What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

October 23, 2017
Catte, a historian from East Tennessee, presents a thoughtful insider’s perspective on Appalachia to counteract the stereotypes associated with the region. She believes that Appalachia—a region of 25 million people encompassing 700,000 square miles across 13 states—is too often presented as a monolithic, dysfunctional “other America” or “white ghetto.” Catte’s Appalachia is instead a “battleground, where industry barons, social reformers, and workers” wage an intergenerational class war. She offers a brief but nuanced history of the region that covers the post–Civil War arrival of industry, the early-
20th-century labor uprisings against exploitative coal companies, government intervention during the 1960s War on Poverty, and the oversize role played in Appalachia’s economy by the current “prison-industrial complex.” Catte also effectively refutes what she refers to as Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance’s “myth”—that white Appalachians share a distinct, homogenous Scots-Irish heritage, rather than a fusion of various European ethnic groups. To highlight the region’s diversity, she observes that for the past three decades African-Americans and Hispanics have contributed most to the area’s population growth and that West Virginia, the only entirely Appalachian state, has the nation’s highest concentration of transgender teens. Though this work could have been more tightly edited, it succeeds in providing a richer, more complex view of a much-maligned region.