“Give me the streets of Manhattan,” Walt Whitman implored, and Eduardo Porter suggested avoiding rural America, maybe especially Appalachia. Well, I’ve tried both — Manhattan’s concrete for over 20 years — and the mountains of the Blue Ridge and the Smokies and the Cumberlands and the Alleghenies from Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia for most of […]
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Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia rebuts the “tired ideas about race and culture” that J.D. Vance peddles in the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy. (T)he Appalachian ‘mountain people’ today are no better than barbarians. They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft. They suffer from poverty, squalor and ill health. They are […]
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