Notes on Ideas of Appalachia: Cultural, Environmental, Social-Structure, and Cultural-Construct Models

Cultural Heritage Models - Overview

Fischer categorizes Appalachian historiography into five cultural-heritage models. These models explain the region
's "otherness" by tracing its roots to British/Irish origins. While all models connect Appalachia to the backcountry, Northern Ireland, and north Britain, they vary in their focus on race, culture, continuity, derivation, or adaptation.

  • Early models often emphasized inheritance or racial aspects.
  • Later models focused more on cultural determinants and their interaction with material and environmental factors.
  • Common framing across all five models:
    • They trace the lineage from Britain and Ireland to Appalachia.
    • They differ on whether they highlight static inheritance or dynamic cultural processes.
    • They also differ on whether culture interacts with the environment and economy.
Model 1: Degenerate Anglo-Saxons
  • Core idea: Appalachia viewed through a racial regression lens, treating its people as "retarded Anglo-Saxons."
  • Early exemplar: Ellen Churchill Semple, "Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains" (1901).
  • Extreme claim: Arnold Toynbee suggested Appalachians "present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization, and then lost it" (A Study of History, 1947, Vol. II: 312).
  • Significance: This model frames Appalachia as an issue of racial/civilizational decline, rather than a cultural process.
  • Context: Part of an older wave of racial-interpretive historiography (185).
Model 2: Cultural Stasis (Frozen British Folkways)
  • Core idea: Appalachia is seen as a place of frozen, unchanging traditional culture, not a degenerate race.
  • Key work: Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917).
  • Claim: Cultural kinship between Appalachia and the British borderlands supports continuity and a static culture.
  • Significance: Shifts focus from race to preserved folkways and the endurance of cultural forms.
  • Context: Part of an early 20th-century exploration of enduring British-rooted culture (185).
Model 3: Cultural Continuity Centered on Scotch-Irish Immigration
  • Core idea: Culture is continuously transmitted through Scotch-Irish settlers, rather than through pure race or static British folkways.
  • Early work: James Craighead, Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil (1878).
  • Subsequent monographs: Charles Hanna (1902), Wayland Dunaway (1944), James Leyburn (1962), Tyler Blethen and Curtis Wood (1983).
  • Significance: Highlights a distinct immigrant group as the transmitter of Appalachian cultural traits.
  • Context: Adds depth to ancestry-based explanations by focusing on specific settler groups (185).
Model 4: Celtic Derivation (Derivation from a Complex Celtic Inheritance)
  • Core idea: Appalachian culture originates from a broader Celtic inheritance, not just the British Isles as a whole.
  • Notable proponents: Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney (Cracker Culture, 1988; revised 1990).
  • Fischer 's stance: Albion 's Seed isn
    't an attack on McDonald & McWhiney; instead, it aims to build upon their work.
  • Controversy: The "Celtic" theme sparked debate, but their scholarship expanded the concept of cultural inheritance, providing breadth and specificity.
  • Significance: Introduces a broader Celtic framework to interpret regional culture beyond strictly Scottish/Irish lines.
Model 5: Albion
's Seed as Cultural Adaptation
  • Core idea: Appalachian practices are adapted responses to historical conditions in the north British borderlands. They show high adaptability to contexts in Northern Ireland, the American backcountry, and the Southern highlands.
  • Emphasis: Not on derivation, but on adaptation and the practical re-use of cultural traits in new environments.
  • Significance: Prioritizes historical contingency, environment, and social conditions in shaping culture, rather than fixed inheritance alone.
Common Elements Across the Five Cultural-Heritage Models (186)
  • All models identify linkages among Appalachia, the backcountry, Northern Ireland, and north Britain.
  • They show an evolution from race-centered to culture-centered explanations.
  • There
    's a shift from static/regressive notions to more dynamic accounts that allow for change and interaction with other factors.
  • Early models emphasized inheritance as the primary cause; later models allow cultural determinants to interact with material and environmental factors.
  • Over time, these models become more complex and "refined" in their origin descriptions and causal linkages (186).
Significance for Broader Scholarly Work
  • Demonstrates the evolution of interpretive frameworks from essence/biology toward culture, environment, and history.
  • Sets up a dialogue with environmental and social-structure perspectives about what makes Appalachia distinctive.

Environmental Models - Overview

A parallel set of explanations highlights how the physical environment shapes Appalachia
's "otherness." There are at least six variations that increasingly incorporate interaction with culture and economy (186-187).

Model 5 (Environment 1): Isolation
  • Early framing: Isolation as the defining factor of Appalachian distinctiveness.
  • Early sources: William Byrd
    's backcountry as "lubberland" (Journey to the Land of Eden, 1733) and Charles Woodmason
    's backsettlements (1768).
  • Temporal span: From the 18th century onward through the 19th and 20th centuries.
  • Significance: Frames isolation as a social force that influences development, community structure, and behavior.
Model 6 (Environment 2): Wilderness and Primitive Innocence
  • Core idea: Appalachians are seen as inhabitants of a wilderness landscape, living in a state of primitive innocence, untouched by civilization
    's vices.
  • Proponent: Anne Royall (as early as 1826).
  • Impact: Much 20th-century popular writing adopted this romantic, nature-centric image of the mountains.
Model 7 (Environment 3): Classical Frontier (Turnerian)
  • Frederick Jackson Turner 's frontier thesis (1893): The frontier is a determinant of cultural development, with free land driving social evolution.
  • Influence: Scholars like Robert Mitchell maintain frontier-centered analyses (e.g., The Appalachian Frontier).
  • Evolution: Later scholars modified Turner
    's idea to an "arrested frontier" concept.
  • Seminal counterpoint: George E. Vincent
    's idea of a "retarded frontier" (1898), describing "quiet pools in the mountains" where the frontier persisted in isolation (American Journal of Sociology, 4 [1898], 15).
Model 8 (Environment 4): Montani Semper Liberi (Mountain Men Are Always Free)
  • Motto: Montani semper liberi (a West Virginia context).
  • Intellectual lineage: Montesquieu 's Spirit of Laws
    • dichotomy between a large, despotic empire and a small, cool mountain republic.
  • Literary reception: Appalachian literature embraced this motif in Emma Bell Miles (The Spirit of the Mountains, 1905), Horace Kephart (Our Southern Highlanders, 1913), and John C. Campbell (The Southern Highlander, 1921).
Model 9 (Environment 5): Ecosocial Rimland/Borderland
  • Idea: Appalachia as an ecosocial rimland
    • a peripheral zone within the global economic system and power structures.
  • Contemporary example: Rodger Cunningham
    's work (discussed by Fischer).
  • Significance: Emphasizes environmental and ecological constraints as part of a larger systems view.
Convergence and Interaction (187)
  • Environmental interpretations are becoming more open and dynamic, recognizing interactions with cultural imperatives.
  • Recent work by Cunningham and Fischer shows converging lines between environmental and cultural-legacy explanations. This illustrates that environment and culture influence each other rather than acting independently.

Social Structure Models - Overview

Historians focusing on late 19th
–20th century Appalachia emphasize social systems, structure, and material imperatives. These often contrast with environmental and cultural-legacy explanations. Models range from stratification to ethnic pluralism, violence, and modernization.

Model 1 (Social 1): Stratification and Class Models (Single-Class and Multi-Class)
  • Early 1930s: Southern Yeomanry interpretation (W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 1940; Frank Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, 1949).
  • Two strands:
    • Single-class model: Emphasizes a homogeneous rural yeomanry.
    • Countervailing stratification model: Highlights social inequalities between rural proletariats and urban elites/industrial interests.
  • Early statements: The Dreiser Committee and John Dos Passos (1930s).
  • Contemporary work: Mary Beth Pudup (late 20th century) continues to focus on class and inequality.
Model 2 (Social 2): Ethnic Pluralism or Melting Pot (1940s–1950s)
  • Core idea: Appalachian history as a process of growing ethnic pluralism or as a mountain melting pot where merged groups form a distinctive social order.
  • Key proponent: Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities (1952).
  • Other supporters: Kenneth Keller; expectation of multicultural tendencies in Appalachian society.
  • Significance: Highlights cultural mixing and group dynamics in shaping Appalachia.
Model 3 (Social 3): Violent Disorder and Culture of Violence
  • Theme: Appalachia as a site of violence, characterized by intense conflict and disorder.
  • Topics covered: Indian-pioneer wars, lynching, regulators, internecine warfare in the Revolution and Civil War, family feuds, political assassinations, racial conflicts, and industrial violence.
  • Significance: Portrays social life as fractious and conflict-ridden.
Model 4 (Social 4): Individualism and Community
  • Focus: Initially on fragmentation and individuality of Appalachian culture; later revisionism emphasizes community and local ties.
  • Example: Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove (1988), as an instance of revisionist counterpoint to monolithic cultural narratives.
Model 5 (Social 5): Industrialization and Modernization (Social-Material Interpretations)
  • Core idea: The experience of modernization and industrialization as a distinctive regional trajectory.
  • Early works: Malcolm Ross, Machine Age in the Hills (1933); Lewis Cecil Gray, Economic Conditions in the Southern Appalachians (1933).
  • Popular period: 1970s
    –1980s, with broader generalization about Appalachian history (often labeled as preindustrial vs. post-1880 to 1940 modernization).
  • Critical stance: Many accounts depict modernization as an unstoppable force, portraying mountain people as victims or passive recipients of progress (Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, 1982; Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path, 1976; studies of feuds and industrial strife).
Model 6 (Social 6): Methodological Shifts in Modernization Studies
  • Trend: In the 1970s
    –1980s, modernization/industrialization theories became narrower and more secular, materialist, determinist, and class-bound.
  • Irony: Marxist explanations gained popularity among young historians even as Marxism globally wavered, suggesting a tension between academic trends and broader political-economic shifts (188).
Significance and Connections
  • Illustrates diverse ways to anchor Appalachian history in social structure and material conditions.
  • Highlights debates over agency, voice, and vulnerability in the face of modernization.
  • Contrasts with cultural-heritage and environmental models by emphasizing economic and political processes as primary drivers.

Cultural-Construct Models - Overview

This distinct strand views Appalachia
's "otherness" as a cultural construct shaped by modern forces and epistemologies. These accounts emphasize that perceptions of Appalachia are social artifacts rather than solely intrinsic traits.

Model 1 (Construct 1): Cultural Constructs as Artifacts of Modern Culture
  • Key work: Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870 –1920 (1978).
  • Core claim: Appalachian "otherness" is real but constructed
    • cultural ideas about the region are themselves cultural artifacts.
  • Significance: Shifts focus from essential traits to how ideas about Appalachia are produced and circulated.
Model 2 (Construct 2): Relativist Interventions and Manipulation of Culture
  • Key work: David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine (1983).
  • Argument: Institutions like Hindman Settlement School, Olive Dame Campbell, and the White Top Virginia Folk Festival were "manipulative cultural interventions." They diverted attention from structural realities such as colonial subjugation, resource exploitation, or class inequality.
  • Perspective: A relativist view that treats Appalachian culture as a selection, arrangement, or accommodation to preconceptions (p. 260).
Model 3 (Construct 3): Urban Imagination and Social Fiction of Appalachia
  • Proponent: Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (1990).
  • Core claim: The idea of a distinctive Appalachian culture is largely a product of urban imagination, a social fiction created in modern America to critique modernity itself.
  • Significance: Emphasizes discourse, rhetoric, and the politics of representation in shaping regional identity.
Significance and Implications
  • These cultural-construct models prioritize epistemology, ideology, and representation. They challenge essentialist or objective depictions of Appalachian culture.
  • They align with broader literary and critical trends that examine how cultures are constructed, marketed, and contested in public life.
  • They encourage a critical evaluation of sources, power relations, and the role of institutions in shaping what counts as Appalachian culture.
Connections to Broader Themes
  • They complement cultural-heritage and environmental models by adding a critical lens on how ideas about Appalachia are produced and disseminated.
  • They highlight the importance of cultural critique in understanding historiography and public perception.