Overview

Our NEH summer institute for teachers, Power and Place: Land and Peoples in Appalachia, will use insights from the study of environmental history to examine the role of landscape in the shaping of culture and history, with the Southern Appalachians as a case study. The content will be the complex history and culture of the Southern Appalachians. The method will be to employ the perspectives of environmental history to tell the story of the region from a fresh and compelling perspective.  Using the story of Appalachia as an example, we will see how an environmental history approach encourages an interdisciplinary approach to a subject and presents an excellent opportunity for team teaching in the classroom.

Environmental history brings nature into the human story, giving a new vantage point to examine traditional themes. As the historian William Cronon observed in Academe our “stories about the past are more complete, if they increase our attention to nature and the place of people within it.” This is a particularly fruitful approach when applied to the history of Appalachia for the region’s dramatic landscape and rich natural resources have been crucial in shaping its economy, its politics, its literature and its music, as well as its relationship to the rest of the country.

The award winning PBS series, APPALACHIA: A History of Mountains and Peoples, will set the stage for three weeks of intensive research into the history and culture of a fascinating and often misunderstood region. Leading scholars in the field as well as some of the region’s most accomplished novelists, poets and filmmakers will guide discussions and research using original sources as well as recent research in the field

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.