Seeking a taste of unspoiled wilderness, more than eight million people visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park each year. Yet few probably realize what makes the park unusual: it was the result of efforts to reclaim wilderness rather than to protect undeveloped land.

The Smokies have, in fact, been a human habitat for 8,000 years, and that contact has molded the landscape as surely as natural forces have. In this book, Daniel S. Pierce examines land use in the Smokies over the centuries, describing the pageant of peoples who have inhabited these mountains and then focusing on the twentieth-century movement to create a national park.

Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials, Pierce presents the most balanced account available of the development of the park. He tells how park supporters set about raising money to buy the land—often from resistant timber companies—and describes the fierce infighting between wilderness advocates and tourism boosters over the shape the park would take. He also discloses the unfortunate human cost of the park’s creation: the displacement of the area’s inhabitants.

Pierce is especially insightful regarding the often-neglected history of the park since 1945. He looks at the problems caused by roadbuilding, tree blight, and air pollution that becomes trapped in the mountains’ natural haze. He also provides astute assessments of the Cades Cove restoration, the Fontana Lake road construction, and other recent developments involving the park.

Full of outstanding photographs and boasting a breadth of coverage unmatched in other books of its kind, The Great Smokies will help visitors better appreciate the wilderness experience they have sought. Pierce’s account makes us more aware of humanity's long interaction with the land while capturing the spirit of those idealistic environmentalists who realized their vision to protect it.

The Author: Daniel S. Pierce teaches in the department of history and the humanities program at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and is a contributor to The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.

With 909 recognized species of lichens, Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) is home to more of these lichenized fungi than any other national park in the United States, as well as nearly half of all species known to occur in eastern North America. There is a great deal of room for scientific exploration, inquiry, and systematic description in the realm of lichenology. In Field Guide to the Lichens of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Erin Tripp and James Lendemer take on the formidable task of creating an all-in-one resource for Park exploration, including lichen distribution maps, tools for identification, vivid photographs and illustrations, and even field notes from their own research campaigns. In the process, the authors create a touchstone for lichen taxonomy and ecology, and they inspire others—researchers as well as casual observers—to take interest in the incredible biodiversity of the Great Smoky Mountains. Biologists, botanists, visitors to the park, naturalists, and others interested in the flora and fauna of both the southern Appalachians and GSMNP will thoroughly enjoy this lovingly prepared field guide.

This catalog documents a 2022 exhibition of original editorial illustrations commissioned by the University of Tennessee Libraries to complement the Chimney Tops 2 Wildfires Oral History Project. The four illustrators showcased here have strong ties to East Tennessee. Paige Braddock, author of the Eisner-nominated comic strip Jane’s World and Chief Creative Officer at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, is an ’85 UT alumna; Charlie Daniel, beloved Knoxville News Sentinel editorial illustrator, has been a Knoxville resident since 1958; Marshall Ramsey, syndicated editorial illustrator and Pulitzer nominee, is a ’91 UT alumnus; and professional illustrator Danny Wilson has been a visible part of Knoxville’s graphic landscape since graduating from UT in 1984. The artists were given access to the project’s digital archive of oral interviews—to date, 139 have been recorded—and were asked to respond creatively to what they heard and read.

The result is Rising from the Ashes, a candid and deeply felt collection of illustrations encapsulating accounts of the merciless firestorm that enveloped Sevier County in November 2016. The flexible medium of the editorial illustration shows itself capable of extended narrative, disquieting detail, and poignant synthesis, as well as moments of beauty, hope, horror, and even humor as it ushers viewers into the recollections of wrestling and sorrow that animate the project’s still expanding archive. Bales writes, “Ultimately, the multiple fires destroyed or damaged 2,500 homes and buildings, killed 14 trapped people, injured another 200 or more, and burned over 17,000 acres of mostly woodlands that were a powder keg of dried leaves, all in a matter of three hours.” Years later, the ramifications of this event are still being felt in the community and region. Rising from the Ashes is a tribute to a people who suffered, lost, banded together, and rebuilt; and no less important, it is an expression of solidarity, recognizing how much remains to be done.