Just as immigrants and African Americans in the Northeast faced hostility for diluting the social and cultural norms of elites, Appalachians were also regarded with an assimilationist gaze. Since the dilemmas of “otherness” were so often self-created and abstract—the real conditions of life in Appalachia or in immigrant neighborhoods did not reflect what elites envisioned them to be—they could not be solved. Appalachians were not uncivilized in the way that intellectuals imagined them to be, and the symptoms of their “backwardness”—favoring different religious practices, for example—did not
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