Most American in The Profit of the Smoky Mountains Essay

A Southern individual talks about how her dialect was influenced when she went up North to visit family (Hutcheson

O’Connor describes the children’s mother in contrast to the grandmother by what they are wearing; thus their clothes represent the age from which they are. The Children’s mother “still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white dot in the print”(O’Connor 118). The children’s mother is representative of the New South in which the Southern Lady is becoming less of a central figure within society. A lady of the old south would never wear slacks and tie her hair up in a kerchief to go out in public. Under an old south mentality these actions would be considered very unlady like. O’Connor illustrates the tension between the old and the new south by the constant struggle between the grandmother, her son, and the daughter-in-law.

Do you ever think about the way you speak and why? Well, Paul Robert does an excellent job explaining why people use the dialect they use in Speech Communities. He discusses that people change their use of language throughout their lives to conform to either society or to what kind of person they want to be, or to just conform to who they need to be at a particular moment, in which I agree. People’s choice of language, including myself, are affected by many of their surroundings, such as where they live and grow up at, their peers, and a person’s work place.

Have you ever been in a place of green with forests and animals everywhere? Well, where some of the Native Americans lived, there were such things. Native American tribes such as the Crow lived in the Great Plains. The Crow tribe of the Great Plains were nomadic and followed the buffalo migrations which provided their food. This tribe spent a good part of the year living in camps that could easily be dismantled and moved to follow the buffalo migrations. Other tribes of the plains were more sedentary. These tribes lived in permanent villages year round.

The colonists who settled in the south were different than their counterparts in the North. The main heritage of the southern colonists was the Celtic in contrast to the English heritage of the colonists who settled in the north. The Celtic heritage these southerner colonists brought to North America from Europe had a profound effect on their folkways as well as influencing their Indian neighbors. Traditional Cherokee lands had incorporated ass of Kentucky, much of Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina and a small part of Virginia and what is now West Virginia. The spatial proximity was one reason for the development of an identity with the Southern colonist and their institutions and traditions (Bullard, F.B. 1989).

Appalachia is often portrayed as an arrested frontier, a geographically isolated subculture, and reservoir of culturally homogenous. Appalachians are pictured as proud, fiercely independent, and god-fearing southerners. But in all reality they are portrayed as fighting and feuding, barefooted and backward, ignorant degenerates, downtrodden by centuries of isolation, inbreeding, and poverty. So how was Appalachia discovered? Well Appalachia was prompted in the mid 1870s by local color writers such as Mary Murfee and John Fox Jr. who explored in fiction and travel sketches such mountain themes as conflicting Civil War loyalties, moon shining, and feuding. (Billings)

I am the best writer for this project because I have been familiar with Appalachian music for a great deal of my life and have a passion for it. I also have researched this topic in great depth and plan to discover even more things as I continue. I chose this direction because it has always intrigued me that Appalachian music has continued through the ages without much help from more modern conveniences.

A long time before this land was called the United States, the Cherokee people used to live in this land in the valleys of rivers that drained the southern Appalachians. These people made their homes, farmed their land, and buried their dead. Also these people, who are now called Indians claimed larger lands. They would use these for hunting deer and gathering material, to live off of. Later these lands were called Virginia and Kentucky. As it is mentioned in the text, these people had their own culture and own way of life. They had their own gender roles and religion; even eating food had a different definition than the white man’s culture. They had equality between genders, and other members of the tribe had equal rights to talk. But

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the state of Arkansas? Chances are, that as an Arkansan the thoughts are quite different than those of someone not born or raised here. Hillbilly, redneck, barefoot, and trailer are a just few of the common first words invoked in the minds of “foreigners” by the word Arkansas. In the non-fiction work, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State, author Brooks Blevins provides readers with his idea of how Arkansas's image began, and then perpetuated over time. He provides several examples of the

In Uneven Ground, the author Ronald D. Eller narrates the economic, political, and social change of Appalachia after World War II. He writes “persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.”(pp.2) Some of the structural problems stated by Eller include problems of land abuse, political corruption, economic shortsightedness, and the loss of community and culture; personally view the economic myopia as being the most daunting.

Daugneaux, Christine B. Appalachia: A Separate Place, A Unique People. Parsons: McLain Printing Company, 1981. Print.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication discusses two very important and controversial questions within their article “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: “What should the schools do about the language habits of students who come from a wide variety of social, economic, and cultural backgrounds?” (2), and “Should the schools try to uphold language variety, or to modify it, or to eradicate it?” (2). While for academic writing purposes students should be expected to use standard American dialect, it is important to respect the diversity and various heritages throughout the country by allowing students to use the dialect they choose when speaking.

Dubuque, IA: Kendall/ Hunt Pub. Co. This is an anthology containing information on Appalachia. The section regarding religion is written by many notable scholars of the region of interest. The section discusses values and lifestyles that include religion.

Wonder why the Great Smoky Mountains are called “smoky”? Which are also known as the Great Smokies. It is because the fog overshadows the mountains and the valleys. When visiting, you can see the fog just sitting there. The Great Smoky Mountains are the most visited national park of all the national parks.

There are different layers of the head garments. The under layer is a cap, these caps were tall and narrow in the 16th and 17th century and later progressed to look like a pillbox. The next layer is a veil of white fabric and is sheer. Some of the fabrics used in the veils and caps are