Southern Appalachian Culture

When people think Appalachia, they think of West Virginia, but the Appalachian Mountains stretch far from West Virginia and the people living in their hills have a shared cultural heritage that is evident no matter what state they are a part of.

The Southern United States is a very interesting place, full of culture and history, such as the Civil War battlefields or the antique shops that you see along the side of the road as you drive through this beautiful part of the United States. It has many different characteristics and many different special things that make it unique. Globalization and Identity, Ethnicity, Religion, The Social Construction of Race, Gender Roles, Class, Places and Spaces (Regional Identity) , and Linguistic Diversity in the south are all topics that I will discuss in this essay.

Being known as the region synonymous with destitution and home to some of the pauperized counties in the country, Appalachia has always been hidden from or sort of isolated from the rest of the world because of their geographic location. The people of Appalachia are often seen as unintelligent and less civilized than other Americans as they were less developed and not exposed to the commercial world. Because of

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)

Appalachia is a region extending from Mississippi to New York and includes eleven states within its official

The collection consists of 15,000 pages of original historical material documenting the land, peoples, exploration, and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The collection is drawn from the holdings of the University of Chicago Library and the Filson Historical Society of Louisville, Kentucky.

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.

Appalachia is a 205,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains stretching from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It is home to more than 25 million people.

If you look at early Appalachian history, many of the earliest settlers in the mountains were of Irish decent. Their ancestors had originally migrated to northeastern America to escape religious persecution and eventually made their way south to the Appalachian Mountains, which they preferred because the area was similar in climate and geographic features to Ireland. Early settlers in the mountains had a Paganistic belief system and because of the geographic location of their settlements, were isolated from the outside world. In the early 1900s there weren’t roads, railroads, paths, etc. to travel into the mountains, which socially isolated groups living in those areas.

Pennsylvania consists of 6 Physiographic Provinces, namely, (1) The Atlantic Coastal Plain Province, (2) The Appalachian Plateau Province, (3) The Ridge and Valley Province, (4) The Piedmont Province, (5) The New England Province and (6) The Central Lowlands Province. Each province has its own geology and particular type of landscape which plays a very important role in the lives of the people living in these regions. For this assignment, I am supposed to describe the geologic history of Pennsylvania’s most important provinces, i.e. the first 4 provinces.

Virginia is generally divided into five different geographic areas. The easternmost region is the Atlantic Coastal Plain, which is also called the Tidewater. The Coastal Plain runs from

China has the largest population of any country on our planet Earth, with more than 1.35 billion people.

Appalachian music is music that has influenced many mainstream type that are around today. This music is not easily explained by playing a song and being able to identify the music. After reading about Appalachian music I have come to think of it as a Copper pot of music. This is in a similar way to the United States as the Copper pot of ethic people from around the world. To be able to understand this it is best to start from the known beginning roots and to understand who sings this music, why, and where it originated.

The ecological dimension is one of the most common ways to define rural characteristics. Noticeable characteristics such as behavior, composition, culture, environment, organization, and resources can be examined to endure a rural macro theme. In simply explanation, it is the interchangeable use of rural and nonmetropolitan and, differing, urban and metropolitan (Hash, Jurkowski, & Krout, 2015). About two thirds of the nations counties are classified as nonmetropolitan areas which include small cities, villages, and open country (Hash et al., 2015). A subculture model of poverty classifies core deficits of the lower subclass as the cause of the problem. Appalachian traditional subculture should not be described as either poverty or farmer

The rural south has long been known as one of the poorest areas of rural America. Statistics have shown the effects of this long-term neglect – low education, high unemployment, high disability, addiction and chronic health care problems. Appalachia is the geographic area adjacent to the Appalachian mountain chain in the US and includes 410 counties in 13 states (Appalachian Regional Commission, 2011). The central portion of Appalachia contains the economically strapped coal counties of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.