The Appalachian region

Appalachia

Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...

 of the Eastern United States

Eastern United States

The Eastern United States, the American East, or simply the East is traditionally defined as the states east of the Mississippi River. The first two tiers of states west of the Mississippi have traditionally been considered part of the West, but can be included in the East today; usually in...

 is home to over 20 million people and covers parts of mostly mountainous areas of 13 states, including Mississippi

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

, Alabama

Alabama

Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...

, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

, New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, Georgia

Georgia (U.S. state)

Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...

, South Carolina

South Carolina

South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...

, North Carolina

North Carolina

North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...

, Tennessee

Tennessee

Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...

, Virginia

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

, Kentucky

Kentucky

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

, Ohio

Ohio

Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

, Maryland

Maryland

Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...

, and the entire state of West Virginia

West Virginia

West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...

. The near-isolation of the area's rugged topography

Topography

Topography is the study of Earth's surface shape and features or those ofplanets, moons, and asteroids...

 is home to communities with a distinct culture, who in many cases are put at a disadvantage because of the transportation and infrastructure

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...

 problems that have developed in the area.

Appalachia

Appalachia

Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...

 is often divided into 3 regions—southern (portions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia), central (portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee), and northern (parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia) Appalachia. Though all areas of Appalachia share problems of rural poverty

Rural poverty

Rural poverty refers to poverty found in rural areas, but more important, to factors of rural society, rural economy and rural political systems that give rise to the poverty found there...

, inadequate jobs, services, transportation, education, and infrastructure, some elements (particularly those relating to industry

Industry

Industry refers to the production of an economic good or service within an economy.-Industrial sectors:There are four key industrial economic sectors: the primary sector, largely raw material extraction industries such as mining and farming; the secondary sector, involving refining, construction,...

 and natural resource extraction) are unique to each sub-region. For example, Appalachians in the central sub-region experience the deepest poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

, partially due to the area’s isolation from urban growth centers.

Appalachia is particularly interesting in the context of social and economic divisions that exist within and between the region’s socioeconomic communities. In addition, outsiders’ often incorrect and over-generalized external perspectives, and their relationship to culture

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

 and folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 of this near-isolated area, are important to the region’s future development.

Poverty, politics, and uneven economic development

Though industry

Industry

Industry refers to the production of an economic good or service within an economy.-Industrial sectors:There are four key industrial economic sectors: the primary sector, largely raw material extraction industries such as mining and farming; the secondary sector, involving refining, construction,...

 and business

Business

A business is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners. Businesses may also be not-for-profit...

 did exist in Appalachia prior to the 20th century, the major modern industries of agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

, large-scale coal mining

Coal mining

The goal of coal mining is to obtain coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content, and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United States,...

, timber

Timber

Timber may refer to:* Timber, a term common in the United Kingdom and Australia for wood materials * Timber, Oregon, an unincorporated community in the U.S...

, and other outside corporate entries into the region did not truly take root until this time. Many Appalachianites sold their rights to land and minerals to such corporations, to the extent that 99 percent of the residents control less than half of the land. Thus, though the area has a wealth of natural resources

Natural Resources

Natural Resources is a soul album released by Motown girl group Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1970 on the Gordy label. The album is significant for the Vietnam War ballad "I Should Be Proud" and the slow jam, "Love Guess Who"...

, natives are often poor. Since at least the 1960s, Appalachia has a higher poverty rate and a higher percentage of working poor than the rest of the nation. Wages, employment rates

Unemployment

Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...

, and education

Education

Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

 also lag. The Appalachian Regional Commission

Appalachian Regional Commission

The Appalachian Regional Commission is a United States federal-state partnership that works with the people of Appalachia to create opportunities for self-sustaining economic development and improved quality of life...

 (ARC) was created in 1965 to address some of the region’s problems, and though there have been improvements, serious issues still exist. Communities that are not considered to be "growth centers” are bypassed for investment, and fall further behind. In 1999, roughly a quarter of the counties in the region qualified as “distressed,” the ARC’s worst status ranking. Fifty-seven percent of adults in central Appalachia did not graduate high school

High school

High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....

 (as opposed to less than 20 percent in the general U.S.
), roughly 20 percent of homes have no telephone

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

, and the population is still declining
.

Infrastructure as an agent of poverty

One of the factors at the root of Appalachian economic struggles is the poor infrastructure. Though the region is crisscrossed by many U.S. and Interstate

Interstate Highway System

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, , is a network of limited-access roads including freeways, highways, and expressways forming part of the National Highway System of the United States of America...

 highways, those routes primarily serve cross-country traffic rather than the locals themselves. Towns closer to the major highways and nearer to the many larger cities fringing the region (Pittsburgh, Wheeling

Wheeling, West Virginia

Wheeling is a city in Ohio and Marshall counties in the U.S. state of West Virginia; it is the county seat of Ohio County. Wheeling is the principal city of the Wheeling Metropolitan Statistical Area...

, Columbus

Columbus, Ohio

Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...

, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, etc.) are disproportionately better-off than rural regions in the mountainous interior. Instead of being tied to the land, jobs in the towns tend to emphasize industry

Industry

Industry refers to the production of an economic good or service within an economy.-Industrial sectors:There are four key industrial economic sectors: the primary sector, largely raw material extraction industries such as mining and farming; the secondary sector, involving refining, construction,...

 and services—important signs of a more diversified economy. However, aside from the major urban centers along its perimeter, the entire Appalachian region still suffers from population decline and the loss of younger residents to the cities.

Another factor affecting development has been sheer inequality in power between the classes. Historically, elites interested in satisfying personal goals have controlled Appalachian politics

Politics

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

 to the expense of the region's poorer residents. Seeing no personal benefit to establishing infrastructure, they generally eschewed developments that would have been difficult and expensive to establish in the mountainous areas. Instead, they allowed the region to rely on industry—using barges to send natural resources to market, requiring that workers have only minimal education, etc.--and created no infrastructure for business.
Now, with roughly 100,000 jobs left for miners, Appalachianites are unable to access jobs or the resources and opportunities necessary to lift themselves out of poverty.
Some academics contend that the situation of Appalachianites amounts to one similar to that in third world

Third World

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...

 countries: Residents live on land that cannot be traded outside of trusted circles or used as collateral

Collateral (finance)

In lending agreements, collateral is a borrower's pledge of specific property to a lender, to secure repayment of a loan.The collateral serves as protection for a lender against a borrower's default - that is, any borrower failing to pay the principal and interest under the terms of a loan obligation...

 because, due to the history of unincorporated businesses with unidentified liabilities, there are not adequate records of ownership rights.
This “dead” capital

Capital (economics)

In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process...

 is a factor that contributes to the historical poverty of the region, limiting Appalachianites’ abilities to use their investments in home and other land-related capital.

Political inequalities

The elite class instilled strong systems of inequality

Economic inequality

Economic inequality comprises all disparities in the distribution of economic assets and income. The term typically refers to inequality among individuals and groups within a society, but can also refer to inequality among countries. The issue of economic inequality is related to the ideas of...

 into Appalachian politics and economy. For instance, the powerful have a history of encouraging racial divisions in order to divide workers and pit them against each other, spurring competition and serving to lower workers’ wages
. Family history and economic status are also bases of discrimination

Discrimination

Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...

: one resident notes of employers, "If you have a rich name, they'll take you--otherwise you can't get no work."

Since the 19th century, coal operators and plantation

Plantation

A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...

 bosses have discouraged education and civic action, allowing workers to become indebted to plantation stores, live in company housing, and generally make themselves vulnerable to the interests of their powerful employers
. Community members that experienced a justifiable fear of punishment for speaking out against the corruption of the status quo

Status quo

Statu quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" – literally "the state in which" – is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are...

 developed a habit of compliance

Compliance (regulation)

In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that corporations or public agencies aspire to in their efforts to ensure that personnel are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws and...

 rather than democratic institutions for social change

Social change

Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society. It may refer to the notion of social progress or sociocultural evolution, the philosophical idea that society moves forward by dialectical or evolutionary means. It may refer to a paradigmatic change in the socio-economic...

. Fearful of punishment, middle class

Middle class

The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....

 residents allied themselves with the elites rather than challenging the system that colored their everyday lives. Burdened by the choice between exile

Exile

Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...

 and exploitation

Exploitation

This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...

, the actual and potential middle class left the region, widening the gap between the poor and those in power
. Observers often perceive a fatalistic attitude on the part of the Appalachian people; many suggest that this is due to the history of political corruption and disenfranchisement, which led to weak civic cultures and a sense of powerlessness. Says a volunteer in the area; “the people usually regard politicians as crooks who won't do anything."

Educational disadvantages

In 2000, 80.49 percent of all adults in the United States were high school graduates, as opposed to 76.89 in Appalachia. Almost 30 percent of Appalachian adults are considered functionally illiterate.
Educational differences between men and women are greater in Appalachia than the rest of the nation, tying into a greater trend of gender inequalities.

Gender inequalities in Appalachia

Women have traditionally been confined to the domestic

Home

A home is a place of residence or refuge. When it refers to a building, it is usually a place in which an individual or a family can rest and store personal property. Most modern-day households contain sanitary facilities and a means of preparing food. Animals have their own homes as well, either...

 sphere, often lack access to resources and employment opportunities, are disproportionately represented in peripheral labor markets, and have lower wages and higher vulnerability to job loss
. Throughout the region, women typically earn 64 percent of men’s wages, though they work as many hours
. Women are also often the hardest-hit by poverty—for example, 70 percent of female-headed households with children under the age of six are in distressed counties, a figure substantially higher than the national average
.

Outside perspectives and stereotypes

Though mainstream

Mainstream

Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....

 Americans

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 assume that Appalachian culture is homogeneous within the region, many distinct locales and sub-regions exist
. Over-generalizations of Appalachianites as impulsive, personalistic, and individualistic “hillbillies” abound. Many scholars speculate that these stereotypes have been created by powerful economic and political forces to justify exploitation of Appalachian peoples. For example, the same forces that put barriers in place to prevent the development of civic culture promulgate the image of Appalachian peoples as politically apathetic, without a social consciousness

Social consciousness

Social consciousness is consciousness shared within a society. It can also be defined as social awareness; to be aware of the problems that different societies and communities face on a day-to-day basis; to be conscious of the difficulties and hardships of society.- Theory :Many studies have been...

, and deserving of their disenfranchised state. In spite of the region’s desperate need for aid, weariness of being represented as “helpless, dumb and poor” often creates an attitude of hostility among Appalachianites

.

Appalachians as a separate status group

It has been suggested that Appalachia constitutes a separate status group under the sociologist Max Weber

Max Weber

Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...

’s definition
. Criteria are tradition, endogamy

Endogamy

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group, rejecting others on such basis as being unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. A Greek Orthodox Christian endogamist, for example, would require that a marriage be only with another...

, an emphasis on intimate interaction and isolation from outsiders, monopolization

Monopolization

The term monopolization refers to an offense under Section 2 of the American Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890. Section 2 states that any person "who shall monopolize . ....

 of economic opportunities, and ownership of certain commodities rather than others
. Appalachia fulfills at least the first four, if not all five. Furthermore, mainstream Americans tend to see Appalachia as a separate subculture

Subculture

In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...

 of low status. Based on these facts, it is reasonable to say that Appalachia does constitute a separate status group.