Book Review of People of the Upper Cumberland: Achievements and Contradictions

Review of: People of the Upper Cumberland: Achievements and Contradictions. Edited by Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015. 434 pp., $54.95, hardback, ISBN 978-1-62190-109-9.

Abstract:

In Smith's case, his essay is largely indebted to and overshadowed by Brian D. McKnight's Confederate Outlaw (2011).Mary Evins offers a well-researched look at the political career of her father, Joe L. Evins, but her conclusions share the limitations of the volume as a whole: an antiquarian quality that suggests the value of the topics lay exclusively in their historical nature while offering limited development of larger historical significance. [...] the volume's lack of a clear organizing argument limits its ability to address larger questions in Appalachian, southern, or American history.