title: Maxwell Jacob Friedman

text: MJF made his return to AEW programming at All Out on September 4 under a mask, winning the Casino Ladder match as the joker entrant and securing himself a future shot for the AEW World Championship with the help of Stokely Hathaway. He was officially revealed to be the person behind the mask at the end of the event, when he came out and stared down the newly crowned AEW World Champion CM Punk on the entrance stage.


title: Maxwell Jacob Friedman

text: On the September 14 episode of "Dynamite", MJF introduced his faction, The Firm, led by Stokely Hathaway. This new faction was considered as MJF's "Support System" and when they were not supporting MJF, all of the members in The Firm would do their own thing. However, on the October 26 episode, MJF was attacked by The Firm, after he had fired Hathaway for disobeying his orders not to attack AEW World Champion Jon Moxley because he wanted Moxley at 100% for their title match at Full Gear. On November 19 at Full Gear, MJF defeated Moxley after using William Regal's signature brass knuckles. Regal slid them into the ring for MJF, helping to make him the youngest AEW World Champion in the history of the company. On the November 30 episode of "Dynamite", MJF discarded the standard AEW World Championship belt, calling it trash, and unveiled his own custom version, which he dubbed Triple-B, the "Big Burberry Belt". It features the exact same design as the standard belt; however, the leather strap is brown and fashioned in Burberry's trademark check pattern to match MJF's signature Burberry scarf. Later in the segment, MJF turned on Regal by attacking him, causing him to be taken to a nearby hospital thus ending their partnership.


title: Maxwell Jacob Friedman

text: Friedman's character has been described by "The New York Times" as "part heel, part tool ... and part goodfella wannabe". Many people within the wrestling industry have praised MJF for his aggressive heel persona, largely due to his ability to blur the line of kayfabe, often insulting fans and other non-professional wrestling celebrities on social media; Dasher Hatfield praised MJF's character, since he can "walk on the edge, being heel without people calling him racist or homophobic". He has also been praised for his professionalism and skill, despite his young age, by the likes of Jim Ross, Jim Cornette, and Chris Jericho.


title: Maxwell Jacob Friedman

text: Since mid-2020, he has been dating artist Naomi Rosenblum. On September 15, 2022, they announced their engagement on social media.


title: Barbara Bach

text: Barbara Bach, Lady Starkey (born Barbara Goldbach) is an American actress and model. She played the Bond girl Anya Amasova in "The Spy Who Loved Me". She is married to former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.


title: Barbara Bach

text: Bach is a native of Jackson Heights, Queens and was raised Roman Catholic. She graduated from Dominican Commercial High School, an all-girls school, in 1964. The following year, she shortened her surname to Bach and began modeling professionally, appearing in catalogs and fashion magazines.


title: Barbara Bach

text: Bach was one of the most sought-after faces of the 1960s, working with the Eileen Ford Agency in New York, appearing on catalogs and the front covers of several international fashion magazines such as "Seventeen" (1965 and 1966), "Vogue" USA (July 1966) photographed by Richard Avedon, "ELLE" France (1966), "Gioia" Italy (1967–1970), and "Figurino" Brazil (1970).


title: Barbara Bach

text: Her acting career started in Italy, where she played Nausicaa in "L'Odissea" in 1968, an eight-hour long TV adaptation of Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey", directed by Franco Rossi and produced by Dino de Laurentiis.


title: Barbara Bach

text: In 1971, Bach co-starred with two other Bond girls, Claudine Auger and Barbara Bouchet, in the mystery "Black Belly of the Tarantula" (a giallo film) and appeared in other Italian films.


title: Barbara Bach

text: In 1977, Bach portrayed the Russian spy Anya Amasova in the James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me". Bach remarked after the film that Bond is "a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets." The following year she appeared in the movie "Force 10 from Navarone". She lost a role to actress Shelley Hack when she auditioned for season four of the television series "Charlie's Angels". During an interview with Johnny Carson on May 9, 1979, she said that she lost the audition for "Charlie's Angels" because they felt she was too sophisticated in attitude and look, and thought that she was not American, even though she was born in Rosedale and grew up in Jackson Heights, both in Queens, New York City. They asked her manager if she could play an American.


title: Barbara Bach

text: Bach has 28 films to her credit. She was featured in a pictorial in "Playboy" in January 1981. She also had a cameo in a September 1987 special issue on the Bond girls.


title: Barbara Bach

text: In 1991, Bach co-founded the Self Help Addiction Recovery Program (SHARP) with Pattie Boyd, the former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, both of whom assisted in the venture. Bach and Ringo Starr created The Lotus Foundation, a charity with many sub-charities.


title: Barbara Bach

text: Bach's first marriage was to Italian businessman Augusto, Count Gregorini di Savignano di Romagna. The couple had two children together, daughter Francesca and son Gianni, before divorcing in 1975. Bach married British musician Ringo Starr, formerly of the Beatles, at Marylebone Town Hall on April 27, 1981. The two met in 1980, on the set of the film "Caveman" (1981).


title: Barbara Bach

text: Bach struggled with alcoholism and heavy drug use and, along with her husband, checked into a rehab in 1988 for four weeks. The couple have remained sober ever since.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: Mary Willa "Mamie" Gummer (born August 3, 1983) is an American actress. She starred in the title role of The CW series "Emily Owens, M.D." (2012–2013), and played the recurring role of Nancy Crozier on "The Good Wife" (2010–2015) and its spin-off, "The Good Fight" (2018). She has also appeared in the films "Evening" (2007), "Side Effects" (2013), "Cake" (2014), and "Ricki and the Flash" (2015). Gummer was nominated for the 2016 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play for the original production of "Ugly Lies the Bone". She is a daughter of Don Gummer and Meryl Streep.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: Gummer was born in New York City, New York, and is the eldest daughter of actress Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer. She grew up in Salisbury, Connecticut, and also spent five years in Los Angeles, California, with her older brother, Henry Wolfe Gummer, and younger sisters, actors Grace Gummer and Louisa Jacobson.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: Gummer attended Miss Porter's School, and graduated from the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, before continuing her studies in theater and communications at Northwestern University, graduating in 2005.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: As a toddler, she appeared with her mother in "Heartburn" (credited under the name Natalie Stern to avoid press scrutiny). Twenty months old at the time of filming, she received a positive review in "The New York Times". After graduating from college in 2005, she made her off-Broadway debut alongside Michael C. Hall in the premiere of Noah Haidle's "Mr. Marmalade", for which she won a Theatre World Award. In 2007, she received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for her performance in Theresa Rebeck's "The Water's Edge".


title: Mamie Gummer

text: Gummer made her motion-picture debut as an adult with a minor role in Lasse Hallström's "The Hoax" (2006), starring Richard Gere. In 2007, she starred with her mother in Michael Cunningham's film adaptation of Susan Minot's novel "Evening", playing her mother as a young woman. The film, directed by Lajos Koltai, featured Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, and Claire Danes.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: She portrayed Sally Adams in the 2008 HBO mini series "John Adams", which details the life of the second President of the United States. She made her Broadway debut in the Tony Award–nominated revival of "Les liaisons dangereuses" in 2008, for which she received critical praise. She also guest-starred on the CBS legal drama "The Good Wife" in the season 1 episode "Bad" portraying Nancy Crozier. Her character returned again on season 2 episodes "Cleaning House" and "Getting Off".


title: Mamie Gummer

text: In 2010, she starred in "The Lightkeepers" with Richard Dreyfuss, Tom Wisdom, Blythe Danner and Bruce Dern.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: Starting in 2011, she starred in the ABC medical show "Off the Map" with Zach Gilford and Valerie Cruz.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: In April 2011, she starred with Hamish Linklater and Alison Fraser in the Off-Broadway production of "The School For Lies" written by David Ives, directed by Walter Bobbie, and produced by Classic Stage Company.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: In 2012, she starred in The CW's "Emily Owens, M.D." The series was canceled early during its first season, but the network continued to air the rest of its 13-episode order.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: From October to December 2015, she starred in the original production of the play "Ugly Lies the Bone" for the Roundabout Theater Company, and received a 2016 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Play for her performance.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: On February 1, 2016, it was announced that Gummer had joined the cast of the Amazon series "The Collection" as a series regular in the role of Helen Sabine.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: Gummer played Lucy Purcell, a mother of two children who finds herself involved in a crime, in the third season of HBO’s anthology drama "True Detective."


title: Mamie Gummer

text: After a year and a half of dating, Gummer became engaged to actor Benjamin Walker in October 2009. They married in July 2011 at her parents' home in Connecticut, and resided in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City. In March 2013, it was announced that Gummer and Walker had amicably separated.


title: Mamie Gummer

text: She became engaged to writer Mehar Sethi (born Meharban Singh Sethi) in August 2018 and was revealed to be pregnant with her first child in December 2018. They got married in February 2019. The same month, Gummer gave birth to a son.


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachia () is a cultural region in the Eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York State to northern Alabama and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, to Cheaha Mountain in Alabama, "Appalachia" typically refers only to the cultural region of the central and southern portions of the range, from the Catskill Mountains of New York southwest to the Blue Ridge Mountains which run southwest from southern Pennsylvania to northern Georgia, and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. In 2020, the region was home to an estimated 26.1 million people, of which roughly 80% are white.


title: Appalachia

text: Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, and behavior of its inhabitants. Early 20th century writers often engaged in yellow journalism focused on sensationalistic aspects of the region's culture, such as moonshining and clan feuding, and often portrayed the region's inhabitants as uneducated and prone to impulsive acts of violence. Sociological studies in the 1960s and 1970s helped to re-examine and dispel these stereotypes. Stereotypes about Appalachian people being ignorant, anti-progress, and racist are still grappled in the region by portrayals in media and press publications.


title: Appalachia

text: While endowed with abundant natural resources, Appalachia has long struggled economically and been associated with poverty. In the early 20th century, large-scale logging and coal mining firms brought wage-paying jobs and modern amenities to Appalachia, but by the 1960s the region had failed to capitalize on any long-term benefits from these two industries. Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government sought to alleviate poverty in the Appalachian region with a series of New Deal initiatives, specifically the Tennessee Valley Authority. This was responsible for the construction of hydroelectric dams that provide a vast amount of electricity and that support programs for better farming practices, regional planning, and economic development. On March 9, 1965, the Appalachian Regional Commission was created to further alleviate poverty in the region, mainly by diversifying the region's economy and helping to provide better health care and educational opportunities to the region's inhabitants. By 1990, Appalachia had largely joined the economic mainstream but still lagged behind the rest of the nation in most economic indicators.


title: Appalachia

text: Since Appalachia lacks definite physiographical or topographical boundaries, there has been some disagreement over what exactly the region encompasses. The most commonly used modern definition of Appalachia is the one initially defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965 and expanded over subsequent decades. The region defined by the Commission currently includes 420 counties and eight independent cities in 13 states, including all 55 counties in West Virginia, 14 counties in New York, 52 in Pennsylvania, 32 in Ohio, 3 in Maryland, 54 in Kentucky, 25 counties and 8 cities in Virginia, 29 in North Carolina, 52 in Tennessee, 6 in South Carolina, 37 in Georgia, 37 in Alabama, and 24 in Mississippi. When the Commission was established, counties were added based on economic need, however, rather than any cultural parameters.


title: Appalachia

text: The first major attempt to map Appalachia as a distinctive cultural region came in the 1890s with the efforts of Berea College president William Goodell Frost, whose "Appalachian America" included 194 counties in 8 states. In 1921, John C. Campbell published "The Southern Highlander and His Homeland" in which he modified Frost's map to include 254 counties in 9 states. A landmark survey of the region in the following decade by the United States Department of Agriculture defined the region as consisting of 206 counties in 6 states. In 1984, Karl Raitz and Richard Ulack expanded the ARC's definition to include 445 counties in 13 states, although they removed all counties in Mississippi and added two in New Jersey. Historian John Alexander Williams, in his 2002 book "Appalachia: A History", distinguished between a "core" Appalachian region consisting of 164 counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, and a greater region defined by the ARC.


title: Appalachia

text: In the "Encyclopedia of Appalachia" (2006), Appalachian State University historian Howard Dorgan suggested the term "Old Appalachia" for the region's cultural boundaries, noting an academic tendency to ignore the southwestern and northeastern extremes of the ARC's pragmatic definition. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at "RealClearPolitics", defines "Greater Appalachia" in his 2012 book "The Lost Majority" as including both the Appalachian Mountains region (western Virginia and North Carolina, the Piedmont region in western South Carolina, West Virginia, southern Ohio, the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi) and the Upland South (southern Indiana and Illinois, the Bluegrass, Mississippi Plateau, Western Coal Field, and Jackson Purchase regions in central and western Kentucky, Middle and West Tennessee, Missouri, the Ozarks in Arkansas, Little Dixie and Southwestern Oklahoma, North and East Texas, and the Texas Hill Country) following Ulster Protestant migrations to the Southern and Midwestern United States in the 18th and 19th centuries.


title: Appalachia

text: While exploring inland along the northern coast of Florida in 1528, the members of the Narváez expedition, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, found a village of indigenous peoples near present-day Tallahassee, Florida, whose name they transcribed as "Apalchen" or "Apalachen" (). The name was soon altered by the Spanish to "Apalache" (Apalachee) and used as a name for the tribe and region spreading well inland to the north. Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition first entered Apalachee territory on June 15, 1528, and applied the name. Now spelled "Appalachian", it is the fourth oldest surviving European place-name in the U.S. After the de Soto expedition in 1540, Spanish cartographers began to apply the name of the tribe to the mountains themselves. The first cartographic appearance of "Apalchen" is on Diego Gutiérrez's map of 1562; the first use for the mountain range is the map of Jacques le Moyne de Morgues in 1565. Le Moyne was also the first European to apply "Apalachen" specifically to a mountain range as opposed to a village, native tribe, or a southeastern region of North America.


title: Appalachia

text: The name was not commonly used for the whole mountain range until the late 19th century. A competing and often more popular name was the "Allegheny Mountains", "Alleghenies", and even "Alleghania".


title: Appalachia

text: In northern U.S. dialects, the mountains are pronounced or . The cultural region of Appalachia is pronounced , also , all with a third syllable like "lay". In southern U.S. dialects, the mountains are called the , and the cultural region of Appalachia is pronounced , both with a third syllable like the "la" in "latch". This pronunciation is favored in the "core" region in central and southern parts of the Appalachian range. The occasional use of the "sh" sound for the "ch" in the last syllable in northern dialects was popularized by Appalachian Trail organizations in New England in the early 20th century.


title: Appalachia

text: Native American hunter-gatherers first arrived in what is now Appalachia over 16,000 years ago. The earliest discovered site is the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County, Pennsylvania, which some scientists claim is pre-Clovis culture. Several other Archaic period (8000–1000 BC) archaeological sites have been identified in the region, such as the St. Albans site in West Virginia and the Icehouse Bottom site in Tennessee. The presence of Africans in the Appalachian Mountains dates back to the sixteenth century with the arrival of European colonists. Enslaved Africans were first brought to America during the 16th century Spanish expeditions to the mountainous regions of the South. In 1526 enslaved Africans were brought to the Pedee River region of western North Carolina by Spanish explorer, Lucas Vazquez de Ayllõn. Enslaved Africans also accompanied the expeditions of Fernando de Soto in 1540 and Juan Pardo, in 1566 who both traveled through Appalachia.


title: Appalachia

text: In the 16th century, the de Soto and Juan Pardo expeditions explored the mountains of South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and encountered complex agrarian societies consisting of Muskogean-speaking inhabitants. De Soto indicated that much of the region west of the mountains was part of the domain of Coosa, a paramount chiefdom centered around a village complex in northern Georgia. By the time English explorers arrived in Appalachia in the late 17th century, the central part of the region was controlled by Algonquian tribes (namely the Shawnee) and the southern part of the region was controlled by the Cherokee. The French based in modern-day Quebec also made inroads into the northern areas of the region in modern-day New York state and Pennsylvania. By the mid 18th century the French had outposts such as Fort Duquesne and Fort Le Boeuf controlling the access points of the Allegheny River valley and upper Ohio valley after exploration by Celeron de Bienville.


title: Appalachia

text: European migration into Appalachia began in the 18th century. As lands in eastern Pennsylvania, the Tidewater region of Virginia and the Carolinas filled up, immigrants began pushing further and further westward into the Appalachian Mountains. A relatively large proportion of the early backcountry immigrants were Ulster Scots—later known as "Scotch-Irish", a group mostly originating from southern Scotland and northern England, many of whom had settled in Ulster Ireland prior to migrating to America — who were seeking cheaper land and freedom from Quaker leaders, many of whom considered the Scotch-Irish "savages". Others included Germans from the Palatinate region and English settlers from the Anglo-Scottish border country. Between 1730 and 1763, immigrants trickled into western Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia, and western Maryland. Thomas Walker's discovery of the Cumberland Gap in 1750 and the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 lured settlers deeper into the mountains, namely to upper east Tennessee, northwestern North Carolina, upstate South Carolina, and central Kentucky.


title: Appalachia

text: During the 18th century, enslaved Africans were brought to Appalachia by European settlers of trans-Appalachia Kentucky and the upper Blue Ridge Valley. According to the first census of 1790, more than 3,000 enslaved Africans were transported across the mountains into East Tennessee and more than 12,000 into the Kentucky mountains. Between 1790 and 1840, a series of treaties with the Cherokee and other Native American tribes opened up lands in north Georgia, north Alabama, the Tennessee Valley, the Cumberland Plateau regions, and the Great Smoky Mountains along what is now the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The last of these treaties culminated in the removal of the bulk of the Cherokee population (as well as Choctaw, Chickasaw and others) from the region via the Trail of Tears from 1831 until 1838.


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachian frontiersmen have long been romanticized for their ruggedness and self-sufficiency. A typical depiction of an Appalachian pioneer involves a hunter wearing a coonskin cap and buckskin clothing, and sporting a long rifle and shoulder-strapped powder horn. Perhaps no single figure symbolizes the Appalachian pioneer more than Daniel Boone (1734–1820), a long hunter and surveyor instrumental in the early settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee. Like Boone, Appalachian pioneers moved into areas largely separated from "civilization" by high mountain ridges, and had to fend for themselves against the elements. As many of these early settlers were living on Native American lands, attacks from Native American tribes were a continuous threat until the 19th century.


title: Appalachia

text: As early as the 18th century, Appalachia (then known simply as the "backcountry") began to distinguish itself from its wealthier lowland and coastal neighbors to the east. Frontiersmen often bickered with lowland and tidewater "elites" over taxes, sometimes to the point of armed revolts such as the Regulator Movement (1767–1771) in North Carolina. In 1778, at the height of the American Revolution, backwoodsmen from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and what is now Kentucky took part in George Rogers Clark's Illinois campaign. Two years later, a group of Appalachian frontiersmen known as the Overmountain Men routed British forces at the Battle of Kings Mountain after rejecting a call by the British to disarm. After the war, residents throughout the Appalachian backcountry—especially the Monongahela region in western Pennsylvania, and antebellum northwestern Virginia (now the north-central part of West Virginia) — refused to pay a tax placed on whiskey by the new American government, leading to what became known as the Whiskey Rebellion. The resulting tighter Federal controls in the Monongahela valley resulted in many whiskey/bourbon makers migrating via the Ohio River to Kentucky and Tennessee where the industry could flourish.


title: Appalachia

text: In the early 19th century, the rift between the yeoman farmers of Appalachia and their wealthier lowland counterparts continued to grow, especially as the latter dominated most state legislatures. People in Appalachia began to feel slighted over what they considered unfair taxation methods and lack of state funding for improvements (especially for roads). In the northern half of the region, the lowland "elites" consisted largely of industrial and business interests, whereas in the parts of the region south of the Mason–Dixon line, the lowland elites consisted of large-scale land-owning planters. The Whig Party, formed in the 1830s, drew widespread support from disaffected Appalachians.


title: Appalachia

text: Tensions between the mountain counties and state governments sometimes reached the point of mountain counties threatening to break off and form separate states. In 1832, bickering between western Virginia and eastern Virginia over the state's constitution led to calls on both sides for the state's separation into two states. In 1841, Tennessee state senator (and later U.S. president) Andrew Johnson introduced legislation in the Tennessee Senate calling for the creation of a separate state in East Tennessee. The proposed state would have been known as "Frankland" and would have invited like-minded mountain counties in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama to join it.


title: Appalachia

text: In 1839 Washington Irving proposed to rename the United States "Alleghania" or "Appalachia" in place of "America", since the latter name belonged to Latin America too. Edgar Allan Poe later took up the idea, and considered Appalachia a much better name than America or Alleghania; he thought it better defined the United States as a distinct geographical entity, separate from the rest of the Americas, and he also thought it did honor to both Irving and the natives who the Appalachian Mountains had been named after. At the time, however, the United States had already reached far beyond the greater Appalachian region, but the "magnificence" of Appalachia Poe considered enough to rechristen the nation with a name that would be unique to its own character. However, Poe's popular influence only grew decades after his death, and so the name was never seriously considered.


title: Appalachia

text: By 1860, the Whig Party had disintegrated. Sentiments in northern Appalachia had shifted to the pro-abolitionist Republican Party. In southern Appalachia, abolitionists still constituted a radical minority, although several smaller opposition parties (most of which were both pro-Union and pro-slavery) were formed to oppose the planter-dominated Southern Democrats. As states in the southern United States moved toward secession, a majority of Southern Appalachians still supported the Union. In 1861, a Minnesota newspaper identified 161 counties in Southern Appalachia—which the paper called "Alleghenia"—where Union support remained strong, and which might provide crucial support for the defeat of the Confederacy. However, many of these Unionists—especially in the mountain areas of North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—were "conditional" Unionists in that they opposed secession, but also opposed violence to prevent secession, and thus when their respective state legislatures voted to secede, their support shifted to the Confederacy. Kentucky sought to remain neutral at the outset of the conflict, opting not to supply troops to either side. After Virginia voted to secede, several mountain counties in northwestern Virginia rejected the ordinance and with the help of the Union Army established a separate state, admitted to the Union as West Virginia in 1863. However, half the counties included in the new state, comprising two-thirds of its territory, were secessionist and pro-Confederate.


title: Appalachia

text: This caused great difficulty for the new Unionist state government in Wheeling, both during and after the war. A similar effort occurred in East Tennessee, but the initiative failed after Tennessee's governor ordered the Confederate Army to occupy the region, forcing East Tennessee's Unionists to flee to the north or go into hiding. The one exception was the so-called Free and Independent State of Scott.


title: Appalachia

text: Both central and southern Appalachia suffered tremendous violence and turmoil during the Civil War. While there were two major theaters of operation in the region—namely the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (and present-day West Virginia) and the Chattanooga area along the Tennessee-Georgia border—much of the violence was caused by bushwhackers and guerrilla war. The northernmost battles of the entire war were fought in Appalachia with the Battle of Buffington Island and the Battle of Salineville resulting from Morgan's Raid. Large numbers of livestock were killed (grazing was an important part of Appalachia's economy), and numerous farms were destroyed, pillaged, or neglected. The actions of both Union and Confederate armies left many inhabitants in the region resentful of government authority and suspicious of outsiders for decades after the war.


title: Appalachia

text: After the war, northern parts of Appalachia experienced an economic boom, while economies in the southern parts of the region stagnated, especially as Southern Democrats regained control of their respective state legislatures at the end of Reconstruction. Pittsburgh as well as Knoxville grew into major industrial centers, especially regarding iron and steel production. By 1900, the Chattanooga area and north Georgia and northern Alabama had experienced similar changes due to manufacturing booms in Atlanta and Birmingham at the edge of the Appalachian region. Railroad construction between the 1880s and early 20th century gave the greater nation access to the vast coalfields in central Appalachia, making the economy in that part of the region practically synonymous with coal mining. As the nationwide demand for lumber skyrocketed, lumber firms turned to the virgin forests of southern Appalachia, using sawmill and logging railroad innovations to reach remote timber stands. The Tri-Cities area of Tennessee and Virginia and the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia became major petrochemical production centers.


title: Appalachia

text: The late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the development of various regional stereotypes. Attempts by President Rutherford B. Hayes to enforce the whiskey tax in the late 1870s led to an explosion in violence between Appalachian "moonshiners" and federal "revenuers" that lasted through the Prohibition period in the 1920s. The breakdown of authority and law enforcement during the Civil War may have contributed to an increase in clan feuding, which by the 1880s was reported to be a problem across most of Kentucky's Cumberland region as well as Carter County in Tennessee, Carroll County in Virginia, and Mingo and Logan counties in West Virginia. Regional writers from this period such as Mary Noailles Murfree and Horace Kephart liked to focus on such sensational aspects of mountain culture, leading readers outside the region to believe they were more widespread than in reality. In an 1899 article in "The Atlantic", Berea College president William G. Frost attempted to redefine the inhabitants of Appalachia as "noble mountaineers"—relics of the nation's pioneer period whose isolation had left them unaffected by modern times.


title: Appalachia

text: Today, residents of Appalachia are viewed by many Americans as uneducated and unrefined, resulting in culture-based stereotyping and discrimination in many areas, including employment and housing. Such discrimination has prompted some to seek redress under prevailing federal and state civil rights laws.


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachia, and especially Kentucky, became nationally known for its violent feuds, especially in the remote mountain districts. They pitted the men in extended clans against each other for decades, often using assassination and arson as weapons, along with ambushes, gunfights, and pre-arranged shootouts. The infamous Hatfield-McCoy Feud of the 19th century was the best known of these family feuds. Some of the feuds were continuations of violent local Civil War episodes. Journalists often wrote about the violence, using stereotypes that "city folks" had developed about Appalachia; they interpreted the feuds as the natural products of profound ignorance, poverty, and isolation, and perhaps even inbreeding. In reality, the leading participants were typically well-to-do local elites with networks of clients who, like the Northeast and Chicago political machines, fought for their own power over local and regional politics.


title: Appalachia

text: Logging firms' rapid devastation of the forests of the Appalachians sparked a movement among conservationists to preserve what remained and allow the land to "heal". In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act, giving the federal government authority to create national forests east of the Mississippi River and control timber harvesting. Regional writers and business interests led a movement to create national parks in the eastern United States similar to Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west, culminating in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, and the Blue Ridge Parkway (connecting the two) in the 1930s. During the same period, New England forester Benton MacKaye led the movement to build the Appalachian Trail, stretching from Georgia to Maine.


title: Appalachia

text: Several significant moments of investment by the United States government into areas of science and technology were established in the mid-20th century, notably with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, crucial with the design of Apollo program launch vehicles and propulsion of the Space Shuttle program, and at adjacent facilities Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee with the Manhattan Project and advancements in supercomputing and nuclear power.


title: Appalachia

text: By the 1950s, poor farming techniques and the loss of jobs to mechanization in the mining industry had left much of central and southern Appalachia poverty-stricken. The lack of jobs also led to widespread difficulties with outmigration. Beginning in the 1930s, federal agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority began investing in the Appalachian region. Sociologists such as James Brown and Cratis Williams and authors such as Harry Caudill and Michael Harrington brought attention to the region's plight in the 1960s, prompting Congress to create the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965. The commission's efforts helped to stem the tide of outmigration and diversify the region's economies. Although there have been drastic improvements in the region's economic conditions since the commission's founding, the ARC still listed 80 counties as "distressed" in 2020, with nearly half of them (38) in Kentucky.


title: Appalachia

text: Since the 1980s, population growth in the Southern Appalachian section of the region has brought about concerns of farmland loss and hazards to the local environment. Regarding housing development, exurban development, characterized by its low-density housing, has violated the habitats of native species and contributed significantly to the decline in agricultural land-use in larger Appalachia.


title: Appalachia

text: There are growing IT sectors in many parts of the region. Summit, the fastest supercomputer in the world as of 2019, is currently housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory near Knoxville, Tennessee.


title: Appalachia

text: Due to topographic considerations, several cities which are themselves or are in metropolitan areas that are near or part of the Appalachian region are not included in most definitions of Appalachia. These include Cleveland, Ohio, Nashville, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia. Pittsburgh is the largest city by population to be wholly within the Appalachian region.


title: Appalachia

text: An estimated 90% of Appalachia's earliest European settlers originated from the Anglo-Scottish border country—namely the English counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland, County Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Lowland Scottish counties of Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, Roxburghshire, Berwickshire and Wigtownshire. Most of these were from families who had been resettled in the Ulster Plantation in northern Ireland in the 17th century, but some came directly from the Anglo-Scottish border region. In America, these people are often grouped under the single name "Scotch-Irish" or "Scots-Irish". While various 20th century writers tried to associate Appalachia with Scottish highlanders, Highland Scots were a relatively insignificant percentage of the region's early European immigrants.


title: Appalachia

text: Although Swedes and Finns formed only a tiny portion of the Appalachian settlers it was Swedish and Finnish settlers of New Sweden who brought the northern European woodsman skills such as log cabin construction which formed the basis of backwoods Appalachian material culture.


title: Appalachia

text: Germans were a major pioneer group to migrate to Appalachia, settling mainly in western Pennsylvania and southwest Virginia. Smaller numbers of Germans were also among the initial wave of migrants to the southern mountains. In the 19th century, Welsh immigrants were brought into the region for their mining and metallurgical expertise, and by 1900 over 100,000 Welsh immigrants were living in western Pennsylvania alone. Thousands of German-speaking Swiss migrated to Appalachia in the second half of the 19th century, and their descendants remain in places such as East Bernstadt, Kentucky, and Gruetli-Laager, Tennessee. The coal mining and manufacturing boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought large numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans to Appalachia, although most of these families left the region when the Great Depression shattered the economy in the 1930s. African Americans have been present in the region since the 18th century, and currently make up 8% of the ARC-designated region, mostly concentrated in urban areas and former mining and manufacturing towns; the African-American component of Appalachia is sometimes termed Affrilachia.


title: Appalachia

text: Native Americans, the region's original inhabitants, are now only a small percentage of the region's present population, their most notable concentration being the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The Melungeons, a group of mixed African, European, and Native American ancestry, are scattered across northeastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia.


title: Appalachia

text: According to the American Factfinder's 2013 data, the Southern Appalachia has a white majority, comprising 84% of the population. African Americans are 7% and Hispanics or Latinos are 6% of the population. Asians and Pacific Islanders are 1.5% of the population. Although the counties have great differences among themselves, in terms of racial and ethnic diversity.


title: Appalachia

text: Christianity has long been the main religion in Appalachia. Religion in Appalachia is characterized by a sense of independence and a distrust of religious hierarchies, both rooted in the evangelical tendencies of the region's pioneers, many of whom had been influenced by the "New Light" movement in England. Many of the denominations brought from Europe underwent modifications or factioning during the Second Great Awakening (especially the Holiness movement) in the early 19th century. A number of 18th and 19th-century religious traditions are still practiced in parts of Appalachia, including natural water (or "creek") baptism, rhythmically chanted preaching, congregational shouting, snake handling, and foot washing. While most church-goers in Appalachia attend fairly well organized churches affiliated with regional or national bodies, small unaffiliated congregations are not uncommon in rural mountain areas.


title: Appalachia

text: Protestantism is the most dominant denomination in Appalachia, although there is a significant Roman Catholic presence in the northern half of the region and in urban areas, like Pittsburgh and Scranton. The region's early Lowland and Ulster Scot immigrants brought Presbyterianism to Appalachia, eventually organizing into bodies such as the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. English Baptists—most of whom had been influenced by the Separate Baptist and Regular Baptist movements—were also common on the Appalachian frontier, and today are represented in the region by groups such as the Free Will Baptists, the Southern Baptists, Missionary Baptists, and "old-time" groups such as the United Baptists and Primitive Baptists. Circuit riders such as Francis Asbury helped spread Methodism to Appalachia in the early 19th century, and today 9.2% of the region's population is Methodist, represented by such bodies as the United Methodist Church, the Free Methodist Church, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Pentecostal movements within the region include the Church of God (based in Cleveland, Tennessee) and the Assemblies of God. Scattered Mennonite colonies exist throughout the region.


title: Appalachia

text: The Appalachian dialect is a dialect of Midland American English known as the Southern Midland dialect, and is spoken primarily in central and southern Appalachia. The Northern Midland dialect is spoken in the northern parts of the region, while Pittsburgh English (more commonly known as "Pittsburghese") is strongly influenced by Appalachian dialect. The Southern Appalachian dialect is considered part of the Southern American dialect, although the two are distinguished by the rhotic nature of the Appalachian dialect. Early 20th century writers believed the Appalachian dialect to be a surviving relic of Old World Scottish or Elizabethan dialects. Recent research suggests, however, that while the dialect has a stronger Scottish influence than other American dialects, most of its distinguishing characteristics have developed in the United States.


title: Appalachia

text: For much of the region's history, education in Appalachia has lagged behind the rest of the nation due in part to struggles with funding from respective state governments and an agrarian-oriented population that often did not see a practical need for formal education. Early education in the region evolved from teaching Christian morality and learning to read the Bible in small, one-room schoolhouses that convened in months when children were not needed to help with farm work. After the Civil War, mandatory education laws and state assistance helped larger communities begin to establish grade schools and high schools. During the same period, many of the region's institutions of higher education were established or greatly expanded. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, service organizations such as Pi Beta Phi and various religious organizations established settlement schools and mission schools in the region's more rural areas.


title: Appalachia

text: In the 20th century, national trends began to have more of an effect on education in Appalachia, sometimes clashing with the region's traditional values. The Scopes Trial—the nation's most publicized debate over the teaching of the theory of evolution—took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in southern Appalachia in 1925. In spite of consolidation and centralization, schools in Appalachia struggled to keep up with federal and state demands into the 21st century. Since 2001, a number of the region's public schools were threatened with loss of funding due to difficulties fulfilling the demands of No Child Left Behind.


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachian music is one of the best-known manifestations of Appalachian culture. Traditional Appalachian music is derived primarily from the English and Scottish ballad tradition and Irish and Scottish fiddle music. African-American blues musicians played a significant role in developing the instrumental aspects of Appalachian music, most notably with the introduction of the five-stringed banjo—one of the region's iconic symbols—in the late 18th century. Another instrument known in Appalachian culture was the Appalachian dulcimer which, in a practical way, is a guitar-shaped instrument laid on its side with a flat bottom and the strings plucked in a manner to make alternating notes.


title: Appalachia

text: In the years following World War I, British folklorist Cecil Sharp brought attention to Southern Appalachia when he noted that its inhabitants still sang hundreds of English and Scottish ballads that had been passed down to them from their ancestors. Commercial recordings of Appalachian musicians in the 1920s would have a significant impact on the development of country music, bluegrass, and old-time music. Appalachian music saw a resurgence in popularity during the American folk music revival of the 1960s, when musicologists such as Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Ralph Rinzler traveled to remote parts of the region in search of musicians unaffected by modern music. Today, dozens of annual music festivals held throughout the region preserve the Appalachian music tradition.


title: Appalachia

text: Early Appalachian literature typically centered on the observations of people from outside the region, such as Henry Timberlake's "Memoirs" (1765) and Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" (1784), although there are notable exceptions, including Davy Crockett's "A Narrative of the Life of Davy Crockett" (1834). Travellers' accounts published in 19th-century magazines gave rise to Appalachian local color, which reached its height with George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood character of the 1860s and native novelists such as Mary Noailles Murfree. Works such as Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861), Emma Bell Miles' "The Spirit of the Mountains" (1905), Catherine Marshall's "Christy" (1912), Horace Kephart's "Our Southern Highlanders" (1913) marked a shift in the region's literature from local color to realism. The transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society and its effects on Appalachia are captured in works such as Olive Tilford Dargan's "Call Home to the Heart" (1932), Agnes Sligh Turnbull's "The Rolling Years" (1936), James Still's "The River of Earth" (1940), Harriette Simpson Arnow's "The Dollmaker" (1954), and Harry Caudill's "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" (1962). In the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of authors like Breece D'J Pancake, Dorothy Allison, and Lisa Alther brought greater literary diversity to the region.


title: Appalachia

text: Along with the above-mentioned, some of Appalachia's best known writers include James Agee ("A Death in the Family"), Anne W. Armstrong ("This Day and Time"), Wendell Berry ("Hannah Coulter", "The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge", "Selected Poems of Wendell Berry"), Jesse Stuart ("Taps for Private Tussie", "The Thread That Runs So True"), Denise Giardina ("The Unquiet Earth", "Storming Heaven"), Lee Smith ("Fair and Tender Ladies", "On Agate Hill"), Silas House ("Clay's Quilt", "A Parchment of Leaves"), Wilma Dykeman ("The Far Family", "The Tall Woman"), Keith Maillard ("Alex Driving South", "Light in the Company of Women", "Hazard Zones", "Gloria", "Running", "Morgantown", "Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes", "Looking Good") Maurice Manning ("Bucolics", "A Companion for Owls"), Anne Shelby ("Appalachian Studies", "We Keep a Store"), George Ella Lyon ("Borrowed Children", "Don't You Remember?"), Pamela Duncan ("Moon Women", "The Big Beautiful"), David Joy ("Where All Light Tends to Go", "The Weight of This World"), Chris Offutt ("No Heroes", "The Good Brother"), Charles Frazier ("Cold Mountain", "Thirteen Moons"), Sharyn McCrumb ("The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter"), Robert Morgan ("Gap Creek"), Jim Wayne Miller ("The Brier Poems"), Gurney Norman ("Divine Right's Trip", "Kinfolks"), Ron Rash ("Serena"), Elizabeth Madox Roberts ("The Great Meadow", "The Time of Man"), Thomas Wolfe ("Look Homeward Angel", "You Can't Go Home Again"), Rachel Carson ("The Sea Around Us", "Silent Spring"; Presidential Medal of Freedom), and Jeannette Walls ("The Glass Castle").


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachian literature crosses with the larger genre of Southern literature. Internationally renowned writers such as William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy have made notable contributions to the American canon with tales set within Appalachia. McCarthy's "Suttree" (1979) is an intense vision of the squalidness and brutality of life along the Tennessee River, in the heart of Appalachia. Other McCarthy novels set in Appalachia include "The Orchard Keeper" (1968) and "Child of God" (1973). Appalachia also serves as the origin point for the kid, the protagonist of McCarthy's Western masterpiece "Blood Meridian". Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, is on the borderlands of what is considered Appalachia, but his fictional Yoknapatawpha should be considered part of the region. Almost all of the fiction which earned him the Nobel Prize is set there, including "Light in August" and "Absalom, Absalom".


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachian folklore has a strong mixture of European, Native American (especially Cherokee), and Biblical influences. The Cherokee taught the region's early European pioneers how to plant and cultivate crops such as corn and squash and how to find edible plants such as ramps. The Cherokee also passed along their knowledge of the medicinal properties of hundreds of native herbs and roots, and how to prepare tonics from such plants. Before the introduction of modern agricultural techniques in the region in the 1930s and 1940s, many Appalachian farmers followed the Biblical tradition of planting by "the signs", such as the phases of the moon, or when certain weather conditions occurred.


title: Appalachia

text: Cherokee folklore continues to influence storytelling in the Appalachians, including depictions and characteristics of regional animals. As told by Eastern Band Cherokee and western North Carolina storyteller Jerry Wolfe, these creatures include the chipmunk, also known as "seven stripes" from an angry bear scratching him down the back—four claw marks and the spaces in between making seven—and the copperhead who sneaks and thieves his way into becoming venomous.


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachian folk tales are rooted in English, Scottish, and Irish fairy tales, as well as regional heroic figures and events. Jack tales, which tend to revolve around the exploits of a simple-but-dedicated figure named "Jack", are popular at story-telling festivals. Other stories involve wild animals, such as hunting tales. In the industrial areas of western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia the composite Joe Magarac steelworker story has been handed down. Regional folk heroes such as the railroad worker John Henry and frontiersmen Davy Crockett, Mike Fink and Johnny Appleseed are examples of real-life figures that evolved into popular folk tale subjects. Murder stories, such as Omie Wise and John Hardy, are popular subjects for Appalachian ballads. Ghost stories, or "haint tales" in regional English, are a common feature of southern oral and literary tradition. Ghost stories native to the region include the story of the Greenbrier Ghost, which is rooted in a Greenbrier County, West Virginia, murder.


title: Appalachia

text: Several urban legends and horror stories have been rooted in the Appalachia region. Since the 1960s the Point Pleasant, West Virginia, legend of Mothman has originated and been explored in popular culture including the 2002 film "The Mothman Prophecies" loosely retelling the original tale. Since the 1910s, reports of glowing orbs around the Brown Mountain ridgeline in North Carolina have been the subject of paranormal theories including the ghost of slaves or Cherokee tribal warriors. Known as the Brown Mountain lights, the story has been adapted in popular culture, including an episode of the 1990s sci-fi drama "The X-Files". The infamous story of the Bell Witch haunting in Tennessee has influenced several major films of the horror genre, including "Poltergeist", "The Blair Witch Project", and the "Paranormal Activity" series.


title: Appalachia

text: Urban Appalachians are people from Appalachia who are living in metropolitan areas outside the Appalachian region. In the decades following the Great Depression and World War II, many Appalachian residents moved to industrial cities in the north and west in a migration that became known as the "Hillbilly Highway". Mechanization of coal mining during the 1950s and 1960s was the major source of unemployment in central Appalachia. Many migration streams covered relatively short distances, with West Virginians moving to Cleveland and other cities in eastern and central Ohio, and eastern Kentuckians moving to Cincinnati and southwest Ohio in search of jobs. More distant cities like Detroit and Chicago attracted migrants from many states. Enclaves of Appalachian culture can still be found in some of these communities.


title: Appalachia

text: In the 1940s through the 1960s, Wheeling, West Virginia, became a cultural center of the region because it had a clear-channel AM radio station, WWVA, which could be heard throughout the entirety of the eastern United States at night. Although Pittsburgh's KDKA was a 50 kilowatt clear channel station that dated back to the early 1920s (as well as spanning all the East Coast in signal strength), WWVA prided itself on rural and farm programming that appealed to a wider audience in the rural region. Cincinnati's WLW also was relied on by many in the central and northern areas of Appalachia.


title: Appalachia

text: In the southern part of the region, WSB-AM Atlanta and WSM-AM Nashville, flagship of the "Grand Ole Opry", were major stations for the region's population during the 20th century, and remain strong in the sub-region.


title: Appalachia

text: Appalachia as an academic interest was the product of a critical scholarship that emerged across the disciplines in the 1960s and 1970s. With a renewed interest in issues of power, scholars could not dismiss the social inequity, class conflict, and environmental destruction encountered by America's so-called "hillbillies". Appalachia's emergence in academia is a result of the intersection between social conditions and critical academic interests, and has resulted in the development of many Appalachian studies programs in colleges and universities across the region, as well as in the Appalachian Studies Association.


title: Appalachia

text: The economy of Appalachia traditionally rested on agriculture, mining, timber, and in the cities, manufacturing. Since the late 20th century, tourism and second-home developments have assumed an increasingly major role.


title: Appalachia

text: While the climate of the Appalachian region is suitable for agriculture, the region's hilly terrain greatly limits the size of the average farm, a problem exacerbated by population growth in the latter half of the 19th century. Subsistence farming was the backbone of the Appalachian economy throughout much of the 19th century, and while economies in places such as western Pennsylvania, the Great Valley of Virginia, and the upper Tennessee Valley in east Tennessee, transitioned to a large-scale farming or manufacturing base around the time of the Civil War, subsistence farming remained an important part of the region's economy until the 1950s. In the early 20th century, Appalachian farmers were struggling to mechanize, and abusive farming practices had over the years left much of the already-limited farmland badly eroded. Various federal entities intervened in the 1930s to restore damaged areas and introduce less-harmful farming techniques. In recent decades, the concept of sustainable agriculture has been applied to the region's small farms, with some success. Nevertheless, the number of farms in the Appalachian region continues to dwindle, plunging from 354,748 farms on in 1969 to 230,050 farms on in 1997.


title: Appalachia

text: Early Appalachian farmers grew both crops introduced from their native Europe as well as crops native to North America (such as corn and squash). Tobacco has long been an important cash crop in Southern Appalachia, especially since the land is ill-suited for cash crops such as cotton. Apples have been grown in the region since the late 18th century, their cultivation being aided by the presence of thermal belts in the region's mountain valleys. Hogs, which could free range in the region's abundant forests, often on chestnuts, were the most popular livestock among early Appalachian farmers. The American chestnut was also an important human food source until the chestnut blight struck in the 20th century. The early settlers also brought cattle and sheep to the region, which they would typically graze in highland meadows known as balds during the growing season when bottomlands were needed for crops. Cattle, mainly the Hereford, Angus, and Charolais breeds, are now the region's chief livestock.


title: Appalachia

text: The mountains and valleys of Appalachia once contained what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of timber. The poor roads, lack of railroads, and general inaccessibility of the region, however, prevented large-scale logging in most of the region throughout much of the 19th century. While logging firms were established in the Carolinas and the Kentucky River valley before the Civil War, most major firms preferred to harvest the more accessible timber stands in the Midwestern and Northeastern parts of the country. By the 1880s, these stands had been exhausted, and a spike in the demand for lumber forced logging firms to seek out the virgin forests of Appalachia. The first major logging ventures in Appalachia transported logs using mule teams or rivers, the latter method sometimes employing splash dams. In the 1890s, innovations such as the Shay locomotive, the steam-powered loader, and the steam-powered skidder allowed massive harvesting of the most remote forest sections.


title: Appalachia

text: Logging in Appalachia reached its peak in the early 20th century, when firms such as the Ritter Lumber Company cut the virgin forests on an alarming scale, leading to the creation of national forests in 1911 and similar state entities to better manage the region's timber resources. Arguably the most successful logging firm in Appalachia was the Georgia Hardwood Lumber Company, established in 1927 and renamed Georgia-Pacific in 1948 when it expanded nationally. Although logging in Appalachia declined as the industry shifted focus to the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s, rising overseas demand in the 1980s brought a resurgence in Appalachian logging. In 1987, there were 4,810 lumber firms operating in the region. In the late 1990s, the Appalachian lumber industry was a multibillion-dollar industry, employing 50,000 people in Tennessee, 26,000 in Kentucky, and 12,000 in West Virginia alone. By 1999, 1.4 million acres were extinguished as a result of deforestation by natural resource industries. Pollution from mining processes and disruption of the land ensued numerous environmental issues. Removal of vegetation and other alterations in the land increased erosion and flooding of surrounding areas. Water quality and aquatic life were also affected.


title: Appalachia

text: Coal mining is the industry most frequently associated with the region in outsiders' minds, due in part to the fact that the region once produced two-thirds of the nation's coal. At present, however, the mining industry employs just 2% of the Appalachian workforce. The region's vast coalfield covers between northern Pennsylvania and central Alabama, mostly along the Cumberland Plateau and Allegheny Plateau regions. Most mining activity has been concentrated in eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania, with smaller operations in western Maryland, Tennessee and Alabama. The Pittsburgh coal seam, which has produced 13 billion tons of coal since the early 19th century, has been called the world's most valuable mineral deposit. There are over 60 major coal seams in West Virginia, and over 80 in eastern Kentucky. Most of the coal mined is bituminous, although significant anthracite deposits exist on the fringe of the region in central Pennsylvania. About two-thirds of Appalachia's coal is produced by underground mining, the rest by surface mining. Mountaintop removal, a form of surface mining, is a highly controversial mining practice in central Appalachia due to its negative impacts on the environment and health of local residents.


title: Appalachia

text: In the late 19th century, the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the nation's railroads brought a soaring demand for coal, and mining operations expanded rapidly across Appalachia. Hundreds of thousands of workers poured into the region from across the United States and from overseas, essentially overhauling the cultural makeup of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. Mining corporations gained considerable influence in state and municipal governments, especially as they often owned the entire towns in which the miners lived. The mining industry was vulnerable to economic downturns, however, and booms and busts were frequent, with major booms occurring during World War I and II, and the worst bust occurring during the Great Depression. The Appalachian mining industry also saw some of the nation's bloodiest labor strife between the 1890s and the 1930s. Mining-related injuries and deaths were not uncommon, and ailments such as black lung disease afflicted miners throughout the 20th century. After World War II, innovations in mechanization (such as longwall mining) and competition from oil and natural gas led to a decline in the region's mining operations. Environmental restrictions, such as those placed on high-sulfur coal in the 1980s, brought further mine closures. While with annual earnings of $55,000, Appalachian miners make more than most other local workers, Appalachian coal mining employed just under 50,000 in 2004.


title: Appalachia

text: Coal mining has made a comeback in some regions in the early 21st century because of the increased prominence of Consol Energy, based in Pittsburgh. The Quecreek Mine rescue in 2002 and continuing mine subsidence problems in abandoned coal mines in western Pennsylvania as well as the Sago Mine disaster and Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia and other regions have also been highlighted in recent times.


title: Appalachia

text: The manufacturing industry in Appalachia is rooted primarily in the ironworks and steelworks of early Pittsburgh and Birmingham, and in the textile mills that sprang up in North Carolina's Piedmont region in the mid-19th century. Factory construction increased greatly after the Civil War, and the region experienced a manufacturing boom between 1890 and 1930. This economic shift led to a mass migration from small farms and rural areas to large urban centers, causing the populations of cities such as Birmingham, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina, to swell exponentially. Manufacturing in the region suffered a setback during the Great Depression, but recovered during World War II and peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. However, difficulties paying retiree benefits, environmental struggles, and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 led to a decline in the region's manufacturing operations. Pittsburgh lost 44% of its factory jobs in the 1980s, and between 1970 and 2001, the number of apparel workers in the Appalachian region decreased from 250,000 to 83,000 and the number of textile workers decreased from 275,000 to 193,000.


title: Appalachia

text: U.S. Steel, founded in Pittsburgh in 1901, was the world's first corporation with more than a billion dollars in initial capitalization. Another Pittsburgh company, Alcoa, helped establish the nation's aluminum industry in the early 20th century, and has had a significant impact on the economies of western Pennsylvania and east Tennessee. Union Carbide built the world's first petrochemical plant in Clendenin, West Virginia, in 1920, and in subsequent years the Kanawha Valley became known as the "Chemical Capital of the World". Eastman Chemical, also established in 1920, is Tennessee's largest single employer. Companies such as Champion Fibre and Bowater established large pulp operations in Canton, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina, respectively, although the former was dogged by battles with environmentalists throughout the 20th century.


title: Appalachia

text: One of the region's oldest industries, tourism became a more important part of the Appalachian economy in the latter half of the 20th century as mining and manufacturing steadily declined. In 2000–2001, tourism in Appalachia accounted for nearly $30 billion and over 600,000 jobs. The mountain terrain—with its accompanying scenery and outdoor recreational opportunities—provide the region's primary attractions. The region is home to one of the world's most well-known hiking trails (the Appalachian Trail), the nation's most-visited national park (the Great Smoky Mountains National Park), and the nation's most visited national parkway (the Blue Ridge Parkway). The craft industry, including the teaching, selling, and display or demonstration of regional crafts, also accounts for an important part of the Appalachian economy, bringing (for example) over $100 million annually to the economy of western North Carolina and over $80 million to the economy of West Virginia. Important heritage tourism attractions in the region include the Biltmore Estate and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, Cades Cove in Tennessee, and Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. Important theme parks include Dollywood and Ghost Town Village, both on the periphery of the Great Smoky Mountains.


title: Appalachia

text: The mineral-rich mountain springs of the Appalachians—which for many years were thought to have health-restoring qualities—were drawing visitors to the region as early as the 18th century with the establishment of resorts at Hot Springs, Virginia, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and what is now Hot Springs, North Carolina. Along with the mineral springs, the cool and clear air of the range's high elevations provided an escape for lowland elites, and elaborate hotels—such as The Greenbrier in West Virginia and the Balsam Mountain Inn in North Carolina—were built throughout the region's remote valleys and mountain slopes. The end of World War I (which opened up travel opportunities to Europe) and the arrival of the automobile (which changed the nation's vacation habits) led to the demise of all but a few of the region's spa resorts. The establishment of national parks in the 1930s brought an explosion of tourist traffic to the region, but created problems with urban sprawl in the various host communities. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, states have placed greater focus on sustaining tourism while preserving host communities.


title: Appalachia

text: Poverty had plagued Appalachia for many years but was not brought to the attention of the rest of the United States until 1940, when James Agee and Walker Evans published "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", a book that documented families in Appalachia during the Great Depression in words and photos. In 1963, John F. Kennedy established the President's Appalachian Regional Commission. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, crystallized Kennedy's efforts in the form of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which passed into law in 1965.


title: Appalachia

text: In Appalachia, severe poverty and desolation were paired with the necessity for careful cultural sensitivity. Many Appalachian people feared that the birth of a new modernized Appalachia would lead to the death of their traditional values and heritage. Because of the isolation of the region, Appalachian people had been unable to catch up to the modernization that lowlanders have achieved. In the 1960s, many people in Appalachia had a standard of living comparable to Third World countries'. Lyndon B. Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" while standing on the front porch of an Inez, Kentucky, home whose residents had been suffering from a long-ignored problem. The Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 stated:


title: Appalachia

text: Since the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in 1965, the region has seen dramatic progress. New roads, schools, health care facilities, water and sewer systems, and other improvements have brought a better life to many Appalachian residents. In the 1960s, 219 counties in the 13-state Appalachian Region were considered economically distressed. Now that list has been cut by more than half, to 82 counties, but these are "hard-core" pockets of poverty, seemingly impervious to all efforts at improving their lot. Martin County, Kentucky, the site of Johnson's 1964 speech, is one such county still ranked as "distressed" by the ARC. As of 2000, the per capita income in Martin County was $10,650, and 37% of its residents lived below the poverty line.


title: Appalachia

text: Like Johnson, President Bill Clinton brought attention to the remaining areas of poverty in Appalachia. On July 5, 1999, he made a public statement concerning the situation in Tyner, Kentucky. Clinton told the enthusiastic crowd:


title: Appalachia

text: The region's poverty has been documented often since the early 1960s. John Cohen documents rural lifestyle and culture in "The High Lonesome Sound", while photojournalist Earl Dotter has been visiting and documenting poverty, healthcare and mining in Appalachia for nearly forty years. Another photojournalist, Shelby Lee Adams, has been photographing Appalachian families and lifestyle for decades.


title: Appalachia

text: Poverty has caused health problems in the region. The diseases of despair, including the opioid epidemic in the United States, and some diseases of poverty are prevalent in Appalachia.


title: Appalachia

text: In 1982 a seven-volume study conducted by the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force was issued by the Appalachian Regional Commission which investigated the issue of absentee land ownership. The study covered 80 counties in six states approximating the area designated "Southern Appalachia" as defined by Thomas R. Ford's 1962 work. The states selected were Alabama (15 counties), Kentucky (12 counties), North Carolina (12 counties), Tennessee (14 counties), Virginia (12 counties), and West Virginia (15 counties).


title: Appalachia

text: In its summary the report stated that "over 55,000 parcels of property in 80 counties were studied, representing some 20,000,000 acres of land and mineral rights..." It found that "41% of the 20 million acres of land and minerals...are held by only 50 private owners and 10 government agencies. The federal government is the single largest owner in Appalachia, holding over 2,000,000 acres." The study found that the extractive industries, i.e., timber, coal, etc., were "greatly underassessed for property tax purposes. Over 75% of the mineral owners in this survey pay under 25 cents per acre in property taxes." In the major coal counties surveyed the average tax per ton of known coal reserves is only $.0002 (1/50th of a cent).


title: Appalachia

text: The government-held lands are tax exempt, but the government makes a payment in lieu of taxes, which is usually less than the normal tax rates.


title: Appalachia

text: "Taken together, the failure to tax minerals adequately, the underassessment of surface lands, and the revenue loss from concentrated federal holdings has a marked impact on local governments in Appalachia. The effect, essentially, is to produce a situation in which a) the small owners carry a disproportionate share of the tax burden; b) counties depend upon federal and state funds to provide revenues, while the large, corporate and absentee owners of the regions's resources go relatively tax-free; and c) citizens face a poverty of needed services despite the presence in their counties of taxable property wealth, especially in the form of coal and other natural resources."


title: Appalachia

text: In 2013, a similar study that concentrated solely on West Virginia found that 25 private owners hold 17.6% of the state's private land of 13 million acres. The federal government owns 1,133,587 acres in West Virginia, 7.4% of the total state acreage of 15,410,560 acres. In 11 counties the top ten absentee landowners own 41% to almost 72% of the private land in each county.


title: Appalachia

text: The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) was created by the U.S. Congress in 1965 to bring poor areas of the 13 U.S. states of the main (southern) range of the Appalachians into the mainstream of the American economy. The commission is a partnership of federal, state, and local governments, and was created to promote economic growth and improve the quality of life in the region. The region as defined by the ARC includes 420 counties, including all of West Virginia; counties in 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia; and also eight cities in Virginia, where state law makes cities administratively separate from counties. The ARC is a planning, research, advocacy and funding organization; it does not have any governing powers.


title: Appalachia

text: The ARC's geographic range of coverage was defined broadly so as to cover as many economically underdeveloped areas as possible; it extends well beyond the area usually thought of as "Appalachia". For instance, parts of Alabama and Mississippi were included in the commission because of problems with unemployment and poverty similar to those in Appalachia proper, and the ARC region extends into the Northeastern states, which are not traditionally considered part of Appalachia culturally (though a "northern Appalachia" identity has emerged in recent times in parts of both NY and PA, particularly in rural areas). More recently, the Youngstown, Ohio, region was declared part of Appalachia by the ARC due to the collapse of the steel industry in the region in the early 1980s and the continuing unemployment problems in the region since, though aside from Columbiana County, Ohio, the Youngstown DMA isn't traditionally or culturally considered part of the region. The ARC's wide scope also grew out of the "pork barrel" phenomenon, as politicians from outside the traditional Appalachia area saw a new way to bring home federal money to their areas. However, former Ohio governor Bob Taft has stated, "What is good for Appalachia is good for all of Ohio."


title: Appalachia

text: Transportation has been the most challenging and expensive issue in Appalachia since the arrival of the first European settlers in the 18th century. With the exception of the October 1, 1940, opening of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the region's mountainous terrain continuously thwarted major federal intervention attempts at major road construction until the 1970s. This left large parts of the region virtually isolated and slowing economic growth. Before the Civil War, major cities in the region were connected via wagon roads to lowland areas, and flatboats provided an important means for transporting goods out of the region. By 1900, railroads connected most of the region with the rest of the nation, although the poor roads made travel beyond railroad hubs difficult. When the Appalachian Regional Commission was created in 1965, road construction was considered its most important initiative, and in subsequent decades the commission spent more on road construction than all other projects combined.


title: Appalachia

text: The effort to connect Appalachia with the outside world has required numerous civil engineering feats. Millions of tons of rock were removed to build road segments such as Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge at the Tennessee-North Carolina state line and U.S. Route 23 in Letcher County, Kentucky. Large tunnels were built through mountain slopes at Cumberland Gap in 1996 to speed up travel along U.S. Route 25E, which acts as a regional arterial connecting Appalachia to the East Coast and the Great Lakes regions. The New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, completed in 1977, was the longest and is now the fourth-longest single-arch bridge in the world. The Blue Ridge Parkway's Linn Cove Viaduct, the construction of which required the assembly of 153 pre-cast segments up the slopes of Grandfather Mountain, has been designated a historic civil engineering landmark.


title: Appalachia

text: The six physiographic provinces that in whole or in part are commonly treated as components of Appalachia are:


title: Appalachia

text: Depictions of Appalachia and its inhabitants in popular media are typically negative, making the region an object of humor, derision, and social concern. Ledford writes, "Always part of the mythical South, Appalachia continues to languish backstage in the American drama, still dressed, in the popular mind at least, in the garments of backwardness, violence, poverty, and hopelessness." Otto argues that comic strips "Li'l Abner" by Al Capp and "Barney Google" by Billy DeBeck, which both began in 1934, caricatured the laziness and weakness for "corn squeezin's" (moonshine) of these "hillbillies". The popular 1960s "Andy Griffith Show" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" on television and James Dickey's 1970 novel "Deliverance" perpetuated the stereotype, although the region itself underwent so many changes after 1945 that it scarcely resembles the comic images.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal gland, conarium, or epiphysis cerebri, is a small endocrine gland in the brain of most vertebrates. The pineal gland produces melatonin, a serotonin-derived hormone which modulates sleep patterns in both circadian and seasonal cycles. The shape of the gland resembles a pine cone, which gives it its name. The pineal gland is located in the epithalamus, near the center of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two halves of the thalamus join. The pineal gland is one of the neuroendocrine secretory circumventricular organs in which capillaries are mostly permeable to solutes in the blood.


title: Pineal gland

text: Nearly all vertebrate species possess a pineal gland. The most important exception is a primitive vertebrate, the hagfish. Even in the hagfish, however, there may be a "pineal equivalent" structure in the dorsal diencephalon. The lancelet "Branchiostoma lanceolatum", an early chordate which is a close relative to vertebrates, also lacks a recognizable pineal gland. The lamprey (another primitive vertebrate), however, does possess one. A few more complex vertebrates have lost pineal glands over the course of their evolution.


title: Pineal gland

text: The results of various scientific research in evolutionary biology, comparative neuroanatomy and neurophysiology have explained the evolutionary history (phylogeny) of the pineal gland in different vertebrate species. From the point of view of biological evolution, the pineal gland is a kind of atrophied photoreceptor. In the epithalamus of some species of amphibians and reptiles, it is linked to a light-sensing organ, known as the parietal eye, which is also called the pineal eye or "third eye."


title: Pineal gland

text: René Descartes believed the human pineal gland to be the "principal seat of the soul." Academic philosophy among his contemporaries considered the pineal gland as a neuroanatomical structure without special metaphysical qualities; science studied it as one endocrine gland among many.


title: Pineal gland

text: The word "pineal", from Latin "pinea" (pine-cone), was first used in the late 17th century to refer to the cone shape of the brain gland.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal gland is a midline brain structure that is unpaired. It takes its name from its pine-cone shape. The gland is reddish-gray and about the size of a grain of rice (5–8 mm) in humans. The pineal gland, also called the pineal body, is part of the epithalamus, and lies between the laterally positioned thalamic bodies and behind the habenular commissure. It is located in the quadrigeminal cistern near to the corpora quadrigemina. It is also located behind the third ventricle and is bathed in cerebrospinal fluid supplied through a small pineal recess of the third ventricle which projects into the stalk of the gland.


title: Pineal gland

text: Unlike most of the mammalian brain, the pineal gland is not isolated from the body by the blood–brain barrier system; it has profuse blood flow, second only to the kidney, supplied from the choroidal branches of the posterior cerebral artery.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal gland receives a sympathetic innervation from the superior cervical ganglion. A parasympathetic innervation from the pterygopalatine and otic ganglia is also present. Further, some nerve fibers penetrate into the pineal gland via the pineal stalk (central innervation). Also, neurons in the trigeminal ganglion innervate the gland with nerve fibers containing the neuropeptide PACAP.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal body in humans consists of a lobular parenchyma of pinealocytes surrounded by connective tissue spaces. The gland's surface is covered by a pial capsule.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal gland consists mainly of pinealocytes, but four other cell types have been identified. As it is quite cellular (in relation to the cortex and white matter), it may be mistaken for a neoplasm.


title: Pineal gland

text: The human pineal gland grows in size until about 1–2 years of age, remaining stable thereafter, although its weight increases gradually from puberty onwards. The abundant melatonin levels in children are believed to inhibit sexual development, and pineal tumors have been linked with precocious puberty. When puberty arrives, melatonin production is reduced.


title: Pineal gland

text: In the zebrafish the pineal gland does not straddle the midline, but shows a left-sided bias. In humans, functional cerebral dominance is accompanied by subtle anatomical asymmetry.


title: Pineal gland

text: One function of the pineal gland is to produce melatonin. Melatonin has various functions in the central nervous system, the most important of which is to help modulate sleep patterns. Melatonin production is stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light. Light sensitive nerve cells in the retina detect light and send this signal to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), synchronizing the SCN to the day-night cycle. Nerve fibers then relay the daylight information from the SCN to the paraventricular nuclei (PVN), then to the spinal cord and via the sympathetic system to superior cervical ganglia (SCG), and from there into the pineal gland.


title: Pineal gland

text: The compound pinoline is also claimed to be produced in the pineal gland; it is one of the beta-carbolines. This claim is subject to some controversy.


title: Pineal gland

text: Studies on rodents suggest that the pineal gland influences the pituitary gland's secretion of the sex hormones, follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinizing hormone (LH). Pinealectomy performed on rodents produced no change in pituitary weight, but caused an increase in the concentration of FSH and LH within the gland. Administration of melatonin did not return the concentrations of FSH to normal levels, suggesting that the pineal gland influences pituitary gland secretion of FSH and LH through an undescribed transmitting molecule.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal gland contains receptors for the regulatory neuropeptide, endothelin-1, which, when injected in picomolar quantities into the lateral cerebral ventricle, causes a calcium-mediated increase in pineal glucose metabolism.


title: Pineal gland

text: Studies in mice suggest that the pineal-derived melatonin regulates new bone deposition. Pineal-derived melatonin mediates its action on the bone cells through MT2 receptors. This pathway could be a potential new target for osteoporosis treatment as the study shows the curative effect of oral melatonin treatment in a postmenopausal osteoporosis mouse model.


title: Pineal gland

text: Calcification of the pineal gland is typical in young adults, and has been observed in children as young as two years of age. The internal secretions of the pineal gland are known to inhibit the development of the reproductive glands because when it is severely damaged in children, development of the sexual organs and the skeleton are accelerated. Pineal gland calcification is detrimental to its ability to synthesize melatonin and scientific literature presents inconclusive findings on whether it causes sleep problems.


title: Pineal gland

text: The calcified gland is often seen in skull X-rays. Calcification rates vary widely by country and correlate with an increase in age, with calcification occurring in an estimated 40% of Americans by age seventeen. Calcification of the pineal gland is associated with corpora arenacea, also known as "brain sand".


title: Pineal gland

text: Tumors of the pineal gland are called pinealomas. These tumors are rare and 50% to 70% are germinomas that arise from sequestered embryonic germ cells. Histologically they are similar to testicular seminomas and ovarian dysgerminomas.


title: Pineal gland

text: A pineal tumor can compress the superior colliculi and pretectal area of the dorsal midbrain, producing Parinaud's syndrome. Pineal tumors also can cause compression of the cerebral aqueduct, resulting in a noncommunicating hydrocephalus. Other manifestations are the consequence of their pressure effects and consist of visual disturbances, headache, mental deterioration, and sometimes dementia-like behaviour.


title: Pineal gland

text: These neoplasms are divided into three categories: pineoblastomas, pineocytomas, and mixed tumors, based on their level of differentiation, which, in turn, correlates with their neoplastic aggressiveness. The clinical course of patients with pineocytomas is prolonged, averaging up to several years. The position of these tumors makes them difficult to remove surgically.


title: Pineal gland

text: The morphology of the pineal gland differs markedly in different pathological conditions. For instance, it is known that its volume is reduced both in obese patients as well as patients with primary insomnia.


title: Pineal gland

text: Most living vertebrates have pineal glands. It is likely that the common ancestor of all vertebrates had a pair of photosensory organs on the top of its head, similar to the arrangement in modern lampreys. Some extinct Devonian fishes have two parietal foramina in their skulls, suggesting an ancestral bilaterality of parietal eyes. The parietal eye and the pineal gland of living tetrapods are probably the descendants of the left and right parts of this organ, respectively.


title: Pineal gland

text: During embryonic development, the parietal eye and the pineal organ of modern lizards and tuataras form together from a pocket formed in the brain ectoderm. The loss of parietal eyes in many living tetrapods is supported by developmental formation of a paired structure that subsequently fuses into a single pineal gland in developing embryos of turtles, snakes, birds, and mammals.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal organs of mammals fall into one of three categories based on shape. Rodents have more structurally complex pineal glands than other mammals.


title: Pineal gland

text: Crocodilians and some tropical lineages of mammals (some xenarthrans (sloths), pangolins, sirenians (manatees and dugongs), and some marsupials (sugar gliders)) have lost both their parietal eye and their pineal organ. Polar mammals, such as walruses and some seals, possess unusually large pineal glands.


title: Pineal gland

text: All amphibians have a pineal organ, but some frogs and toads also have what is called a "frontal organ", which is essentially a parietal eye.


title: Pineal gland

text: Pinealocytes in many non-mammalian vertebrates have a strong resemblance to the photoreceptor cells of the eye. Evidence from morphology and developmental biology suggests that pineal cells possess a common evolutionary ancestor with retinal cells.


title: Pineal gland

text: Pineal cytostructure seems to have evolutionary similarities to the retinal cells of the lateral eyes. Modern birds and reptiles express the phototransducing pigment melanopsin in the pineal gland. Avian pineal glands are thought to act like the suprachiasmatic nucleus in mammals. The structure of the pineal eye in modern lizards and tuatara is analogous to the cornea, lens, and retina of the lateral eyes of vertebrates.


title: Pineal gland

text: In most vertebrates, exposure to light sets off a chain reaction of enzymatic events within the pineal gland that regulates circadian rhythms. In humans and other mammals, the light signals necessary to set circadian rhythms are sent from the eye through the retinohypothalamic system to the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) and the pineal gland.


title: Pineal gland

text: The fossilized skulls of many extinct vertebrates have a pineal foramen (opening), which in some cases is larger than that of any living vertebrate. Although fossils seldom preserve deep-brain soft anatomy, the brain of the Russian fossil bird "Cerebavis cenomanica" from Melovatka, about 90 million years old, shows a relatively large parietal eye and pineal gland.


title: Pineal gland

text: Seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist René Descartes was highly interested in anatomy and physiology. He discussed the pineal gland both in his first book, the "Treatise of Man" (written before 1637, but only published posthumously 1662/1664), and in his last book, "The Passions of the Soul" (1649) and he regarded it as "the principal seat of the soul and the place in which all our thoughts are formed." In the "Treatise of Man", Descartes described conceptual models of man, namely creatures created by God, which consist of two ingredients, a body and a soul. In the "Passions", Descartes split man up into a body and a soul and emphasized that the soul is joined to the whole body by "a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain's substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain's anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities". Descartes attached significance to the gland because he believed it to be the only section of the brain to exist as a single part rather than one-half of a pair. Some of Descartes's basic anatomical and physiological assumptions were totally mistaken, not only by modern standards, but also in light of what was already known in his time.


title: Pineal gland

text: The notion of a "pineal-eye" is central to the philosophy of the French writer Georges Bataille, which is analyzed at length by literary scholar Denis Hollier in his study "Against Architecture". In this work Hollier discusses how Bataille uses the concept of a "pineal-eye" as a reference to a blind-spot in Western rationality, and an organ of excess and delirium. This conceptual device is explicit in his surrealist texts, "The Jesuve" and "The Pineal Eye".


title: Pineal gland

text: In the late 19th century Madame Blavatsky (who founded theosophy) identified the pineal gland with the Hindu concept of the third eye, or the Ajna chakra. This association is still popular today.


title: Pineal gland

text: In the short story "From Beyond" by H. P. Lovecraft, a scientist creates an electronic device that emits a resonance wave, which stimulates an affected person's pineal gland, thereby allowing them to perceive planes of existence outside the scope of accepted reality, a translucent, alien environment that overlaps our own recognized reality. It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1986. The 2013 horror film "Banshee Chapter" is heavily influenced by this short story.


title: Pineal gland

text: The secretory activity of the pineal gland is only partially understood. Its location deep in the brain suggested to philosophers throughout history that it possesses particular importance. This combination led to its being regarded as a "mystery" gland with mystical, metaphysical, and occult theories surrounding its perceived functions.


title: Pineal gland

text: The pineal gland was originally believed to be a "vestigial remnant" of a larger organ. In 1917, it was known that extract of cow pineals lightened frog skin. Dermatology professor Aaron B. Lerner and colleagues at Yale University, hoping that a substance from the pineal might be useful in treating skin diseases, isolated and named the hormone melatonin in 1958. The substance did not prove to be helpful as intended, but its discovery helped solve several mysteries such as why removing the rat's pineal accelerated ovary growth, why keeping rats in constant light decreased the weight of their pineals, and why pinealectomy and constant light affect ovary growth to an equal extent; this knowledge gave a boost to the then new field of chronobiology. Of the endocrine organs, the function of the pineal gland was the last discovered.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's 1975 book "The Structure of Magic I". NLP claims that there is a connection between neurological processes ("neuro-"), language ("linguistic") and acquired behavioral patterns ("programming"), and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness, allergy, the common cold, and learning disorders, often in a single session. They also claim that NLP can "model" the skills of exceptional people, allowing anyone to acquire them.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: NLP has been adopted by some hypnotherapists, as well as by companies that run seminars marketed as "leadership training" to businesses and government agencies.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: There is no scientific evidence supporting the claims made by NLP advocates, and it has been called a "pseudoscience". Scientific reviews have shown that NLP is based on outdated metaphors of for the brain's inner workings, that are inconsistent with current neurological theory and contain numerous factual errors. Reviews also found that research that favored NLP contained significant methodological flaws, and that there were three times as many studies of a much higher quality that failed to reproduce the "extraordinary claims" made by Bandler, Grinder, and other NLP practitioners.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP comprises a methodology termed "modeling", plus a set of techniques that they derived from its initial applications. Of such methods that are considered fundamental, they derived many from the work of Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: Bandler and Grinder also drew upon the theories of Gregory Bateson, Alfred Korzybski and Noam Chomsky (particularly transformational grammar), as well as ideas and techniques from Carlos Castaneda.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: Bandler and Grinder claim that their methodology can codify the structure inherent to the therapeutic "magic" as performed in therapy by Perls, Satir and Erickson, and indeed inherent to any complex human activity, and then from that codification, the structure and its activity can be learned by others. Their 1975 book, "The Structure of Magic I: A Book about Language and Therapy", is intended to be a codification of the therapeutic techniques of Perls and Satir.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: Bandler and Grinder say that they used their own process of "modeling" to model Virginia Satir so they could produce what they termed the "Meta-Model", a model for gathering information and challenging a client's language and underlying thinking. They claim that by challenging linguistic distortions, specifying generalizations, and recovering deleted information in the client's statements, the transformational grammar concepts of "surface structure" yield a more complete representation of the underlying "deep structure" and therefore have therapeutic benefit. Also derived from Satir were "anchoring", "future pacing" and "representational systems".


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: In contrast, the "Milton-Model"—a model of the purportedly hypnotic language of Milton Erickson—was described by Bandler and Grinder as "artfully vague" and metaphoric. The Milton-Model is used in combination with the Meta-Model as a softener, to induce "trance" and to deliver indirect therapeutic suggestion.


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: Linguist Karen Stollznow describes Bandler's and Grinder's reference to such experts as namedropping. Other than Satir, the people they cite as influences did not collaborate with Bandler or Grinder. Chomsky himself has no association with NLP whatsoever; his original work was intended as theory, not therapy. Stollznow writes, "[o]ther than borrowing terminology, NLP does not bear authentic resemblance to any of Chomsky's theories or philosophies—linguistic, cognitive or political."


title: Neuro-linguistic programming

text: According to André Muller Weitzenhoffer, a researcher in the field of hypnosis, "the major weakness of Bandler and Grinder's linguistic analysis is that so much of it is built upon untested hypotheses and is supported by totally inadequate data." Weitzenhoffer adds that Bandler and Grinder misuse formal logic and mathematics, redefine or misunderstand terms from the linguistics lexicon ("e.g.", nominalization), create a scientific façade by needlessly complicating Ericksonian concepts with unfounded claims, make factual errors, and disregard or confuse concepts central to the Ericksonian approach.