"In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South.Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole."--Amazon / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1116/thumbnail.jpg

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 885 p. : map (part col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 863-885).

The Farmers’ Alliance in Western North Carolina receives only cursory analysis in studies concerned with the late nineteenth-century agrarian reform movement in the state. Historians have uniformly labeled the mountain region as inconsequential on the twin basis of geographic isolation and Republicanism. Their analyses have concluded that the Alliance did not matter to Western North Carolinians and that the mountains did not matter to the state Alliance. These assumptions are incorrect. An in-depth examination of the Alliance’s role in WNC demonstrates that the order most certainly mattered to these mountaineers, and their leaders, such as Senator Zebulon Vance, exerted considerable influence upon state and national agrarian reform agendas. Moreover, Western North Carolina agricultural conditions directly impacted farmer’s receptiveness to the Alliance and later Populist movements. This manuscript demonstrates the evolution of the Farmers’ Alliance in WNC using research collected from numerous documents, newspapers, census records, and secondary sources.

This presentation explores the role the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played in western North Carolina’s reconstruction. It may seem ironic that an agency tasked with aiding the adjustment from slavery to free labor was in the southern mountains, but the irony dissipates in light of the evidence. The Conservative Party’s resumption of local control in 1865 led white Unionists to embrace the Republican Party and black political cooperation two years later, a move that would have been impossible without the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its agents represented the most tangible source of federal power in the mountain counties, and as such helped build relationships between black and white mountaineers that allowed the Republicans to sweep the pivotal local and state elections of 1868.

Southern concepts of gender influenced Appalachian society throughout the antebellum and Civil War eras. Concepts of masculinity and femininity, including “the cult of true womanhood” and Southern manhood, shifted and broaden throughout the South due to wartime stressors. Appalachians adjusted these gender roles in order to survive chaos and turmoil in their region. The brutal political and community divisions, high rates of desertion, guerilla warfare, and threats of invasion in the mountain regions intensified these concepts of gender. Southern constructions of gender molded the Appalachian experience of war but the high level of conflict strengthened these new roles as a means of survival.

This research examines the history and events that shaped the people and community of Lost Cove, an isolated Appalachian settlement. Chapter 1 surveys previous written and oral accounts of Lost Cove and the physical/cultural attributes of the community. Chapter 2 explores Lost Cove's identity, name, and first settlers. Chapter 3 explores the community's buildings and the families' livelihood. Chapter 4 examines the effect that the CC & O Railway and the sawmills had on the community. Chapter 5 examines moonshine selling in Lost Cove. Chapter 6 reveals how the church and school acted as a gathering place and how sermons and funerals were conducted. Chapter 7 explains why Lost Cove became a ghost town. Much of the information in chapters 3 through 7 is based on oral history interviews that the author did with former residents of the cove.

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of students, administrators, and faculty of one community college on the factors that facilitate or inhibit collegiate student success toward associate degree completion. Degree completion was defined as graduating with an associate degree. The following research questions guided this study: 1) What support systems or resources are in place at the community college to assist students with degree completion? 2) What factors in the college student success course at this community college facilitate or inhibit successful degree completion? The case study was conducted in a single community college inNorth Carolina. Participants included 10 community college professionals and 5 students. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews and then transcribed. Pseudonyms were used to maintain participant anonymity. The data were analyzed through the process of coding. Findings identified eight themes in relation to facilitating and inhibiting degree completion at the community college level. These themes were: (a) curriculum, (b) advising, (c) support services, (d) relationships, (e) faculty status, (f) intrinsic motivation, (g) developmental courses, and (h) external factors. Conclusions of the research study and recommendations for further research were determined.

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