A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1

Brooks Blevins's A History of the Ozarks is an ambitious three-volume study of a region from its geological origins to the present. The Old Ozarks begins with these ancient roots and proceeds to the eve of the Civil War. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book mainly focuses upon the diverse groups of people who inhabited this challenging terrain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether examining native groups that preceded white arrival, the earliest Spanish and French settlers, or newly emerged Americans, Blevins demonstrates that multifarious relationships were forged between humans and the land. The Ozarks is a place often marked as homogenous, with this similitude mired in suggestions of antimodern backwardness. With meticulous and exhaustive research, the author sets out to demonstrate the socially constructed nature of place and to reveal that when stripped of its mythology, the Ozarks is much more of a “regional microcosm of the American experience” than “a place and people of unique qualities” (p. 8

Archaeology · Genealogy · Geography · Mythology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · Classics · History