Review of Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Sociologists have been fascinated by the Appalachians ever since George Vincent of the University of Chicago took a four-day horseback ride through Breathitt, Perry, and Knott Counties in eastern Kentucky in 1898. Urging study of "this curious social . . .

Recent discussions of planned social change have organized interventive strategies into models which identify underlying philosophical assumptions, value orientations, and political perspectives. Two papers published in 1965 can be taken as the beginn . . .

The Bicentennial is also the approximate centennial of the "discovery" of Southern Appalachia as a unique subcultural region by the writers of the "local-color" movement in the mid-1870's. Within twenty years the missionary movement had transformed th . . .

John F. Kennedy to West Virginia, introducing him to the poverty of the central Appalachian coalfields as he waged a successful battle against Hubert Humphrey in the Democratic primary. Kennedy's confrontation with West Virginia's poverty led to sever . . .