Elizabeth Giddens
Welcome! I'm a professor of English and professional writing at KSU.
In April 2023, my book, Oconaluftee: The History of a Smoky Mountain Valley, was published by UNC Press.
Here's an H-Net review of it: Hartman on Giddens' Oconaluftee
The book has been honored with the following awards:
- 2024 GAYA (Georgia Author of the Year) winner in History from the Georgia Writers Association
- Finalist for the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Asheville Museum of History
- Finalist for The Weatherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia (nonfiction, 2023) from Berea College
Oconaluftee: The History of a Smoky Mountain Valley
By Elizabeth Giddens
304 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 29 halftones, 1 map, notes, bibl., index
$25 paperback | ISBN: 978-1-4696-7341-7
Pub month: April 2023
Oconaluftee Valley, located on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, is home of
the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and part of the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). This valley, the watershed of the Oconaluftee
River, provides an epic tale that belies its seeming isolation before the twentieth
century. Always a desirable place to settle, hunt, gather, farm, and live, the valley
participated in important moments during the colonial era, Trail of Tears, and Civil
War. The experiences of turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrial logging alongside
the national park movement show how land-use trends changed communities and families.
Despite a national ambiance of cross-cultural conflict, on important occasions its
residents lived like neighbors, sharing resources and acting cooperatively for mutual
benefit and survival. They demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of threats
to their existence.
Elizabeth Giddens offers a deeply researched account of the human story of the valley,
from Indigenous settlements to the establishment of the national park by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt in 1940. She builds the tale from archives, census records, property
records, personal memoirs, and more, showing how national events affected all of Oconaluftee’s
people—Indigenous, Black, and white.