Appalachian Outreach Program (1979-1981)

In 1979, the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University received a grant of $23,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce a series of nine multi-media outreach programs, based on materials held by the Archives. The programs were presented to the public for free throughout east Tennessee and its surrounding areas.

An additional NEH grant in 1981 for $41,000 enabled the program to expand throughout southern Appalachia and allowed the Archives to design study guides to accompany a selection of the programs. In 1988, the Archives converted the slideshows to Umatic and VHS tape, and in 2009 the Archives created digital surrogates of the programs.

This exhibit contains the digital surrogates of each of the nine programs, along with all available supplementary materials: scripts for all nine programs and study guides for the six programs for which such material was created. Additionally, it includes a range of press releases, program descriptions, newspaper reviews, and advertisements.

All materials in this exhibit are drawn from the Archives of Appalachia’s collection #0237, “Archives of Appalachia and University Archives Records.”