The Lucy-Desi Museum: Paying Tribute to the Inventors of the Sitcom
by Paul Heimel

Jamestown, N.Y., celebrates a different kind of Appalachian pioneer, Lucille Ball, with a new museum.

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Living the Past at Oak Hill School
by Amy D. Clark

Children come and spend a day at an East Tennessee one-room schoolhouse—and come as close as 21st-century kids can get to living in the 19th.

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Saltville, Va., residents do their best to cover it all—from dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers to rocket fuel—in their new Museum of the Middle Appalachians. In the process, the town hopes to become a tourist destination, shoring up a faltering economy in the process.

From childhood stories to copies of award-winning manuscripts, Appalachian writer Lee Smith’s papers have found a home in Raleigh, N.C.

An Oak Ridge, Tenn., museum documents Appalachia’s role in the birth of the nuclear age.

Appalachian archivists have joined with colleagues in other parts of the country in utilizing Internet technology to give unprecedented access to manuscripts, books, and photographs—some obscure and fragile—to users all over the globe.

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Cornshuck dolls and baskets and plows: That's what good Appalachians are made of, right? Wrong, argues museum director Charles Watkins.

West Virginia writer Edwina Pendarvis offers a meditation on how a mansion-turned-museum in Charleston embodies Appalachia's complex, sometimes paradoxical history.

“She crossed the culvert where the back road joined another and became Flora’s street. She stood looking upstream, trying to see the sandbar where her sister Barb had found possum bones back during the winter. She thought of the flow beneath her feet and of Howard Carter opening a tomb people had walked over for centuries without knowing it was there. It was strange to think that under an ordinary street, under desert sand, under mounds like Hissarlik, there were things that no one knew about unless they went down to them—art, gold, nine Troys at least, dead bodies and bones. ...”

Making Molasses by Christy Lenzi

The Brilliant Days by Arthur Smith

Eastern Woodlands: 1749 by Stephen M. Holt

The Boy Who Fell Through Howell's Mill by Ron Houchin

First Grade by James Owens

Chronicle by Marianne Worthington

Family Tree by Rebecca Lee Yates

Tennessee Latitudes by Jeffrey Franklin

Breaking Up Housekeeping by Jeff Daniel Marion

Take in My Arm the Dark by Kristin Camitta Zimet, reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis

Out of the Woods: Stories by Chris Offutt, reviewed by Larry Smith

What a Light Thing, This Stone by Suzanne U. Clark, reviewed by James Owens

Cassandra Singing by David Madden, reviewed by Silas House

Books & Films Worth Mentioning by Marianne Worthington

Photo and illustration credits (from the top): Todd Brininger, Amy Clark, Fred DeBusk, NCSU Libraries Special Collections, Lynn Freeny, Southeaster Native American Documents Project, Catherine Pinson, R. Lewis Ferguson, Drue Dixon, Nancy Fischman, The Sow's Ear Press. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

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