What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

“the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a ‘coalition of mostly blue-collar and white working-class voters’ just doesn’t square with election data.”

Interjecting layers of such divisiveness is typical of the establishment’s political playbook for both parties in Appalachia, and particularly West Virginia.

The media made a broad and unconvincing attempt to de-legitimize Sanders’s popularity in Appalachia.

“It is unhelpful, as this piece makes clear, to demonize or belittle those who voted for Trump out of desperation. Rather, we need to hear their desperation and help them.”

“We know Appalachia exists because we need it to define what we are not. It is the ‘other America’ because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives.” Appalachia is real, but it exists in our cultural imagination as a mythical place where uncomfortable truths become projected and compartmentalized.

The idea of Appalachia as a peculiar and untamed corner of America grew in popularity during the early twentieth century. This shared belief facilitated a number of experiments and outcomes within the region. Outside entrepreneurs pushed the limits of industry in the name of modernization, folklorists sought and collected “primitive” arts, missionaries brought religion to the “unchurched,” and industrialists drew from a vast pool of expendable labor.

Using nonunionized labor gave southern West Virginian coal companies a competitive market advantage over unionized mines and made their West Virginian coal fields frequent targets for efforts to expand the United Mine Workers of America. Each campaign brought bloodshed, but none loom larger than the uprisings of 1920 and 1921 that culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the final chapter of West Virginia’s mine wars.

In 1921, Thomas Felts, aiming to avenge his brothers’ deaths, pressured McDowell County officials to indict Hatfield on charges stemming from a year-old incident. When Hatfield appeared for the trial on August 1, Baldwin-Felts agents murdered him on the courthouse steps.

Many assembled wore red bandanas around their neck, the only insignia available, leading their enemies to call them “rednecks.”

Rednecks = protesters

West Virginia has the highest concentration of transgender teenagers in the country,

In April, filmmakers in West Virginia hosted the fourth Appalachian Queer Film Festival.

While reading Greek poetry, my professors warned us to be careful of the double meaning of elegies; they were, it seems, often written as political propaganda.

“Greater Appalachia” is connected to a 2012 work of popular history by Colin Woodard called American Nations.

In 1933, journalist Thomas Henry and University of Chicago sociologist Mandel Sherman released Hollow Folk, a book that purported to be a sociological study of the very people the government aimed to displace.