"She stared at a single set of footprints in the snow ahead of her. She’d been following faint tracks in the snow all day but hadn’t given them much thought because so many people climb the Jewell Trail. She fixated on the tracks and realized they had been made by a pair of sneakers." By Ty Gagne.

Big coastal cities don’t have a monopoly on truly progressive organizing. By Leigh Ann Carey.

When Shelton Laurel and the Appalachian war are mentioned at all, they are too often perceived as an exception, wiped off with a “war's hell” or blamed on the ways of those peculiar mountain folks. By David Forbes.

Crystal Good

Rising Appalachia

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out. By Barbara Kingsolver.

The historian Elizabeth Catte on J.D. Vance, colonial logic, and the end of coal in the region that outsiders love to imagine but can’t seem to understand. By Regan Penaluna.

It's the site of the nation’s single largest armed uprising since the Civil War and its most violent labor insurrection. And coal companies are trying to erase that history. By Ron Soodalter. (Jan. 31, 2018)

Over the course of a year, photographer Stacy Kranitz documented life in the Ohio River Valley, where voters went for Trump by wide margins. By Alice Speri.

J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has been held up as a guidebook for understanding the 2016 election, but his logic is rooted in an enduring and dangerous myth about race in Appalachia. By Elizabeth Catte.

The story of Harlan County, Kentucky’s Civil War legend and the KKK. By Andrew Milton Smith.

The Appalachian mountain ranges are home to fervent Trump supporters who want him to back them now. By Laura Bicker.

A local environmental activist fights to prepare her community for life beyond mining. By Eliza Griswold.

West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the country. Locals are fighting to save their neighbors—and their towns—from destruction. By Margaret Talbot,

A complex network of local organizations helps neighbors support one another as they rebound from a dying industry. By Peter Slavin.

A Look at Downward Mobility in Lancaster, Ohio. By Lauren Kaori Gurley.

Local officials in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County insist the water is fine, despite repeated violations of EPA limits. But residents have been relying on bottled water for years. By Story Hinckley.

My mother died the day she turned 55. This Sunday will be my first Mother’s Day without her, but nearly a year after she died, I still find it impossible to be heartbroken over her passing… By Joshua Wilkey.

Sean Dunne

What happens when an African American woman decides to solo-hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine during a summer of bitter political upheaval? Everything you can imagine, from scary moments of racism to new friendships to soaring epiphanies about the timeless value of America’s most storied trekking route. By Rahawa Haile.