Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia ed. by Aaron D. Purcell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia ed. by Aaron D. Purcell Madison Cates Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia. Edited by Aaron D. Purcell. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 283. $48.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-589-9.) Displacement narratives have long occupied a central place in Appalachian literature and film. Fictionalized stories of love, conflict, and loss that unfold when Duke Power or the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) come to town appear in works ranging from Ron Rash's novels to the star-studded 1960 film Wild River. Taking such legacies of dams and lost towns as its starting point, Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, a [End Page 802] collection of essays edited by Aaron D. Purcell, offers a cohesive and welcome antidote to the relative paucity of historical studies on loss and displacement in the modern South. Of course, prominent works by economic and environmental historians do show well how dams and national parks reshaped the modern South. But few of these histories have centered the local experiences and memories of displacement fundamental to the region's twentieth-century history as effectively as Lost in Transition. Not simply a critique of the bureaucratic "progress narrative" that was central to public and private land actions, this collection shows the power of local histories to peel back the layers of the physical and imagined landscapes of the South and reveal pasts often hidden in plain sight (p. 216). Using case studies including the atomic weapons labs of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dams built by Duke Power and TVA, and three different national parks, the authors explore how intertwined discourses of "progress" and "removal"––formerly used to justify the dispossession of Native Americans––were repurposed to justify removals in the twentieth century. To do so, they rely on a wealth of government documents, oral histories, and local newspapers. This archive of Appalachian dispossession is one of the volume's most important contributions. As Purcell and others show, opening documents hidden behind sanitized, euphemistic labels like TVA's "population readjustment case files" helps expose the emotional and contested process of creating parks, lakes, and dams (p. 41). These archives also reinforce the diversity of Appalachia. As Alyssa D. Warrick and Russell Olwell point out in their respective essays on Mammoth Cave and Oak Ridge, federal documents provide in-depth profiles of Black communities that struggled to remain amid eminent domain and white repression. These essays work well with pieces by Margaret Lynn Brown on the Great Smoky Mountains and by Katrina M. Powell and Savannah Paige Murray on Shenandoah National Park and the New River Valley, which examine how ideas about race, class, and nostalgia influenced later efforts to remember, lament, and protest communal dispossession. In each chapter, oral testimonies––collected both at the time of removal and in more contemporary interviews––offer powerful correctives to the progress narratives that sought to erase these communities. Two of the later essays, Matthew Chisholm's study of Bryson City, North Carolina's "Road to Nowhere" and Stephen Wallace Taylor's conclusion, analyze the fluidity of local memory through the changing politics of Appalachia. Here, the growing resentment toward public land actions owes as much to the New Right and its challenge to the New Deal as it does to local grievances. Historians of the region's environment, politics, and memory should learn from and engage with the valuable insights provided by such in-depth local studies. To the authors' collective credit, the juxtaposition of the rural, small Appalachian communities against the "nearly unstoppable" forces of public and private actors only occasionally strays toward what Taylor calls a "hero narrative" (pp. 186, 216). It is easy to portray displaced communities as tragic figures, often defiant but usually doomed. But at their best, these essays avoid [End Page 803] that temptation by showing how communal memories are constructed and contested. Such stories offer a more fitting elegy for Appalachia, where nostalgic lamentations are both recognized and examined. Madison Cates Coastal Carolina University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association