Appalachian Identity Research Articles

The old, the new, and the in-between: Preadolescents' use of stylistic variation in speech in projecting their own identity in a culturally changing environment.

Cultural learning begins early, with infants' and young children's initial imitations of group-specific local behaviors. Comparatively little is known about cultural development in older children, whose more advanced socio-cognitive skills can moderate their decisions about adherence to the established cultural conventions and acceptance of new norms. Focusing on the acquisition of a regional dialect, the current study was conducted in a small community in western North Carolina, whose rich Appalachian heritage grew from distinctive cultural and living traditions. The region has gradually opened up to outside influences and the local culture is now shifting toward mainstream American socio-cultural norms. The study sought to determine how preadolescents positioned themselves in this socio-culturally changing environment. Using detailed acoustic analysis to measure stylistic variation in speech in 9-12-year-olds and perceptual ratings to verify its salience, we examined the pronunciation of the vowel /ai/ to test children's adherence to the old Appalachian identity marker (the monophthong) and their acceptance of the modern American society (the diphthong). As an innovation, children created an intermediate phonetic variant that reduced the pronunciation differences between the old and modern patterns. Demonstrating the ability to adapt speech style to context, they increased the degree of diphthongization in this /ai/-variant in careful speech (reading), and reduced it in casual conversations. Girls' productions were more diphthongal than were boys' in reading but not in conversations. The new variant in children represents regional dialect levelling, and likely results from their accommodation to the changing environment, which promotes reduction of old marked forms.

Linguistic and object-based stance-taking in Appalachian interviews

AbstractThis article uses data from interviews conducted in western North Carolina in order to examine the ways in which speakers enact authoritative, evaluative, and interactional stances to construct individual identity. In this data, we find a subtle interplay between the content of explicit statements, narrative content, and the use of grammatical features associated with Appalachian English (e.g.a-prefixing, nonstandard past tense), and the use of physical artifacts as sources of stance-taking. This article focuses on two speakers' use of (present and not-present) physical artifacts (a placemat, a Civil War era sword, a lock of hair, and a piece of wood with a bullet hole in it) to enact stances that construct individual versions of an Appalachian identity. What this analysis suggests is that it is not just linguistic choices that contribute to stance enactment, but physical objects as well. (Sociolinguistics, stance-taking, Appalachian English, material culture, language and idenity)*

Abstract A37: A group randomized trial to reduce obesity among Appalachian church members: The Walk by Faith study

Abstract Purpose: Appalachia is a rural, socioeconomically disadvantaged region with limited access to preventive health services. The Appalachia Community Cancer Network (ACCN) is an NCI-funded research initiative that collaborates with community-based cancer coalitions and other community groups to increase awareness, provide education, and promote cancer prevention. Using Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) principles, ACCN tested a program to reduce overweight and obesity, a modifiable risk factor for cancer, by working with churches, an important institution in Appalachia. The primary outcome of this study was change in weight from baseline to twelve months. The goal of this report is to present trial results for weight reduction at 12 months. Methods: The study was a group randomized trial where county or group of counties in five Appalachian states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia) were randomly assigned to receive either an intervention program on diet and physical activity titled “Walk by Faith” (WbF) or an educational program focused on cancer screening titled “Ribbons of Faith” (RoF). Participants attended an information session, provided informed consent, were screened for eligibility, and completed biometric measurements including height, weight, blood pressure, and waist and hip circumference. Biometric measurements were also collected at 12 and 24 months. Participants reported on demographic, tobacco use, cancer and cancer screening history, healthcare access, Appalachian identity, physical activity and diet-related information at baseline and annually for two years. Church members were eligible if they were 18 years of age or older, overweight, willing to use a computer, and medically cleared to participate. Ohio and Pennsylvania sites enrolled participants from January through September in 2012, while the other three states enrolled participants from February to November 2013. Participants in the WbF program received pedometers, monthly education sessions focused on healthy eating and exercise, healthy eating guide books, physical activity journals, and access to a website (Faithfully Living Well) customized for each church and designed to assist participants to overcome barriers to healthy eating and physical activity, track their weight and activities, and access health-related articles and healthy recipes. RoF participants were invited to attend monthly educational sessions about cancer and cancer screening. Results: Of 866 interested parishioners at 28 churches, 159 (18%) were ineligible; of the 707 eligible individuals who completed screening, 663 (94%) were enrolled. Participants were predominantly female (71%) with average BMI of 33.2; 42% reported regular exercise, 25% had a high school education or lower, and 26% had household incomes <$40,000. Although the difference in weight loss from baseline to 12 months for WbF compared to RoF was not statistically significant overall (1.1% decrease in weight for WbF vs. RoF, p=0.17), results varied by gender. Among men, those in the WbF arm experienced a 2.5% loss in weight compared to men in the RoF arm (p=0.03). Participants in the WbF group increased fruit and vegetable consumption by 26% at 12-months compared to the RoF group (p=0.03). Among WbF participants, greater participation in monthly educational sessions was associated with greater weight loss; for every two sessions attended, weight at 12-months reduced on average by 0.7% (p=0.002). Conclusions: Overall, the WbF program facilitated weight loss in mainly male participants, and all participants improved fruit and vegetable intake. If participants were engaged in WbF activities, they lost more weight; thus, ways to improve participation should be explored. These results lend support to church-based intervention programs for underserved rural communities. Citation Format: Ryan Baltic, Electra D. Paskett, Samuel Lesko, Stephenie Kennedy, Gene Lengerich, Karen A. Roberto, Nancy Schoenberg, Gregory Young, Mark Dignan. A group randomized trial to reduce obesity among Appalachian church members: The Walk by Faith study. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eighth AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 13-16, 2015; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2016;25(3 Suppl):Abstract nr A37.

Determinants of Appalachian Identity: Using Vernacular Traces to Study Cultural Geographies of an American Region

This article uses data on two vernacular traces, toponyms and business names, to explore and analyze cultural geographies of the U.S. Appalachian region. First, cluster detection is applied to a set of generic place names (toponyms) that are found to be components of a relatively unique Appalachian geographic vernacular. The results from this exercise are then mapped onto common spatial representations of the Appalachian region, where they are combined with a selected marker of perceived regional identity—businesses that have the character string “Appalachia” in their name—to construct a study area for subsequent analysis. Finally, data are collected for places inside of the derived study area to examine determinants of Appalachian identity in a zero-inflated count regression model. The findings convey important insights about specific heritage and environmental variables that correlate with, and likely contribute to the production of, patterns of Appalachian identity in the United States. In addition, the conceptual model and methodology of the article are claimed to be transferrable to other studies of cultural regions, heritage, and identity, both inside and outside of Appalachia.

"Where I’m From:" Does Strong Teacher Appalachian Identity Impact Views of Student Efficacy?

Abstract Teacher candidates in a beginning educational psychology course were surveyed about how they believe others perceive the communities and the region these students consider "home." Subjects were asked whether these outsiders’ beliefs were accurate and then were given an opportunity to correct misconceptions others might have about their values or traits. Additionally, subjects, most of whom plan to teach in Appalachia, characterized the strengths of, and expressed concerns about, their future public school students. While all but two percent of the subjects hailed from Appalachia, identification as "Appalachian" was weak; students also perceived that others outside the region viewed them in negative, regionally stereotypical terms which the subjects rejected as untrue. However, the majority of these same subjects, all future teachers, characterized their future students as having many unfavorable, stereotypical learning characteristics. These findings are important for teacher educators, especially considering the decades of research demonstrating the impact of teacher expectations on student performance.

The Poco Field: An American Story of Place (review)

Reviewed by: The Poco Field: An American Story of Place Mark S. Myers The Poco Field: An American Story of Place. By Talmage A. Stanley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. pp. xx, 232.) In his work, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place, Talmage Stanley masterfully weaves issues of identity with the personal story of his grandparents, C. T. and Aldah Apperson. Stanley begins his work with the observation that the idea of “place” is the result of interaction between three concepts: the natural environment, the built environment, and human culture and history. The idea of community and sense of place that is common in Appalachian identity is the result of the interaction of these three complex ideas. By evaluating the lives of his grandparents in both Keystone, West Virginia, and Newbern, Virginia, as well as their efforts to create a middle-class life for their family, Stanley is not only able to place the story of Appalachia within the context of the American story of consumerism, but to also create a framework for change and the building of stronger communities. A primary focus of Stanley’s work is the effort of his grandparents to achieve a middle-class standard of living. To depict this effort, Stanley uses the Keystone neighborhood of Westfield. Westfield was the “white” neighborhood [End Page 95] of the town, which contained the white school and church. In this area, native whites and immigrants lived in close proximity, implying that there was true diversity in Westfield. However, Stanley notes that the middle-class and elite white community of Keystone owned these homes. In other words, Westfield defined not only the values of the middle class of Keystone, and by extension the rest of the Central Appalachian coalfields, but it also depicted the rigid segregation between the different populations in the region. Stanley believes that there is more to the story of Westfield, however. He says that “owing its existence to the emergence of the Poco field as part of the American economic engine and a way of life defined in terms of industrial profit and consumer goods, Westfield is also a way of thinking and speaking with particularity about larger systems and structures of values, forces, ideas, understandings, and choices” (55). In other words, the idea of Westfield is a manifestation of American middle-class values about place, as well as a definition of the limits of middle-class desires in the Poco field. Stanley’s grandparents realized these limits, and eventually left the coalfields for Newbern in the late 1940s. Stanley also does an excellent job of connecting the Westfield concept to the modern history of McDowell County. Despite a significant production of coal and the desire for a middle-class, consumerist standard of living, McDowell County remains mired in endemic poverty and the many problems that result from economic catastrophe. Using the examples of the efforts of the Big Creek People in Action to improve their community in Caretta, the failure of the First National Bank of Keystone, the devastating floods of 2001 and 2002, and the failure of the McDowell County school system, Stanley discusses the true detachment between the values of Westfield and what he calls a citizenship of place. As Stanley notes, “a citizenship of place that moves against and across the old Westfield boundaries understands place as a dynamic, ongoing social reality expressed in all aspects of daily life. This citizenship knows that we need each other on a deep and significant level” (187). Using extensive primary sources, as well as an excellent amount of the relevant literature, Stanley has produced an important contribution to the field of Appalachian studies. His work requires scholars and students of the region to think of the modern history of Appalachia in a sophisticated and interdisciplinary way. How this notion of place will impact our history or our view of the region is an important question for scholars to consider as the region moves into the post-coal era. [End Page 96] Mark S. Myers The Indiana Academy–Ball State University Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press

You Are and You Ain’t: Story and Literature as Redneck Resistance

Abstract Appalachian identity is often portrayed as an either/or proposition in popular perception, while at the same time backwoods stereotypes stick hard to that identity. In this essay, I offer my own complicated Appalachian narrative alongside analysis of the literary and social positions of Fred Chappell and Silas House to discuss how contemporary individuals talk back against stereotype and expectation. I argue that an ideological construct of hillbillies seeks always to hold Appalachia in a frozen state of backwardness, which serves certain national narratives of power. By talking back, writers like Chappell and House break those narratives, work to defuse the political capital of stereotype, and ease limitations on what constitutes authentic Appalachian identity.

A Geography of Appalachian Identity

Las definiciones sobre la región de los Apalaches varían considerablemente. En este trabajo desarrollamos un entendimiento teóricamente fundado y con bases empíricas de los Apalaches, centrándonos en el proceso social de la identidad regional. Nuestra medida de la identidad de los Apalaches se basa en el número relativo de empresas en una ciudad que incluyen la palabra "Apalaches" en su nombre. A partir de este análisis, encontramos que la zona central de la identidad de los Apalaches se encuentra en el este de Tennessee, el oeste de Carolina del Norte, el este de Kentucky, el sur de West Virginia y el suroeste de Virginia. También exploramos los factores predictivos de la identidad de los Apalaches y determinamos que el nivel de pobreza, porcentaje de Negros, elevación, y la densidad de población predicen la identidad de los Apalaches. Este trabajo debe ser de interés para los científicos sociales interesados en el estudio de la identidad regional, tanto dentro como fuera de los Apalaches.

The Thistle and the Brier: Historical Links and Cultural Parallels between Scotland and Appalachia (review)

Reviewed by: The Thistle and the Brier: Historical Links and Cultural Parallels between Scotland and Appalachia Gregory Hansen The Thistle and the Brier: Historical Links and Cultural Parallels between Scotland and Appalachia. By Richard Blaustein. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2003. Pp. vii + 174, bibliography, illustrations, index, notes.) Richard Blaustein pairs the thistle with the brier to compare the history and culture of Scotland with Appalachia. The thistle is a well-enshrined emblem for the Scottish motto "None Touch Me with Impunity," whereas the brier's nascent symbolic associations with Appalachia are more subtle. Although the term "brierhopper" has a history as an even more offensive synonym for "hillbilly," the brier appears as an emblem for Appalachian identity mainly in Jim Wayne Miller's recent writing in Appalachian studies. In his scholarship, activism, and poetry, Miller transforms the brier from a badge of shame into a symbol of pride, Blaustein writes, and The Thistle and the Brier illustrates how this type of symbolic transformation plays out in Scotland and Appalachia. These apt symbols become resources for understanding the importance of folklore and literature in maintaining and reviving the cultural identity that links Scotland to Appalachia. Blaustein develops rich comparisons by working carefully with these prickly symbols. He uses a number of comparative approaches, and much of the book focuses on historical legacies and cultural affinities common to Scottish and Appalachian people. A wealth of scholarship connects vibrant Scottish and Scotch-Irish analogues to Appalachian folk music, storytelling, material culture, and other forms of traditional culture. Blaustein summarizes the major points of connection and then makes an interesting move: after delineating parallels between writers and historians from the two regions, he demonstrates that they share common political and social values, largely shaped by a legacy of colonialism and economic duress. Referencing Rodger Cunningham's theory of metropolitan cores within world systems, Blaustein explains how the isolation and rural character of Scotland and Appalachia influence their political and economic marginalization. Blaustein is careful not to overextend his comparisons, but he provides important and poignant examples of negative stereotyping and cultural denigration associated with ethnic and regional cultural identity. Along with comparing history, expressive culture, and psychological analogues, Blaustein looks at relationships between contemporary Scottish and Appalachian writers. This approach lends an engaging variety to the book's eleven chapters, which include interviews with writers and cultural activists, theoretical discussions about intellectual history, historical sketches, and essays. Although the book occasionally reads like a pastiche, Blaustein's comparisons and generalizations unify this compilation into a cohesive volume. The book's major theme is a reassessment of cultural revitalization movements in Scotland and Appalachia. Recent arguments have challenged the contention that Appalachian cultural traditions are strongly rooted in Scottish folk culture. Using a wealth of recent scholarship and solid evidence, Blaustein traces direct cultural connections between Appalachian regional identity and Scottish ethnicity. He not only convincingly delineates long-standing Scottish cultural influences on Appalachia, but also critiques the concept of "invented tradition," showing how all traditional activities are [End Page 130] invented over time. Blaustein then considers the deconstruction of concepts such as "folk culture" and "tradition" that began in the 1980s with David Whisnant, Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Nairn, and other critical theorists. Acknowledging that their work has led to important insights into the politics of culture, Blaustein recognizes how putative invented traditions and imagined communities can bolster unreflective jingoism, colonialism, and strident militarism. The Thistle and the Brier includes a careful critique of the negative repercussions of romantic nationalist ideology in folklore's intellectual history. The major argument that Blaustein sustains throughout the book, however, is that a highly politicized, stridently post-Marxist deconstructionist rhetoric is a suspect form of intellectual discourse. Critical theory and deconstructionism may be useful when one analyzes how hegemony is established and sustained, but the same symbolic forms and political mechanisms that support jingoistic cultural nationalism can also serve as resources for political resistance. Whether these types of resistance truly challenge the established political order is a highly debatable and thorny point in cultural critique. Blaustein's central tenet is that symbolic expression provides essential resources for community cohesion. He provides strong support for this argument by...

Harvest by Catherine Landis (review)

Catherine Landis. Harvest. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2004. 338 pages. Hardback. $23.95. Knoxville author Catherine Landis's second novel, Harvest, tackles the complex subjects of Appalachian identity, land conservation, the disappearance of family farming, and the corporate greed associated with suburban sprawl. Harvest is also about the displacement and demise of an Appalachian family. And without imposing herself on the narrative or falling into polemics, Landis skillfully comments on these heady subjects while giving readers one of the most memorable character studies to appear in recent Appalachian fiction. Told from the point of view of three main characters, Harvest is what Landis calls "a testament to changes in East Tennessee over the last century and a lament for losing land to bulldozers." The novel opens near Norris, Tennessee, in 1933 as the Tennessee Valley Authority is preparing to build a dam. Six-year-old Arliss Greene is helping his immediate and extended families prepare for the forced move from their community—ironically called New Hope—to a new farm in northern Knox County, Tennessee. He leaves New Hope "riding backwards on top of a loaded wagon," visualizing his birthplace underwater: "He imagined fish swimming in and out of the gaping windows of the house, . . . pictured tree limbs bending to river currents instead of the wind." Within the span of 36 pages, Landis covers that many years in Arliss Greene's life. Readers may balk at moving so fast, but Landis' narrative strategy symbolizes the quickness and absoluteness in which Arliss loses his birthright, childhood, and several family members. By age 14, Arliss has willingly stepped into the grinding labor of cattle farmer, working compulsively, becoming "the kind of farmer who kept the grass around his fence rows short and neat, his barn spotless, his machinery clean and running." By the late 1970s Arliss and his wife Merle have two grown sons. Merle is a "loud, clumsy" woman, rigid in her 'made-up mind' about the world and totally indifferent to Arliss' dedication as farmer. The Greene sons show no interest in or respect for farm work either. The older son moves to Atlanta and becomes a land developer. The younger son, Daniel, and his wife, Leda, are the other two narrators in Landis's story. Daniel, a fidgety but imaginative child, grows up with a love of baseball and literature. From an early age, Daniel dismisses his father as ignorant and wrong-headed. He abhors farming and works hard at shedding his own "farm boy" image around other kids. 77 After an unfortunate series of disasters, Daniel and Leda are forced to move onto the Greene farm where Daniel attempts to complete his dissertation on Sut Lovingood—the quintessential Appalachian fool, created by another Knoxville writer, George Washington Harris, in 1867. As Appalachian scholar Jack Higgs suggests: Sut Lovingood, "the most complete fool in American letters," symbolizes independence and personal freedom while reminding us of our human frailties and limitations. Like many a character in Harris's stories, Sut Lovingood is Daniel's undoing. Daniel's life becomes embattled, much like the preacher who cries out after Sut sends the lizards up his pants legs: "Pray fur me brethren an' sisteren, fur I is a-rastilin wif the great inimy right now!" Daniel alone, however, is his own great enemy. He toys with Appalachian culture but rejects his own Appalachian heritage; he tries to be a writerbut refuses to consider that his father's story mightbe worthy of retelling. His wife says, "Daniel had spent so much time studying Sut Lovingood, he had missed the bigger story, the one about a real Appalachian life that lived right next door." Daniel fails as scholar, writer, teacher; he abandons projects in mid-course; eventually his family crumbles and is once more displaced. Leda, meanwhile, as mother to two children and long-suffering wife to Daniel and his increasingly bizarre and erratic behavior, eventually finds liberation and meaning for her life. She becomes Arliss's unlikely farm hand when he shows up on her porch one day and asks, "Can you help me for a minute?" Slowly learning the intricate details of successful farming and finding enfranchisement...

Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia by Jane Hicks, and: Vivid Companion by Irene McKinney (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Reviews Jane Hicks. Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2005. 78 pages, Paperback, $10.00. Irene McKinney. Vivid Companion. Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2004. 98 pages, Paperback, $16.50. These collections of poems—the former a first book, the latter the fifth volume by West Virginia's Poet Laureate—add substantially to the array of poetry published in recent years by Appalachian women writers. Jane Hicks, a native of East Tennessee, has won the Appalachian Poetry Contest sponsored by Now & Then magazine (2002) and the James Still Award for Poetry presented by the Appalachian Writers Association (2003). Although Blood and Bone Remember is her firstbook, she is clearly an accomplished poet, and the Jesse Stuart Foundation is to be commended for making her work more widely available. The poems in this collection, unequally divided among four titled sections, are diverse in subject matter and structure. While Hicks occasionally uses variants of such traditional forms as the sestina ("Second Semester") and the pantoum ("How We Became Cosmic Possums"), most of the poems are in free verse, often organized into stanzas of uniform lengths. The book's title announces the poet's concern with memory and the past's shaping of the present, a prominent theme in Appalachian writing. Part I, also titled "Blood and Bone Remember," contains 26 poems on a variety of topics, from such conventional Appalachian subjects as huckleberry picking and hog killing to vivid childhood memories of confrontations with an abusive father ("The Fall of the House," "Choose Your Weapons"), from celebrations of ancestors to explicitly political poems ("Spring 1991: Reunion," "Nine One One"). Part I opens with the line, "I am from the quilts I sew," and references to quilting become this book's principal unifying device, an emblem of female creativity, its communal dimension and its capacity to incorporate the past into the present: "relics, remnants, remains gathered / into beauty, pressed into utility" (25). A highly skilled quilter, Hicks transforms quilting—with what she calls its "precision and adherence to pattern" (18)—into a metaphor for poetry itself. And 73 when she turns in Part IV to the three figures she terms "Daughters of Necessity," she invokes the three Fates of classical mythology, themselves linked to weaving as a variation on quilting. Parts ILTV all illustrate one of the major strengths of this collection: Hicks's ability to create a range of first-person voices beyond her own. Part II consists of seven numbered "Diamond Jenny" poems, each of them detailing lives affected by coal mining, the first two those of a miner's wife and daughter, respectively. As readers eventually become aware, the numbers in these titles refer not to the varied experiences of one person but to the experiences of several people at separate mines, all with the same name—a discovery that has the effect of multiplying exponentially the dangers and deaths these poems record. In the four Cosmic Possum poems of Part III, Hicks deals less with distinctively "other" voices than with an alter ego, as Jim Wayne Miller did through his persona the Brier. Hicks defines the term "Cosmic Possums" as "Suburban Appalachian Baby Boomers" and playfully describes them as follows: Caught between Country Club and 4-H, Neither shrimp nor crawdad, Neither hip nor hillbilly, Neither feedsack nor cashmere (52). This persona enables Hicks to reflect both humorously and satirically on Appalachian identity in transition. Among this volume's most powerful poems are those Hicks attributes to her "Daughters of Necessity": Cassandra, Thalia, and Lydia, representatives of earlier generations of Appalachian women. The Greek Cassandra was a prophetess fated not to be believed; Hicks's Cassandra, condemned by her preacher for bearing an out-ofwedlock child, finds herself in the poem "Felix Culpa" "blessed by loving, not damned" (60). Thalia, named for one of the three Graces as well as the Greek Muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, is a rural librarian who delivers books by pack horse—and also serves as a midwife. And Lydia, who celebrates her "morning of creation" in "Labor Room" and speaks of "keep[ing] company with the Fates" as a girl (74), returns the reader to...

Locals on Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia

Certain Appalachian stereotypes were widely accepted by the early twentieth century, yet most people in the United States had never visited the region. Although information about the area was limited and came largely through a few channels, a general consensus about Appalachia nonetheless emerged in the popular culture: Appalachia was a place apart, a different and sometimes dangerous place, a place whose people possessed only the mere rudiments of civilization. Largely created by outsiders, this popular image of the region emerged during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the writing of short-story authors, novelists, missionaries, social workers, handicraft organizers, and academics whose work forged a remarkably enduring stereotype of the region and its people. Where were Appalachian people in this process? Much recent analysis of the social construction of Appalachian identity has them silent and passive, objects of description and scrutiny who themselves contributed little to the popular conception of Appalachia. Were they in fact unaware of the stereotype, as the notion of Appalachian ignorance and illiteracy might suggest? Did their isolation hinder access to the media that perpetuated such stereotypes? There was in fact an Appalachian reaction to the social construction of identity, but because it occurred on a local rather than a national scale, its influence on popular conceptions of Appalachia was muted. Instead, the writings of outsiders, mainly local colorists and the early academics who studied the region, created a canonical set of ideas about Appalachia. Using similar descriptive language these authors freely exchanged themes and imagery across the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, creating tropes that continue to resonate in American popular culture, influencing depictions of mountain folk in movies, television shows, and comic strips. One specific descriptive essay about a southern Appalachian community, written in 1913 by Harold W. Foght, an educational reformer and academic, illustrates this process. His depiction of this community owes more to imagery borrowed from local-color novels than to first-hand observation. An explanation for this seeming violation of academic integrity, can be found in the ideology of rural educational reform and the then-current methodology for promoting it. The republication of the essay within the mountain community itself gave this group of Appalachians a chance to read and comment on a highly stereotyped depiction of themselves. Editorials and letters printed in the county newspaper provide a rare opportunity to assess Appalachian awareness of the dynamics of information and power that dominated the region's relations with mainstream America. Local reactions vehemently rejected Foght's depiction of the Appalachian stereotype, but the unequal access to information networks by Appalachians and outsiders ultimately determined whose version of Appalachia was accepted. Stock images of Appalachians permeate popular culture. Movies, television, comic strips, and postcards feature the lanky, gun-toting, grizzle-bearded man with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a coon dog at his feet, the archetypal patriarch of the mountains. Other familiar characters include the sallow matriarch, corncob pipe planted firmly between her lips; a genial and gangling youth, physically powerful but intellectually naive; and a buxom and almost equally dim female counterpart. Snuffy Smith, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Li'l Abner informed America about hillbillies. (1) Through such portrayals, the media transform everyday objects of mountain life into icons of popular culture. Shotgun, corncob pipe, and banjo serve as shorthand for a host of preconceptions about Appalachians. The corncob pipe perpetually upon Granny's lips transgresses female behavioral norms, underscoring the degradation of mountain culture. Most people outside the region would have viewed hunting as a leisure activity rather than a vital contribution to subsistence; thus, shotgun and coon dog become emblematic of the Appalachian male's shiftlessness. …

Teachers and Teaching: Beyond the Classroom

Traditionally, little is expected of students in the area of eastern Kentucky where Carol Stumbo teaches. It is as true today as it was when Stumbo, the daughter of a coal miner, was growing up. Like many other cultural minorities, Appalachians are normally educated to "fit in" to the majority culture and to devalue their own history and culture. "Success," then, often comes at the expense of their Appalachian identity. In this article, the author discusses an oral history project designed to make the acquisition of writing skills more palatable to her students, and the unexpected and far-reaching consequences the project has had on her view of her own education and teaching, her students, and her community. This article captures the seriousness and honesty with which Stumbo confronts these changes and reflects her deep commitment to, and belief in, her students.