Resources for Public School Teachers

by Wilma A. Dunaway

Publications and Lectures that Challenge Mythology about Appalachia

Visual & Illustrative Aids about Appalachian Slavery   

Links to Electronic Sources about Appalachian Slavery  

Published Antebellum Source Materials about Appalachian Slavery   

Resource Materials about 19th Century Appalachian Women  

Contact the Author

Publications and Lectures that Challenge Mythology about Appalachia

• Books about Appalachia and Slavery

• Lecture "Romantic Idealism Dies Hard: Challenging Scholarly Mythology about Southern Appalachia."

• Lecture  “ Slavery and the Black Appalachian Family.”

• "Diaspora, Death and Sexual Exploitation: Slave Families at Risk in the Mountain South" Appalachian Journal  26 (Winter 1999)

•  "The 'Disremembered' of the Antebellum South: A New Look at the Invisible Labor of Poor Women" Critical Sociology 21 (3) (Fall 1995): 89-106

• "The Incorporation of Mountain Ecosystems into the Capitalist World-System"  Review of the Fernand Braudel Center 19 (1996)

• "Put in Master's Pocket: Interstate Slave Trading and the Black Appalachian Diaspora" In Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, edited by John  Inscoe (University Press of Kentucky, 2000)

• "The Spatial Organization of Trade and Class Struggle over Transport Infrastructure: Southern Appalachia, 1830-1860"   In Space and Transport in the World-System,  edited by Stephen Bunker and Paul Cicantell (Greenwood Press, 1998)

• "Speculators and Settler Capitalists: Unthinking the Mythology about Appalachian Landholding, 1790-1860"  In Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century,  edited by Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight Billings, and Altina Waller (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

• "Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation: Women's Resistance to Agrarian Capitalism and Cultural Change, 1800-1838"  American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21 (Spring 1997)

• "Women at Risk: Capitalist Incorporation and Community Transformation on the Cherokee Frontier"  In A World-Systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples and Ecology, edited by Thomas D. Hall ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999)

  Visual & Illustrative Aids about Appalachian Slavery

• Map Where is Southern Appalachia?       For a list of counties, click here

• Map Trade and Slave Trading Routes in 19th century Southern Appalachia

• Images of Slavery in Appalachian Virginia

• Images of Enslaved Appalachian Children

Links to Electronic Sources about Appalachian Slavery

• Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the Antebellum Mountain South [An electronic Library Archive]

• Wilma A. Dunaway, Articles and Book Chapters about Appalachia 

• “Slaves and Courts, 1740-1860,” Library of Congress

• “Virginia Runaway Slaves Project”

• “Valley of the Shadow”  [Website about two communities during the Civil War]

• Virtual Jamestown

• “North American Slave Narratives,” University of North Carolina, contains most of these narratives.

• The Library of Congress website provides access to many of the narratives online.

•  The Library of Congress exhibit “American Memory”  includes discussion of content from the slave narratives.

• “Personal Narratives of the American South

• “The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865"

Published Antebellum Source Materials about Appalachian Slavery

1. How to Locate Slave Narratives from the WPA Collection   The entire collection has been published in these 41 volumes.

• The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, compiled by George Rawick (Greenwood Press, 1972).

• The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement I, compiled by George Rawick (Greenwood Press, 1977).

• The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement II, compiled by George Rawick (Greenwood Press, 1979).

2. Personal Narratives of Poor Whites

• The Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires. Compiled by Gustavus W. Dyer and John T. Moore (Southern Historical Press, 1985).