No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Race Differences in the Origins and Consequences of Chronic Poverty in Rural Appalachia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Much of what is known about how Appalachians cope with chronic poverty is the result of the landmark Beech Creek studies, a series of investigations of an impoverished, geographically isolated group of neighborhoods in eastern Kentucky (Brown 1952a, 1952b, 1988 [1950]; Schwarzweller et al. 1971; McCoy 1986). In 1942 James Brown purposefully selected a remote, nonmining area in rural Clay County, Kentucky, to document a way of life that was less deeply affected by the penetration of commodity, labor, and consumer markets than were Appalachian coalfield communities at the time. Brown’s detailed ethnographic observations of subsistence farming, social stratification, and family and community life, together with subsequent studies of residents and out-migrants from Beech Creek, provide the best empirical record of the strategies by which Appalachian persisters and migrants have coped with chronic, intergenerational poverty.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Social Science History Association 1996
References
Agresti, B. (1978) “The first decades of freedom: Black families in a southern county, 1870 and 1885.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 40: 697–706.Google Scholar
Aries, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Baldick, Robert. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Banks, A. (1980) “Labor and the development of industrial capitalism in eastern Kentucky, 1870-1930.” Ph.D. diss., McMaster University.Google Scholar
Billings, D., and Blee, K. (1991) “Family strategies in a subsistence economy: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942.” Sociological Perspectives 33: 63–88.Google Scholar
Billings, D., and Blee, K. (1995) “Agriculture and poverty in the Kentucky mountains: Beech Creek, 1850–1910,” in Pudup, M., Billings, D., and Waller, A. (eds.) Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 233-69.Google Scholar
Blee, K., and Billings, D. (1986) “Reconstructing daily life in the past: A hermeneutic approach to ethnographic data.” Sociological Quarterly 27: 443-62.Google Scholar
Brown, J. (1952a) “The conjugal family and the extended family group in a Kentucky mountain farming community.” American Sociological Review 7: 297–305.Google Scholar
Brown, J. (1952b) “The farm family in a Kentucky mountain neighborhood.” Bulletin 587. Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station.Google Scholar
Brown, J. (1988 [1950]) Beech Creek: A Study of a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood. Berea, KY: Berea College Press.Google Scholar
Burton, O. (1985) In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, J. (1969 [1921]) The Southern Highlander and his Homeland. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Clay County (1871, 1879, 1892) Tax rolls. Kentucky State Library and Archives, Frankfort.Google Scholar
Clay County Deed Books. (1840-1900) Miscellaneous deeds. Clay County Office of the County Clerk, Manchester, Kentucky.Google Scholar
Corbin, D. (1981) Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922. Working Class in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Elder, G. Jr., (1974) Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Eller, R. (1982) Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930. Twentieth-Century America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Eller, R. (1994) “Kentucky’s distressed communities: A report on poverty in Appalachian Kentucky.” Lexington: University of Kentucky, Appalachian Center.Google Scholar
Gaventa, J. (1980) Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Glascoe, L. (1978) “Migration and adjustment in the nineteenth-century city: Occupation, property, and household structure of native-born whites, Buffalo, New York, 1855,” in Hareven, T. and Vinovskis, M. (eds.) Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America. Quantitative Studies in History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 154-78.Google Scholar
Gordon, L., and McLanahan, S. (1991) “Single parenthood in 1900.” Journal of Family History 16: 97–116.Google Scholar
Hahn, S. (1985) “The unmaking of the southern yeomanry: The transformation of the Georgia upcountry, 1860-1890,” in Hahn, S. and Prude, J. (eds.) The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 179–203.Google Scholar
Holt, S. (1994) “Making freedom pay: Freedpeople working for themselves, North Carolina, 1865-1900.” Journal of Southern History 60: 229-62.Google Scholar
Inscoe, J. (1989) Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, L. (1927) “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia.” Journal of Negro History 12: 365-88.Google Scholar
Jones, J. (1992) The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Kenzer, R. (1987) Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849-1881. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Kephart, H. (1976 [1913]) Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
King, M. (1990) “All in the family? The incompatibility and reconciliation of family demography and family history.” Historical Methods 23: 32–40.Google Scholar
Lewis, R. (1987) Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Lewis, R. (1989) “From peasant to proletarian: The migration of southern blacks to the central Appalachian Coalfields.” Journal of Southern History 55: 77–102.Google Scholar
McCoy, V. (1986) “Solidarity and integration of migrant family groups.” Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati.Google Scholar
McLanahan, S. (1985) “Family structure and the reproduction of poverty.” American Journal of Sociology 90: 873–901.Google Scholar
Mitchell, R., ed. (1991) Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Morgan, S., McDaniel, A., Miller, A., and Preston, S. (1993) “Racial differences in household and family structure at the turn of the century.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 798–828.Google Scholar
Murphy, J. (1982) “Slavery and freedom in Appalachia: Kentucky as a demographic case study.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 80: 151-69.Google Scholar
Pudup, M., Billings, D., and Waller, A., eds. (1995) Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Ruggles, S. (1986) “Availability of kin and the demography of historical family structure.” Historical Methods 19: 93–102.Google Scholar
Ruggles, S. (1990) “Family demography and family history: Problems and prospects.” Historical Methods 23: 22–30.Google Scholar
Ruggles, S. (1994a) “The origins of African-American family structure.” American Sociological Review 59:136-51.Google Scholar
Ruggles, S. (1994b) “The transformation of American family structure.” American Historical Review 99:103-28.Google Scholar
Schwarzweller, H., Brown, J., and Mangalam, J. (1971) Mountain Families in Transition: A Case Study of Appalachian Migration. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Schweninger, L. (1990a) Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. Blacks in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Schweninger, L. (1990b) “Property owning free African-American women in the South, 1800–1870.” Journal of Women’s History 1:13–44.Google Scholar
Shapiro, H. (1978) Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Smith, D., Dahlin, M., and Friedberger, M. (1979) “The family structure of the older black population in the American South in 1880 and 1900.” Sociology and Social Research 63: 544-65.Google Scholar
Stack, C. (1974) All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Stuckert, R. (1987) “Black populations of the southern Appalachian mountains.” Phylon 48: 141-51.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1973) The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970. Harvard Studies in Urban History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tolnay, S., and Beck, E. (1992) “Racial violence and black migration in the American South, 1910 to 1930.” American Sociological Review 57: 103-16.Google Scholar
Trotter, J. Jr., (1990) Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32. Blacks in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Turner, W., and Cabbell, E., eds. (1985) Blacks in Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1850-80a) Manuscript censuses of agriculture. Microfilm. Special Collections, University of Kentucky Library, Lexington.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1850–80b, 1900-1910) Manuscript censuses of population. Microfilm. Special Collections, University of Kentucky Library, Lexington.Google Scholar
Walker, J. (1983) “The legal status of free blacks in early Kentucky.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 57: 382-95.Google Scholar
Waller, A. (1988) Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Wright, G. (1990) Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar