This week on Inside Appalachia, a Pittsburgh artist channels the Steel City’s mythology and struggles into tarot cards. Western North Carolina author Ron Rash shares his thoughts on writing about Appalachians. And we hear about efforts in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to return a young bald eagle to the wild.
This week on Inside Appalachia, Appalachians are often called mountaineers but are they also "pioneers?" A new documentary reckons with what it means… to be a pioneer. In Michigan, an Appalachian mountain man competes in a championship tournament, for skipping stones and we wade into a mountain wetland to search for one of the region’s most elusive creatures.
Politically, Appalachia encompasses 423 counties across 13 states and West Virginia’s the only state entirely inside the region. That leaves so much room for geographic and cultural variation, as well as many different views on what Appalachia really is. For Inside Appalachia, we turned our entire episode over to the question, “What is Appalachia?”
This week on Inside Appalachia, Rev. George Mills Dickerson of Tazewell, Virginia was born in the years after slavery ended. He’s remembered today through his poetry. And a new wave of black lung disease is ravaging Appalachia. We’ll hear more from a black lung town hall in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Coal miners have their own thoughts about black lung, too.