“A significant contribution to the current understanding of southern Appalachia’s place within the South and the nation.” —The Journal of American History

Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties.

Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe’s essays consider a multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. Devoting attention to how truths from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations, he considers novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how their work has contributed much to either our understanding?or misunderstanding?of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination.

“Each essay is a gem of historical and critical analysis that adds greatly to our understanding of the Appalachian past.” —Dwight Billings, coeditor of Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century