APST 650 - Appalachian Cultural Competency for Professionals

Credits: (3)

With a focus on several sub-regions of Appalachia, students will gain an historical understanding of how local color writers, stereotypes, natural resource extraction, and political economies in these areas have influenced their current conditions. Students will be exposed to an overview of the history of the Appalachian Region from its earliest European explorers and their interaction with Native Americans to its settlement by various ethnic groups. There will be an emphasis on events in the late 19th century up to the latter 20th and early 21st centuries and how these events have shaped the formation of the Appalachian region, residents’ identities, and the creation and continual evolution of a formal Appalachian Studies discipline that began in the 1960s.