Steven E. Nash. Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge

Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge provides a worthwhile exploration of the experience of the Reconstruction period in western North Carolina, a region still oddly overlooked in southern historiography and in broader treatments of this fraught and still contested era. Steven E. Nash deepens the effort to overcome simplistic historiographical framings of Appalachian otherness and exceptionalism by offering new local readings of the socioeconomic “incursion of federal power” (2) into the mountains after the Civil War. In the introduction, he promises an emphasis on the state, which places this regional study in line with fresh emphasis on the activist state in this era and generally in the nineteenth century. This book proposes to both challenge and explode the existing parameters of Reconstruction and Appalachian studies with a local-level examination of “socioecological order” in this distinct region (4). Nash contrasts the experiences of Appalachians with those of other southerners in the complicated postwar era while additionally reinserting Appalachian experiences and emphases centrally into North Carolina history and placing “understanding of the mountain South into a new, postexceptional phase” (6). Here the book fits well into the long-standing (and, surprisingly, still seemingly necessary and ever-renewing) historical effort to contest simplifying or marginalizing approaches to Appalachian topics while still asserting the utilities of regional study. This book neatly frames the singularity of the region and of its interpretive value for historians of the political cultures of U.S. racial formations, patterns of state development, capitalist development, as well as, of course, for those in Appalachian studies and southern history itself. Appalachian experiences matter, this book argues, and those who ignore the tenor of political change in the region may well fail to understand the dynamic implementation (and sometimes failure) in the mountain periphery of policy choices made at the national level.

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