Frederick Douglass is well known in history as a formerly enslaved person who became a prominent writer, activist and abolitionist. But his travels in Central Appalachia and the speeches he gave specifically around West Virginia are much less known. Community historian John Muller has been documenting Douglass’ life for more […]
Read More
Appalachia has many strengths and faces many challenges. Some of those are addressed in a new book produced by the Ohio Valley ReSource, a public media reporting collaborative made up of reporters from West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. The book is titled “Appalachian Fall: Dispatches from Coal Country on What’s Ailing […]
Read More
Many families have turned to video conferencing apps like Zoom and Skype to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic. Those online conversations can also serve a larger purpose — to capture family oral histories. Oral histories are, at their simplest, recordings of memories. They have been around since the earliest days of reel-to-reel […]
Read More
On June 25, 1980, Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed in Pocahontas County. They were on the way to the Rainbow Family Gathering, an annual meeting of hippies and other like-minded people that celebrate peace, harmony and freedom held at different national forests across the country. The murders captivated […]
Read More
In February 1968, U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy visited eastern Kentucky to investigate the successes and the failures of the “War on Poverty.” In the new book “All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia,” author Matthew Algeo examined the trip and digs into what Kennedy saw, what has […]
Read More
The Melungeon people of east Tennessee were isolated and discriminated against throughout much of their history. They began to be “othered” in the 1800s for being mixed-race Appalachians. Melungeons are considered a tri-racial isolate, meaning they are a combination of traits from multiple ethnic backgrounds, thus, creating their own unique […]
Read More