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Proving Ground

Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes

Edward Slavishak

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Disrupting the intervenor narrative in Appalachian studies.

The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of what they would encounter. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. In Proving Ground, Edward Slavishak studies several of these interlopers to show that the travelers’ tales were the foundation of powerful forms of...

Disrupting the intervenor narrative in Appalachian studies.

The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of what they would encounter. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. In Proving Ground, Edward Slavishak studies several of these interlopers to show that the travelers’ tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge.

Following four individuals and one cohort as they climbed professional ladders via the Appalachian Mountains, Slavishak argues that these visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise. Time spent in the mountains, in the guise of work (or play that mimicked work), distinguished travelers as master problem-solvers and transformed Appalachia into a proving ground for preservationists, planners, hikers, anthropologists, and photographers.

Based on archival materials from outdoors clubs, trade journals, field notes, correspondence, National Park Service records, civic promotional materials, and photographs, Proving Ground presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. Touching on critical regionalism and mobility studies, this book is a boundary-pushing cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century.

Reviews

Reviews

Proving Ground provides fertile terrain for thinking about the politics of expertise and makes important contributions to intellectual history and Appalachian studies. Slavishak has produced an eloquently written and thought-provoking book.

Eloquently written and prodigiously researched... Proving Ground is an intensely interesting story of intersecting perspectives—particularly of place, environment, and culture—that gives "close attention to the messy material of human encounters with landscapes" (p. 13). This provocative book will lead regionalists to examine what made the Appalachian proving ground similar, and different, from other such terrain.

Exhaustively researched and skillfully composed... The most impressive features of Proving Ground are the depth of Slavishak's research into important but relatively unknown personalities and cultural trends, regional and national, and his familiarity with the history and vocabulary of each of several very different professional, aesthetic, academic, and recreational pursuits as practiced within the Appalachians.

Slavishak throws light on how conceptions of place can be exported and disseminated. And by studying professionals rather than leisure travelers, Slavishak has revealed how and why a heterogeneous group of them accessed seemingly remote corners of Appalachia and sought to carry their experiences out again.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
232
ISBN
9781421425399
Illustration Description
16 b&w illus.
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Expert Vision
2. Terrestrial and Human
3. The Stern Grip of Circumstance
4. A Priceless Asset
5. William Gedney and the Look of Coal Country
Conclusion
Not

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Expert Vision
2. Terrestrial and Human
3. The Stern Grip of Circumstance
4. A Priceless Asset
5. William Gedney and the Look of Coal Country
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
Edward Slavishak
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Edward Slavishak

Edward Slavishak is an associate professor of history at Susquehanna University. He is the author of Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh.