The title of this edited collection, Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia, is a bit of a paradox. In the introduction as well as in every essay the authors insist that the nature and levels of violence in Appalachia are no different than in the rest of America. Yet each essay is centered upon an incident of violence in Appalachia – lynching, murder, labor protest, boundary conflict, political assassination, feuding. This structure implicitly suggests that despite the explicit protest against violent stereotypes, there is indeed something uniquely violent about the region. There is something disconcerting here. If violence in the region is similar to the rest of the country, why focus on it in the book's title? Yet an argument could be made that given the violent stereotypes of Appalachia, it does make sense to focus on violence, if only to discredit it. For so long portrayals of this mountain region by popular writers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians have been of an implacably ignorant, backward, and therefore violent culture. Thus the authors, despite nearly a quarter-century of scholarly refutation of such stereotypes, still felt the need for a frontal attack against popular conventional wisdom. Understandable. But the result, ironically, is to reinforce the stereotype of Appalachia as a uniquely violent region when the thrust of the book is to refute that stereotype.

The fifteen essays grapple with the larger subject of American violence even as they focus on events in Appalachia. They can roughly be divided into two categories – those examining actual violence resulting from social and political turmoil and those focussed not on actual violence but on cultural perceptions of violence. In the first category, Kevin Barksdale discusses the movement to create a state called Franklin in the late eighteenth century, Kathryn Meier analyzes the conflict over political boundaries in eastern Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley in the second half of the eighteenth century, and T. C. Hutton takes up political violence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kentucky. In the first two of these, the authors show that much of the conflict was more posturing than real, thereby revealing typical patterns of conflict in colonial America such as threats and property damage rather than significant violence. The third instance that took place a century later in Kentucky involved a deliberate and brutal use of murder to silence political opponents. In this case, the stereotype of Appalachian feuding was deployed by the perpetrators of the violence to deflect attention from the political and economic motivation.

Three other essays in this category of social and political turmoil demonstrate further parallels with the rest of the country. They elucidate the religious conflict behind the murder of a Mormon elder in Appalachian Georgia (Mary Ella Engel), the racial conflict which sparked a riot in Roanoke, Virgina in 1893 (Rand Dotson), and the class conflict that resulted in a high level of violence in West Virginia's coalfields (Paul Rakes and Kenneth Bailey). During this same period, such violence was not unusual in an America torn by religious and labor conflict, and racial hatred. In short, the causes of violence are in American institutions and social relations, and not in Appalachian culture.

Perceptions of violence are the focus of seven essays. These authors argue that perceptions themselves could shape behavior and history. Tyler Boulware's piece on Cherokee relations with whites shows how tribal elders invented character traits for their own young men in order to manipulate whites. They claimed that the younger generation was hotheaded and could not be controlled by tribal leaders, and therefore whites should not retaliate for hostile acts carried out by young men. Thus they perpetuated a generational myth to prevent violence between whites and Indians. Two essays examine literary works to tease out attitudes toward mountain people in the first half of the nineteenth century. Did middle-class whites believe mountain folks were more violent than other Americans in that early period? John Inscoe, in his analysis of William Gilmore Simms's novel Guy Rivers, written in 1834, concludes with a resounding no. He argues that although the novel was set in the mountains of Georgia, it reflected fear of the lawless and unruly frontier rather than a mountain culture of violence. Inscoe's argument is echoed by Katherine Ledford's essay on narratives of travelers to the mountain south in the same period. She finds that the middle-class travelers were both mesmerized and revolted by frontier, not mountain, violence. These essays show that Appalachia in the early nineteenth century had not yet attained the reputation of a uniquely violent region.

However, by the late nineteenth century, Appalachia was indeed perceived by outsiders, as well as residents, as a region rife with feuds and violence. Several essays demonstrate how this perception shaped the behavior of Appalachians themselves. Bruce Stewart's essay on moonshining, Kevin Young's essay on the manhunt for Brodus Miller, and Richard Starnes's piece on the murder of Thomas Price are especially good at showing how this worked. In each case, Appalachians, usually town-dwelling middle-class folks, accused their rural, less educated neighbors of sustaining the violent reputation of the mountains, thereby preventing the progress of civilization. Ironically, these middle-class Appalachians had accepted the stereotype but exempted themselves from it.

In another excellent but somewhat tangential iteration of this theme, Durwood Dunn explains how an incident of white brutality against a slave in East Tennessee caused widespread protest against the violence of the slave system. It became, as Dunn puts it, a catalyst that resulted in whites debating among themselves the issue of slavery's brutality. All these cultural essays essentially demonstrate that violence in Appalachia was not dissimilar to violence in other regions of the country. They do this very effectively. But I would argue that they also engage, albeit implicitly, the issue of an increasing revulsion in the Western world against violence, a shift in cultural attitudes that has recently been highlighted by Randolph Roth in American Homicide (2012) and Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012). The essays in this volume help illuminate that it is cultural perception, rather than violence, that is intrinsic to Appalachia.