High Adventure in a New World : Reading Contemporary Environmental Issues in Appalachia Through the Lens of Gilded Age Travel Writing

The Gilded Age, roughly 1876 to 1896 -- the two-decade period following Reconstruction -- saw a burst of economic activity and natural resource extraction in the region now called southern Appalachia. International capital flowed through the bond markets in New York and London, into large scale investments in timber, coal, and other extractive industries. During the same era, popular American illustrated monthly magazines likewise sent a legion of writers and illustrators into the southern mountains. The result was that Harper\u27s, Appleton\u27s, Lippincott\u27s (later The Century Magazine), the Atlantic Monthly, and others produced a large and surprisingly coherent body of travel writing about the region. These travel essays express an ideology, relating to nature, capital, economic development, and human values. In fact, I propose that an interested reader can now detect in this body of writing, with the benefit of hindsight, the seeds of the region\u27s 21st century environmental problems. I propose further that even the logic of anthropogenic global warming can be read in this body of travel writing. I require a projector and computer for a power point presentation