The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: a Study in Anthropogeography by Ellen Churchill Semple
The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: a Study in Anthropogeography by Ellen Churchill Semple (1863 - 1932)
Genre(s): Political Science, Modern (19th C), Exploration
Read by: Leon Harvey in English
Chapters:
00:00:00 - 01 - 1
00:42:46 - 02 - 2
In one of the most progressive and productive countries of the world, and in that section of the country which has had its civilization and its wealth longest, we find a large area where the people are still living the frontier life of the backwoods, where the civilization is that of the eighteenth century, where the people speak the English of Shakespeare's time, where the large majority of the inhabitants have never seen a steamboat or a railroad, where money is as scarce as in colonial days, and all trade is barter. It is the great upheaved mass of the Southern Appalachians which, with the conserving power of the mountains, has caused these conditions to survive, carrying a bit of the eighteenth century intact over into this strongly contrasted twentieth century, and presenting an anachronism all the more marked because found in the heart of the bustling, money-making, novelty-loving United States. These conditions are to be found throughout the broad belt of the Southern Appalachians, but nowhere in such purity or covering so large an area as in the mountain region of Kentucky. - Summary by Ellen Churchill Semple
Video Summary
AI GeneratedThis text examines the anthropogeography of the Kentucky mountains, where extreme isolation has preserved an 18th-century Anglo-Saxon way of life. It details how the rugged terrain of the Cumberland Plateau stifled infrastructure and economic growth, fostering a society based on kinship, barter, and self-sufficiency, while creating a unique cultural reservoir of archaic language and customs.