100 Days in Appalachia

Hillbilly Horror: Reckoning With a Genre 15 Years After ‘Wrong Turn’

“You’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? Is he a coal ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Politically-Connected W.Va. GameChanger Program Receives Opioid Funds Amid Doubts from Experts

On a Tuesday afternoon, Michelle Allen is in her office in an empty Robert C. Byrd High School. Allen is the career and technical instructor at RCB and also runs GameChanger, the school’s prevention ...
100 Days in Appalachia

In West Virginia’s Southern Coalfields, a Grassroots ‘Jubilee’

On a late spring day in 2022, Rev. Brad Davis was riding along the twisting roads of McDowell County, West Virginia. Davis was soon to start his current job pastoring five United Methodist churches ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Documenting the Appalachian Intifada: A Review of ‘So Much to be Angry About’

Liberation movements around the world and throughout history have always created our own media: to tell our own stories, to teach our own people and to strengthen our movements and organizations. In ...
100 Days in Appalachia

For This W.Va. Family, Legislative Attention on ‘Warehousing’ People with Intellectual Disabilities at State Hospitals Is too Late

Richard Rothermund was healthy and generally happy before he was confined to Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital in Huntington in 2020, according to Sue Rouse, his mother. There, Sue says, a lack of ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Five Years After It Became a National Park, There’s a Growing Divide In West Virginia’s New River Gorge

The New River Gorge is a jagged area in the middle of Southern West Virginia’s coalfields. Shaped by one of the oldest rivers in the world, whitewater rapids roll under its high petrified sandstone ...
100 Days in Appalachia

What is the New Apostolic Reformation? How a Religio-Political Movement is Affecting U.S. and Appalachian Politics

Apostles and prophets. Spiritual warfare. Dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation. You might come across these terms if you follow politics these days. Here’s some context and clarity about the ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Asheville Leaders Said They Wanted Reparations. One Year Later, Progress Has Been Slow at Best.

When Asheville, North Carolina’s City Council passed a resolution in favor of reparations for its Black citizens in July of last year, the initiative gained national attention. Multiple thinkpieces ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Big Tech Comes to Tucker County, WV

Pamela Moe was reading the paper in late March when she spotted a public notice from a company she’d never heard of. Fundamental Data, a Virginia-based company, had applied for a permit from West ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Tyler Childers’ Appalachia: How the Country Singer Challenges our Relationships with Addiction and Religion

The first time I heard Tyler Childers’ voice I was riding in the passenger seat of a 15-year-old car late at night through the back roads of West Virginia. It was 2019, and I was 17 years old. And ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Appalachian Whiteness: A History that Never Existed

Writing about Southern Appalachia slightly more than a century ago, travel writer Horace Kephart called “[o]ur highlanders…the most homogenous people in the United States.” “The mountains proper,” he ...
100 Days in Appalachia

As COVID-19 Damages Black Appalachian Communities, This Mother, Daughter Team Are Working to Save an Unexpected Casualty: Black History

Dr. Norma Thomas carries a microphone as she walks the streets of Uniontown, Pennsylvania’s East End. This is the “before times,” before COVID-19, and as Thomas recounts the local history of the East ...