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Two young PhDs in public history have come back to the mountains to make a difference.
It’s called Passel, Drs. Josh Howard’s and Elizabeth Catte’s public history consulting group.
Passel? “In our part of the world,” they say on their website, “passel means an assortment of things.”
That’s understatement. Now based in Staunton, Virginia, Catte and Howard are writers, teachers, nonprofit advisors, workshop leaders, museum consultants, historical researchers, grantwriters and National Park Service subcontractors.
It’s a passel of hats they wear. But all of their work shares this common ground: a passion for making the past a force for change in the present, and for righting the world’s perception of Appalachia in a time dominated by division and reductive labels.
First things first. If you haven’t read “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia,” you’ve probably heard about it. Elizabeth Catte’s book, now in its third printing and recently released as an Audiobook, has been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Los Angeles Times.
“What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” is a small book that packs a powerful punch. Catte writes with elegant anger about how Appalachia has been reduced to a stereotype, its diversity and creative strength ignored. Though her book has been billed as a response to J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Catte’s book soars well beyond that, to address longstanding cultural untruths about Appalachia. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants the story of “the other side.”
Catte was co-editor of the recently released book “55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike,” and is currently writing a history of Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia. Once known as the Western State Lunatic Asylum, the 190-year-old institution was the site of legal forced sterilizations from 1924 until the law was repealed in the 1970s.
Partner Josh Howard’s work is equally rooted in place, and fueled by a passion for public and applied history as an agent for change. “There are many projects, ideas, topics and organizations that remain under-served because they don’t represent aspects of history that funders want to invest in,” Howard says.
More than half of the work that Passel does is pro bono, given to small nonprofits without resources to hire needed help. Assistance was provided to the Appalachian African American Cultural Center in Pennington Gap as they regrouped.
“We want Passel to be a tool that helps improve the balance, whether it’s helping connect individuals to resources or taking an active role in planning interpretive projects,” Howard says.
Pro bono work drew Howard back to the Longdale area of Alleghany County, Virginia, where his family has deep roots. And where the Forest Service operated from 1938 to 1950 the only recreation area designated for African Americans in Virginia…and quite possibly the only one in America.
It was called Green Pastures, the park, and was built in 1938 by Civilian Conservation Corps workers at the request of the Clifton Forge chapter of the NAACP. In the introduction to the recently published What’s Your Story? oral history of Green Pastures, Howard writes about the movement to provide African Americans a place to gather and be outdoors in the Jim Crow era:
A protest campaign, spurred forward by local African Americans and the Clifton Forge chapter of the NAACP, challenged the unwritten rules of segregation at recreation areas throughout the state. Fearing these challenges might be met with escalating protest…the Forest Service agreed to build a recreation area explicitly and exclusively for African-American use.
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The excerpt above appears in our March/April 2019 issue. For the rest of the story and more like it, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription.
