[at-l] Encyclopedia of Appalachian..doh!

[pmags at yahoo.com (Paul Magnanti)]

Sorry..my first attempt was cut off.

Anyway, if you are interested in not just the trail
about also the unqiue geographial, cultural and
historical area this trail passes through, you may
find the book of interest.

Original link:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06073/669920.stm

Article:
Encyclopedia opens window on Appalachia

Tuesday, March 14, 2006
By Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In 1,860 pages, heavy as a big chunk of coal, a new
Encyclopedia of Appalachia aims to tell people a few
things they don't know about the oft-mythic mountain
region.

	
	
For more information or to order a copy of the
Encyclopeda of Appalachia, visit www.etsu.edu.


Rudy Abramson, the tome's co-editor, believes
Pittsburgh is more a part of the region than many
people think, and points out that it was the steel
industry and Pittsburgh banks that "played such an
overarching role in the exploitation of the timber and
coal down in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky."

One objective for the project was to "disabuse" people
of negative notions, including Appalachians
themselves. "But we wanted to get it right more than
anything else," said Mr. Abramson, a former Washington
correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, who now lives
in Reston, Va. He was 58 when the project started a
decade ago. He's delighted that it's finished and
thinks it can be useful in many ways.

"One of the things this book does is show what an
incredibly diverse place the region is, not just in
terms of culture, but also in ecology and business,"
said Mr. Abramson.

Among the unexpected facts he learned is that the
region is home to more than 50 species of orchids, as
well as 100 colonies of the rare box huckleberry, one
of the oldest known living plants. One colony, thought
to be 13,000 years old, is located in Pennsylvania's
Perry County.

Of course, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh are just a tiny
part of the federally defined 13-state region. Western
Pennsylvania is not part of Appalachia's five-state
"core" -- "where the affinity of history, culture, the
economy, and the mountain land is strongest" -- but
neighboring West Virginia is.

The book, which is being published by The Center for
Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee
State University and the University of Tennessee
Pressk, drew funding from many sources, including the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

The project's vast cast of more than 1,500 includes
editorial board members and section editors from
Juniata College, the University of Pittsburgh at
Titusville, West Virginia University and Youngstown
State University. Other contributors from the
Pittsburgh area wrote articles, many with local
flavor.


There are entries on Pittsburgh Brewing Co. and Iron
City beer, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and Fallingwater,
and references to many other area individuals and
institutions, from the Crawfords, a Negro League
baseball team, to the Post-Gazette, the first
newspaper this side of the mountains that give the
region its name.

The 2,000 entries and 300 photographs and
illustrations are divided into 30 sections in five
major divisions: The Landscape, The People, Work and
the Economy, Cultural Traditions, and Institutions.

The work embraces a huge range of topics, some
scholarly, presented to be readable by a wide
audience. Leafing through, one might stop at "New Deal
Communities," "Coon Dog Cemetery," Wheeling's "Marsh
Stogies," "Coverlets," "Dried Apple Stack Cake,"
"Skillet Lickers," "Gays and Lesbians," "Backsliding,"
"Knotts, Don," "Grandfather Mountain" and "Fatback
(see Pork)."

Who knew that the long-running hillbilly comic strip
"Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" gave us the terms
"heebie jeebies" and "horsefeathers"?

As laid out in its introduction, the encyclopedia
attempts to document Appalachia as not a social and
economic problem, but as a real, if often redefined
and constantly changing, place -- one that is "too
diverse to generalize about."

As Mr. Abramson's co-editor, Jean Haskell, concludes
in her "Hillbilly" article, "The hillbilly both
attracts and repels, representing both the complexity
of Appalachia and the ambivalence about the region in
the public mind."

The book is to debut officially on Friday at the
Appalachian Studies Association conference "Both Ends
of the Road: Making the Appalachian Connection," at
Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. (About
four hours west of Pittsburgh and just outside
Appalachia's boundaries, Dayton became home to many
Appalachian migrants in the 1950s and '60s; Mr.
Abramson believes holding the gathering there may
signal a shift toward more interest in northern
Appalachia.)

The book, at $79.95 (at most bookstores and online
sellers), is targeted more to schools and other
institutions than individual buyers, as are others in
the growing oeuvre of regional and state
encyclopedias.

The editors hope funding comes through for digital and
perhaps children's versions and regular updates.

The encyclopedia notes that rather than a finished
product, they "look upon it as a beginning, a
cornerstone of a regional reference that will be
increasingly accessible, relevant and useful."

************************************************************
The true harvest of my life is intangible.... a little stardust 
caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched
--Thoreau
http://www.magnanti.com