Gone Home

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264 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 16 halftones, 2 tables, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4703-6
Published: September 2018
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6606-8
Published: August 2021
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4704-3
Published: August 2018
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5546-6
Published: August 2018

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Awards & distinctions

2019 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture, Section on Culture, American Sociological Association

2019 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, Race, Gender, and Class Section, American Sociological Association

Finalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology, Association of American Publishers

Runner-Up, 2018 Weatherford Award for Nonfiction, Berea College and Appalachian Studies Association

Honorable Mention, Otis Dudley Duncan Award, Sociology of Population Section, American Sociological Association

Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown’s Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond.

Drawn from over 150 original oral history interviews with former and current residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, Brown shows that as the nation experienced enormous transformation from the pre- to the post-civil rights era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of black coal miners, Brown shows the mutable and shifting nature of collective identity, the struggles of labor and representation, and that Appalachia is far more diverse than you think.