Overview

The Wild East explores the social, political, and environmental changes in the Great Smoky Mountains during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although this national park is most often portrayed as a triumph of wilderness preservation, Margaret Lynn Brown concludes that the largest forested region in the eastern United States is actually a recreated wilderness--a product of restoration and even manipulation of the land. Several hundred years before white settlement, Cherokees farmed and hunted this land. Between 1910 and 1920, corporate lumbermen built railroads into the region's most remote watersheds and removed more than 60 percent of the old-growth forest. Despite this level of human impact, those who promoted the establishment of a national park in 1934 represented the land as an untouched wilderness and described the people living there as pioneers. Nearly twenty-five years after the book's first publication, this revised edition discusses current research, citizen science initiatives, and land management practices that are restoring native plants and wildlife populations in the twenty-first century. Margaret Lynn Brown emphasizes the extraordinary treasure that is the Great Smoky Mountains and the importance of continuing to invest in the park's protection for years to come.

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Reviews

""Brown brings her story to life with pertinent and insightful oral histories gleaned from the park archives and conducted by the author herself."" -- ""Georgia Historical Quarterly "" ""Debunks the cherished myth of the Smokies as a pristine wilderness snatched from the brink of destruction to preserve the heritage of the Wild East. Instead, Brown details how the various, often contradictory approaches to managing the park since the 1930s reflect competing notions of how Americans ought to relate to nature."" -- ""Blue Ridge Outdoors""

Author Information

Margaret Lynn Brown is professor emeritus of history at Brevard College in North Carolina. She is also an essayist and reviewer. Kitty Hendrix has been an actor/singer nearly all of her life, appearing on stage, in film and television, and on concert stages on both the East and West coasts. She has originated nearly thirty leading roles and sung on stages such as Carnegie Hall and Symphony Hall, Boston. She has been an owner/producer of two theater companies and also owned a successful interior design firm. In 2013 Kitty recorded her first audiobook. She was hooked. With wide vocal and emotional range, she is known to have a voice with ""gravitas"" and can express deep emotional power. She enjoys immersing herself in the POV of the author and the many diverse characters she has portrayed. She is as comfortable performing historical biographies as she is cozy mysteries and thrillers. Kitty has recorded over 100 audiobooks, mostly with major publishers and in nearly every genre. She has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards, been nominated for an Audie (with a title that she self-produced) and been recognized for her narration by Jo Reed of Behind The Mic, AudioFile Magazine, and Library Journal.

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