Beyond the mountains

"Beyond the Mountains explore the ways in which Appalachia so often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region served alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, a region of backward agriculture, a bastion of yeoman farmers, and a place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse"--