Professional sculptor and mixed media artist Mary Ruden recently invited Appalachia Bare to attend the historical marker unveiling for suffragette Lizzie Crozier French. Our Admin, Tom Anderson and I stepped into Knoxville Tennessee’s Old Gray Cemetery and were greeted by a wonderful group of individuals, many wearing suffragette white. MaryContinue Reading
Some years ago, my family and I visited former president Andrew Johnson’s home in Greeneville, Tennessee. The tour was interesting, as all historical places are, but I felt a heavy presence throughout the house. Perhaps that feeling had something to do with a sort of transposed shame that Andrew JohnsonContinue Reading
Things happen at night in the holler. Bad things. Of course, that goes for big cities, too. But we all know hollers have no street lights or city lights and nighttime is pitch-black along those meandering dirt roads. Nightfall covers a multitude of sins like a cozy patchwork blanket. It’sContinue Reading
Criterium “As a rider, you have to have a certain set of skills in order to navigate a criterium. You must have the ability to corner rapidly and sharply, with as little touching of your fellow riders as possible, holding your line on the road. In order to claim theContinue Reading
Enjoy some of our favorite submitted images from Trent Eades, Jim Clark, John Allyn Miller, and Erik Bathe. Click on the gallery names for more stunning photographs from these talented photographers. Trent Eades Trent Eades Gallery Mardi Growl Going Medieval in Appalachia Jim Clark After theContinue Reading
Tennessee Williams was one of the foremost playwrights in the 20th century. He wrote close to 40 plays, 70 one-act plays, and several screenplays, achieving great success with The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; Pulitzer Prize winner), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955; Pulitzer Prize winner),Continue Reading
In the year 2000, my sons Erik and Gabriel and I set out to create a video documentary of the people living in Free Hills, one of America’s last remaining Black settlements established before the Civil War. Located in hardscrabble Clay County, Tennessee, near the community of Celina, the FreeContinue Reading
Kin Takahashi was a five-feet-two-inch, 123-pound ball of joyous energy whose fire burned brightly for only thirty-six short years. But Mr. Takahashi shared his energy with all those around him willingly and without hesitation. It could be said that his life was so brief because he gave everything of himself,Continue Reading
White trash have been with us since colonial times – though they often went by other names. That’s the contention of historian Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Isenberg also destroys assumptions about America’s allegedly class-free society in which all one needed wereContinue Reading
On a rainy day in late March our family decided we needed a day in the Smokies, or, to be more precise, under them. Our destination was Tuckaleechee Caverns in Townsend, Tennessee, about 25 miles south of Knoxville. The word Tuckaleechee is derived from the Cherokee word, Tikwalitsi (original meaningContinue Reading