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Reviewed by:
  • Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War's Aftermath
  • Matt Wray (bio)
Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War's Aftermath. Edited by Andrew L. Slap. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Pp. 379. Cloth, $40.00.)

If this edited volume has a recurring theme, it is that the historical period most crucial to the fate of Appalachia is also the one most neglected by historians. The book's thirteen essays, covering 1865-1910, showcase the work of young historians alongside that of seasoned veterans. They effectively make the case for placing the era of Reconstruction at the center of historical analysis of Appalachia. As editor Andrew Slap correctly notes in the first chapter, there are two major historical explanations for the region's persistent poverty and underdevelopment. The first points to particularly exploitive patterns of industrialization from 1880 to 1920 as the major culprit, while a second argument locates the seeds of impoverishment in the antebellum era. Moreover, as Gordon McKinney points out in his fine introduction, previous studies of both eras have failed to offer consistent findings about patterns of economic, political, and cultural development in the region.

These keen insights nicely frame one of the central questions motivating this book: Have we been looking for answers in the right place, but the wrong time? By focusing on the neglected years covered in this volume, we're told, we may discover the true genesis of Appalachian poverty. After all, the war and its aftermath were a period of massive economic, social, political, and cultural upheaval for the nation. Was this not also true in Appalachia? The essays provide ample evidence that indeed it was and that such historical ruptures could be the fissures through which the region fell into a state of continued social disrepair. Events in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia are given deep consideration, and these case studies testify to the destructiveness of the war throughout Appalachia.

Unfortunately, these essays do not help us resolve long-standing historiographical debates about the region. As Slap himself notes, the essays "do not paint a coherent portrait" of Appalachia during Reconstruction. It is a measure of the difficulties facing this field right now that these essays often come to opposite conclusions about key empirical questions. [End Page 576]

One reason for this incoherence, in the volume as well as the field, is that the theoretical assumptions are misleading. The contributors offer different answers, for instance, to the question of whether Appalachia's underdevelopment results from its cultural isolation from the rest of modernizing America or from intentional economic underdevelopment by outsiders who wish to keep it as a peripheral economy serving the needs of the core. The historical evidence, at this point, supports both positions. In terms of theory, this evidence suggests—contrary to the either/or formulation of the debate—important interactions between the forces of integration and isolation. Economic integration does not always lead to cultural integration, particularly if the natives are in no mood to get with the program. Yet cultural resistance to assimilation (a more precise concept than "isolation") does not always impede economic integration.

A second difficulty is methodological. Debates about the significance of varying degrees of isolation and integration are pitched at a level of generalization (e.g., what makes Appalachia's history so distinct?) that the single-case-study method cannot logically bear. The problem is that there is no logical warrant for inferring from counties or states to the level of the region. This is a version of what social scientists call the ecological fallacy. It's always possible that the carefully selected case study is the exception, not the rule. Historians of Appalachia may be debating questions that their usual methods—place-based cases studies—cannot answer. Individual case studies do not scale well geographically, especially in regions known for internal heterogeneity. Separate county- or state-level case studies cannot simply be aggregated to produce definitive facts about the larger region within which they are embedded.

Ken Fones-Wolf 's chapter on the intersection of economics and politics in West Virginia comes closest to what is needed: a detailed study that offers a robust theoretical framework designed to...

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