This talk is about an hour. All right, lets go ahead and get started, everyone. Welcome to class. Over the course of this semester so far, we have seen how appalachia, perhaps to a greater degree than any other american region is defined to the world and in the minds of its residents by outsiders. We have seen, for example, how industrialists employed the negative stereotype of the violent hillbilly to rationalize the seizure of thousands of acres of land on the boundary between kentucky and West Virginia. The image of appalachia as an impoverished and backward area continues to haunt the region to this day. Indeed, many residents have absorbed and inverted negative stereotypes of the region and its people and have also constructed new identities for themselves based upon how they think they are perceived. A classic example of this, i think, is the recent bestselling book, j. D. Vances hillbillyology, a book well turn to later on in this lecture. For these reasons, its beholden on us, i think, to understand how appalachian stereotypes have evolved over time and how they have been mobilized in different circumstances for the benefit of outsiders and those who live here. But i think i would like to start our story with a negative stereotype, and i want to dissect a negative image of ap latchians in American Culture, beginning in the mid to late 19th century. Among the oldest and perhaps most persist eent aspects of th view of the people of the mountains is their cultural and economic backwardness, their supposed backwardness. Edgar alan poe set one of his short stories published in 1844, in a fictional location, situated to the south and west of charlottesville, virginia. He entitled this short story, the ragged mountains. And its an interesting story, partially because its the only short story that poe set in virginia, despite having attended university here, or at that point in virginia. Those hills, those ragged mountains, according to the main character of the story were a place of dreary isolation. And were steeped in a quote, solitude that seemed absolutely virgin. The narrow feared the area because of local tales regarding the, quote, unkuth and fierce races of men who tended their caverns. This early gothic rendering of appalachia touching on two themes, that would become main stays of outside perceptions of the region and its people. First the mountains are geographically isolated, and this becomes a key factor in the development of the hillbilly stereotype. Second, the geographic isolation of the region shelters the people of the mountains from modernity. Premodern traditions, according to those who subscribe to this image, survive in isolation in appalachia. The southern mountains in the words of one observer who well turn to in greater detail later on, are populated by, quote, our contemporary ancestors. Those the image of the mountain as a backward and isolated region has existed in one way or another for centuries, these stereotypes only became rooted in the National Consciousness after the civil war. Scholars argue that the whole idea of appalachia as a unique cultural and geographic region came into existence only in the late 19th century. And it came into existence for two reasons. One, the rise of what is known as local color, or regional literature in national magazines, and two, the rapid industrialization of the mountains resulting from the rise of the extraction industries. But before we turn to these topics, we must remember that the United States, in the 1870s and 1880s was a nation seeking to understand itself. And its place in the world. In the aftermath of extraordinary tragedy and in the midst of rapid economic change. The country as weve seen in past lectures emerged battered after the 1860s, following decades of sectional strife and the devastation of civil war. Americans particularly in the north, understandably chose to look at the possibilities of a new future rather than turn to their recent painful past. The u. S. In the gilded age was a nation infatuated with economic expansion, industrialization, and progress. Indeed americans were aware they were living in a period of change, and they were conscious that their country had emerged on the global stage as a world power. American progress and ingenuity had brought into being Thomas Jeffersons dream of an empire of liberty. In this environment of optimism and the faith in the new, the stubborn persistence of old customs in the Appalachian Mountains seemed a strange anomaly. But lets go back to local color literature. Industrialization brought prosperity on the cities and resulted in the swelling of the middle class. This new middle class had wealth and leisure time. Though economically well off, many northern urbanites craved distractions from the tedium and humdrum of everyday city life. Many found an escape in travel literature and local color or regional stories printed in the new monthly magazines that emerged in the year surrounding the war. Magazines such as harpers weekly, the atlantic, lippen cots, and cosmopolitan, thrived to tales of romance, travel, and adventure in strange and exotic corners of the nation and indeed in the world. Appalachia was a region very near the urban centers of the northeast. And was in the late 19th century rural, and to a large degree, forested. It was also culturally southern. All of this made it an ideal locale for local color scouts, who can contrast its picturesque landscape with the habits of its people with the new America Emerging in the cities across the north. And i think at this point, lets turn to our first handout for an example of local color literature. Published in 1899 in harpers weekly, this is a pretty famous example. And its handout number one, our contemporary ancestors. Its a brief reading, but turn to it quickly with these questions in mind. Who wants to answer that first question . Who wants to take a stab at that one . Michael . Wait for the i highlight from the text being in the conditions of the colonial times and i think thats reflective of the colonial economy that the coal industry brought from West Virginia and extorted from the Appalachian Region in general. And by saying our contemporary ancestors, hes making a reference to the english colonies themselves, but West Virginia, because of this colonial economy, hasnt been able to escape the extortion or the colonial economy that made up most of the colonies. So in a way, its still stuck in the past. Interestingly, hes certainly touching on this idea of sort of a pastoral, perhaps colonial past, survive sbog the into the present. How can you have an contemporary ancestors . Arent they deceased . The very nature of an ancestor is that they predate you . So what say contemporary ancestor . Its kind of like they were with the evolutionary theory of the caveman. Its like you found a caveman walking around. Its like, oh, my gosh, we found one, this is awesome. Our contemporary ancestors, we found one thats still alive. Thats our history. He approaches it with a scientific spirit, we can analyze these people and find out where we came from. Its kind of degrading and really interesting. Perhaps it is degrading, and you certainly see as part of this feuding hillbilly stereotype, this idea that these people are somehow, i wouldnt say sub human, but degraded. Like their condition is degraded. That certainly comes up in much of this literature. So a contemporary ancestor is who . A past person living amongst us, and this is a key component of the emerging sort of pastoral image of appalachia. Its inhabited by people of a bygone era, that survive into the present. Its like a museum. Its like colonial williamsburg, but it actually exists, its not a museum show. Right . Now why does the author say that the people of this region are impoverished while those other people in upstate new york are not . What saved the people of upstate new york from poverty . Michael again. In the second paragraph, he goes into this. In upstate new york, the building of the erie canal and the almost interstate linkage between upstate new york and its surrounding metropolises, kept it at least in stride with metropolis and evolution, societal evolution. Okay, yeah. Anyone else want to Say Something on this . Yeah, absolutely the erie canal is an important component here. Yeah . Later in the second paragraph when you talk about the railroads connecting with West Virginia, like we saw when the railroads came into the region, ideas, businesses, but those businesses were, once again, outsiders. So i think it was just the idea of how isolated the region was, and we needed transportation and like a belief in the conventions, we wanted transportation from the eastern side, and we finally got that. Good. Yeah. Industrialization, right . Industrialization, the connection to the modern economy has saved the poor people of upstate new york from the fate that the impoverished hillbillies are suffering in 19th century appalachia. So reading between the lines of the article, how might the people of appalachia escape their poverty . How might this conception of our contemporary ancestors, in other words, how might it be abused by outside interests . So in the same paragraph, he talks about intercommunication as a means of progress, and i thought that was really interesting, because he also talks about the mountain life as illiterate. So its like this communication, being able to read and write is put on this pedestal. If you can do this, youll be able to pull yourself out of poverty. The people of appalachia had a different way of communicating that necessarily couldnt be put pretty on a page, you know what i mean. So he was saying you can be saved if you can read and stop drinking and stop killing each other. But its a really derogatory way of looking at it. Yeah, yeah. Youve hit the nail on the head there. I think what theyre saying is, through progress, these people can be saved. And what is progress . Integration in the national economy, integration into American Progress and to this idea of sort of of america that had come into being in the gilded age. Yeah, thats what according to frost could save these people. I think thats the underlying assertion here. And that you could see how, for instance, when we looked at the rise of the extraction industries, we discussed the issue of land seizure, right . You can see how this sort of thinking could be used to justify certain actions, a certain treatment of people. Its all in the name of progress. Perhaps these people dont know whats best for them. We know whats best, right . All right, great, guys. While the local color back to the lecture, saw appalachian traditions as quaint curiosities, many leaders of the new south which emerged after the war viewed the people and the region as embarrassments and obstacles to progress. We have seen in our discussion of altina wallers, the fuse book, how state authorities from kentucky and West Virginia really got involved in the Hatfield Mccoy feud after the railroad had brought outside investment and National Attention to the area. The wheelie intelligencer, published outside of wheeling, bemoaned the effects that the National Coverage of feud violence had on industry in the state. Quote, capitalists refused to come and prospect because they say they are afraid of our outlaws. You cannot get them to go into the interior to inspect our timber and coal lands for fear they will be ambushed. The people of the mountains, in the eyes of these capitalists and outlined by the wheeling intelligencer, these people of the mountains with their strange ways, their preindustrial routine and their supposed penchant for violence had no place in the emergent new south after reconstruction or during reconstruction. They are obstacles to investment and hinder the advance of the extraction industry. As such, they should either be reformed in order to make them useful members of the new industrial order, or they should be marginalized entirely. Many industrialists and investors opted for the latter option as weve seen. Coal operators brought in workers in the form of African Americans from the deep south and Eastern European immigrants, who they believed would be better suited to Industrial Labor and who would work longer hours for less pay. As weve seen again in our last few lectures on the extractive industries, the perception of the ignorant mountain folk, now remember this is a perception fostered in this local color journalism and also within the sort of newspaper coverage of the feud. The perception of the ignorant mountain folk that they did not make the most of their land, that its potential, the potential of the rich Mineral Resources of the land was lost on them. This underpinned attempts by outside investors to seize the mineral rights of thousands of acres of land in southern West Virginia in Eastern Kentucky in the last decades of the 19th century. In the late 19th century, the dismissive hillbilly stereotype became a major justification for the swift acquisition of Mountain Land and resources by outside investors. And now the question is, this is a depiction of a kentucky moon shiner published in harpers weekly in the 1880s. The question is, what are the real world effects, again, for this of this stereotype . Its enough to just talk about how it develops, but did it really affect how people perceived appalachians . We can argue about how how it came into play when industrialists came into the area to invest in mining, et cetera. But how else might it have affected people on the ground . And to answer that question, i want you to turn to the second handout in your page in your packet. One of the things we talked about in our last lecture was the appalachian diaspora during a period of decline in the coal industry. We saw thousands of people move into the cities of the midwest and the eastern seaboard. This continued through the 19 fir 50s and 60s. What happened to these people when they got to the city . So this is a story published in the chicago sunday tribune, called girl reporter visits the jungle of hillbillies, and it depicts a neighbor on the Upper East Side of chicago that had become associated with rural, southern, working class whites who had come in to the city to get jobs in factories, namely in the canning and Food Production industry. You see it here. Its the front page of that chicago sunday tribune. Here is the story. Front page, right . Girl reporter. This is a serialized account, it stretches over several edition of the newspaper. So lets take a second to read it. And i think this is particularly shocking. I think this is one of the most shocking sources that weve looked at all year. But if you can take a look, read it, and then like we had with the last handout, take these questions into consideration, maybe we can talk about it as a group. Added so many questions to this. About gender, how does race play into this. All right, but lets start with an easy one. What adjectives does the reporter and her sources use to describe southern migrants . Yeah. I think my favorite one, well, my least favorite one, the plague of locusts that lasts for years, have the lowest standard of living and moral code, if any of all, the biggest capacity for liquor and the most savage and vicious tactics when drunk, which is most of the time. I mean, they had this stereotype in mind when they entered the jungle of the hillbillies. And they werent trying to find stories that would help them disprove their claims. So they went in with a mindset and i guess they accomplished what they were trying to write. Great. Yeah . With that, theyre like feeding the fire of whats going on. Its not theyre not making anything any better. In the other article before that was talking about trying to get out of it. Theyre just making it worse because its what more people are coming in to see to see whats going on and theyre not helping at all. They call it like a rare and strange breed. Feuding hillbillies and shooting cousins. You remember when we were discussing altina walers the feud, and the rise of feuding in the late 19th century appalachia as a whole. I said this image of the feuding hillbilly will haunt people from the region to this day. And this is evidence of this. Where did this notion of a feuding hillbilly come from . It comes from that News Coverage of that feud in the 19th century. It was a major news story that continues, i would argue, to haunt people from ach lafppalac this day. This line, skid row dives, opium parlors and other dens of inequity, compared with the joints taken over by the clans of southern, fighting feuding hillbillies and their shooting cousins who today constitute one of the most dangerous and lawless elements of chicagos fastgrowing migrant population. So theyre linking the internal migrants with the perceived threats of migrants as a whole. Right . Theyre linking it with other immigrant groups. I mean, i end it with this provocative question here at the end of this section here, which many of you who are from appalachia, you might be confronted with these similar stereotypes. You might feel when people ask you if youre from West Virginia, whether you might feel thats a loaded question, and they might come back with all sorts of assumptions based on similar stereotypes. So thats one of the reasons i wanted to bring this to your attention. Because again, were living in an era of diaspora, when many will leave appalachia for opportunities elsewhere. I feel that if i was in a work situation and somebody asked me, where are you from, and i said West Virginia and they came back with one of the usual stereotypes, like, oh, theyre hillbillies, theyre in the mountains, like how do you have an education or something along those lines, i would use it more as a learning component for them, kind of expose them to what i grew up with, the beautiful areas that i was around, and more of the natural learning environments that i got to be around. We had river lots, we went hiking, things like that, it was i think it really can enhance a childs life. And it wasnt the fighting, drunken hillbillies that most