Appalachian Figures From a Knox County river farm to the governor’s chair On paper, Silas Woodson looks like a Midwestern politician. He practiced law in St Joseph, Missouri, served as a Union militia officer during the Civil War, and in 1873 became the first Democrat elected governor of Missouri after the war. Look a little closer and the story runs straight through the hills of southeastern Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures A Revolutionary pension and a mountain judge On autumn court days in Harlan, the docket could run long. Old men who had marched with Washington or fought in Carolina hobbled into the courthouse and told their stories to a clerk, a lawyer, and a judge who knew something about frontier fighting himself. In October 1833, Revolutionary veteran Jesse Brock stood in Harlan Circuit Court to give a sworn statement for his pension.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths A haunted highway through the coalfields If you drive US 119 at night, the road feels older than the concrete beneath your tires. The four-lane slices through coal country from Pineville, Kentucky, up through the Tug Valley and Logan into central and northern West Virginia, before continuing on to Uniontown and Punxsutawney in Pennsylvania.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths If you drive the back roads of Appalachia long enough, someone will eventually warn you about a girl in white who may be waiting just past the next curve. Sometimes she is a bride on her wedding night. Sometimes she is simply “the lady in white,” a stranger who steps out of the fog and into your car. She asks for a ride, rides in silence, and then vanishes before you reach town.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths In a bend of the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee, a farming family named Bell took root in the early nineteenth century. Two centuries later, their homestead is remembered less for corn and tobacco than for a talking spirit that slapped children, quoted Scripture, and claimed it had murdered the family patriarch.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On clear nights above the Catawba Valley, Brown Mountain does not look like much. It is a low, flat ridge that runs along the Burke and Caldwell county line in western North Carolina, roughly twelve miles northwest of Morganton and just west of Wilson Creek. From overlooks on the Blue Ridge Parkway or from the Brown Mountain Overlook on Highway 181, the ridge is an even, dark skyline. It should be unremarkable.

The dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa , backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my favorite images of any fossil ever. Photo by William Jude Hart. New paper out: Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.

Émile Bréhier BRÉHIER, Émile. O fim do mundo antigo (trad.

"I did not sufficiently counterbalance that with skepticism and verification at the moment it mattered... I did not enforce the standard you expect: only claim access to evidence I can actually see"

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