by scratch farming, hunting and moonshine whiskey. The Civil War ravaged the land, leaving in its wake a legacy of hate which erupted into the great Kentucky mountain feuds and continued in the "Moonshine Wars" of the Prohibition Era. When Caudill first wrote in 1962 the Cumberland Plateau was a wasteland of refuse-clogged streams, sterile hillsides, abandoned company towns and great piles of slag and rusting automobiles. The people were often illiterate, clannish and grim, but their fighting spirit was sapped and many, if not most, lived on welfare, which they regarded as their right. Schools were atrocious where they existed and the remaining coal was being ruthlessly gouged out by strip mining operations that, ironically, fed the gargantuan industrial complex of the TVA. The publication of this book was a clarion call to action to address the distress of this region and resulted in the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency that has pumped millions of dollars into Appalachia.

Caudill explores the southern Appalachian Mountains area's history, from its first settlement to the Civil War, and from the rise of coal barons to the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s.

This book of stories celebrates people who have a magnetism, a tenacity, a personal vision, an independence, and a self-sufficiency that elude most of us today.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands, A Biography of a Depressed Area by Harry M. Caudill, first published in 1963, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

Excerpt from Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area Although Caudill has called his book A Biography of a Depressed Area, it is also the story of what other parts of America might have been, if we had not developed a land ethic and formulated a system atic conservation program. Ironically, not far away from the dark and bloody ground of the Cumberland Plateau is the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's highest benchmark in land use and regional planning of resources. But a few years ago the Congress drew a wall around tva, and its proximity only serves now to dramatize the contrast between the social health and well-being that accompany wise development of resources, and the poverty of land and Spirit that can occur in absence of such planning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Appalachia on Our Mind is not a history of Appalachia. It is rather a history of the American idea of Appalachia. The author argues that the emergence of this idea has little to do with the realities of mountain life but was the result of a need to reconcile the "otherness" of Appalachia, as decribed by local-color writers, tourists, and home missionaries, with assumptions about the nature of America and American civilization. Between 1870 and 1900, it became clear that the existence of the "strange land and peculiar people" of the southern mountains challenged dominant notions about the basic homogeneity of the American people and the progress of the United States toward achiving a uniform national civilization. Some people attempted to explain Appalachian otherness as normal and natural -- no exception to the rule of progress. Others attempted the practical integration of Appalachia into America through philanthropic work. In the twentieth century, however, still other people began questioning their assumptions about the characteristics of American civilization itself, ultimately defining Appalachia as a region in a nation of regions and the mountaineers as a people in a nation of peoples. In his skillful examination of the "invention" of the idea of Appalachia and its impact on American thought and action during the early twentieth century, Mr. Shapiro analyzes the following: the "discovery" of Appalachia as a field for fiction by the local-color writers and as a field for benevolent work by the home missionaries of the northern Protestant churches; the emergence of the "problem" of Appalachia and attempts to solve it through explanation and social action; the articulation of a regionalist definition of Appalachia and the establishment of instituions that reinforced that definition; the impact of that regionalistic definition of Appalachia on the conduct of systematic benevolence, expecially in the context of the debate over child-labor restriction and the transformation of philanthropy into community work; and the attempt to discover the bases for an indigenous mountain culture in handicrafts, folksong, and folkdance.