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Socially Relevant History: Appalachian Kentucky in the Twentieth Century

Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area has recently reached the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.1 That book, first appearing in 1963, explored the historical roots of poverty in eastern Kentucky, and its interpretations set the stage for analysis of regional history for the next several decades. Caudill argued that the history of eastern Kentucky was mainly a story of degradation and dysfunction, an approach that echoed media presentations of the region at that time and ever since. For Caudill, dysfunction came from both internal and external sources—internally from a deficient genetic stock at the time of white re-settlement, plus a recurring brain drain through out-migration, and externally through exploitation from coal corporations.2 Although stories of internal dysfunction in Appalachia (in Kentucky and elsewhere in the mountains) had a long pedigree, the indictment of the coal industry as essentially