Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes

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Description

Most Americans know Appalachia through stereotyped images: moonshine and handicrafts, poverty and illiteracy, rugged terrain and isolated mountaineers. Historian David Hsiung maintains that to be able to remember the origins of such stereotypes, we should look critically at their underlying concepts, especially those of isolation and community. In line with Hsiung’s interpretation, two worlds coexisted in the Tennessee mountains: some people made connections with the remainder of country and others lived in relative isolation. When this latter group came to be characterized by their neighbors as backward, growing perceptions of difference inside the mountain region sooner or later found their way into fiction and popular images of Appalachia for well over a century. By demonstrating that these perceptions of difference first emerged from within Appalachia itself, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains alters the recurrently held views of this region and its people all through the antebellum period. This provocative work will stimulate future studies of early Appalachia and function a model for the analysis of regional cultures.

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