Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia ed. by Bruce E. Stewart (review)

For generations, Appalachia was defined as an exceptional region with a people geographically and socially isolated and violent toward outsiders. This faulty and stereotypical view is continually reinforced in popular culture and news documentary programs on the region. Since the 1970s, revisionist scholars have altered this poor representation. A pioneering example was Altina Waller's reexamination of the famous Hatfield-McCoy Feud. She persuasively argued that rapid industrialization of the Tug Valley intensified the local tensions. However, there remains much work to do in order to clarify the image of the feuding, murderous mountaineer.

Bruce Stewart's edited volume Blood in the Hills collects some of the most cutting-edge scholarship to argue that Appalachian violence was a "response to the larger economic, social, and political forces" shaping the nation as a whole (3). These essays cover a sweep of time from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. This is a useful strategy. Building off of Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind (1978), the volume shows how local color writers and middle-class Victorians created the "myth" of Appalachia. "Inventing" a violent society helped "project their own fears about economic modernization" onto a people seemingly different (5-6). While similar to Waller's argument, this new volume dates the roots of stereotypes back to the frontier era. Throughout, the authors contend the region was not exceptionally ferocious, and that violent acts were often products of local and regional power struggles (6).

The volume is divided into four chronological sections. The first covers the period of frontier conflict. Essays by Kevin Barksdale on the "State of Franklin" in the Upper Tennessee Valley and Tyler Boulware's essay on Cherokee policies highlight the level of political instability in this "borderland" region between colonial administrators, white settlers, and Native peoples. A common theme was divisions between local powerbrokers. Boulware's essay is useful in showing how Cherokee headsmen used the overzealousness of young warriors as a diplomatic weapon against European encroachment on their lands (82).

The section on the antebellum period uses cultural analysis to highlight the fashioning of Appalachian myths. Essays by John Inscoe and Katherine E. Ledford show how literature fostered a perception of the inherently violent character of mountain people. Inscoe focuses on William Gilmore Simms's border romances set in the northern Georgia mining regions. These works, more akin to Western novels, contrasted the "ordered society of the plantation South and the unbridled license of the far frontier" (116). Likewise Ledford argues that travel writings tell readers more about the writers' own social fears than about the region per se. By defining "the other" as a backward highlander, Ledford argues this provided comfort for the middle-class, Northern, travel writers (128).

The next section examines the late nineteenth century. A strong attachment to localism often led highlanders to fear a loss of autonomy to political elites and outside forces. Bruce Stewart shows how these fears gained traction during the Moonshine Wars of the late 1870s. Even with resistance elsewhere, "semi-barbarian" mountaineers became the focus of federal government enforcement. Few spoke of how "distilled spirits" served as a form of necessary cash in the mountains, or that most highlanders saw these taxes as a challenge to local control (185-186). Addressing the late nineteenth century feuds, T.R.C. Hutton argues persuasively that the myth of the gun-toting hillbilly feudist masked that feuds in eastern Kentucky were "calculated acts of violence" by local political elites seeking political hegemony (16). In Hutton's piece, local Democrats sponsored political assassinations of Republican challengers. To hide their motives, they publicized the violence as an extension of an ongoing "family feud" (274).

The final section examines early twentieth century coalfield violence and mob actions. Paul Rakes and Ken Bailey show how historians need to balance the traditional narrative of labor strife with discussions of "non-strike...