There is no neutral there: Appalachia as a mythic “Trump Country”

There is no neutral there: Appalachia as a mythic “Trump Country”

Of the 2016 presidential election, New York Times international affairs correspondent Roger Cohen wrote, “The race is tightening once again because Trump’s perceived character – a strong leader with a simple message, never flinching from a fight, cutting through political correctness with a bracing bluntness – resonates in places like Appalachia where courage, country, and cussedness are core values.”

Cohen’s dispatch is one of many now forming a distinct genre of election writing – the “Trump Country” piece, which seeks to illuminate the values of Trump supporters using Appalachia – and most often West Virginia – as a template with little variation in content or approach. “To understand Donald Trump’s success,” their composite argument flows, “you must understand Appalachia.”

My concern is less about unpacking these articles individually – although I confess I’m not exactly sure what “cussedness” is or why it is ascribed as one of my core values – but rather pulling back and examining what the sheer volume of these pieces might tell us. We need to examine why journalists from elite and prestige publications are invested in presenting Appalachians – and particularly West Virginians – as representative of all Trump supporters, to the extent that they write, as John Saward does in Vanity Fair, “I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump.” Why aren’t pockets of Trump supporters in Oklahoma, Idaho, Florida, New York, and New Jersey the subject of similar profiles? To be sure, I’m certain that there isn’t a red state in America that hasn’t been described as “Trump Country” by at least one journalist, but the compulsion to hold up Appalachia as representative is unique.

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Teaching Public History with King of the Hill (redux edition)

Teaching Public History with King of the Hill (redux edition)

Peggy: If we don’t learn from the past, what’s the point of even having one?
Vance Gilbert: That’s going in the brochure!

“What is public history?”

Although we exist in different interdisciplinary fields and seek varied vocational attainment, perhaps the one thing that truly unites us as public historians is that we’ve all had to flub our way through precisely that question.

It’s a topic that I devote a lot of space to in my undergraduate public history classroom, because grappling with this question is often the start of an intellectual process that ends with a new appreciation for power and the production of history. And because this process is so important, I start it off with a long look at a fictional museum of prostitution from the cult television show King of the Hill.

Yes, I’ll explain.

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Pick 5: Mothman

He’s the quintessential Appalachian monster. Like so much mountain lore, his origins tell a story about the decline of the natural environment at the hands of exploitative outsiders. According to legend, he rose from the acid-infected ruins of the West Virginia Ordinance Works on a cool night in 1966, but he’s best known for his appearance at the Silver Bridge collapse the following year. Locals interpreted previous sightings of the strange creature as a warning of the tragedy yet to come, which claimed the lives of 46 men, women, and children in 1967. In the years that followed, Mothman became a harbinger of doom, the sign of a bad moon rising.

Point Pleasant, West Virginia, has hosted its annual Mothman festival since 2002, the year John Keel’s Fortean-inspired book The Mothman Prophecies became a major motion picture starring Richard Gere. In post-industrial West Virginia, the festival is now a vital source of revenue for the dying town. Tourists can run in the Mothman 5K, watch the Miss Mothman pageant, take a bus tour of area Mothman haunts, or meet amateur cryptolzoologists. Although he remains thoroughly in the realm of the kitsch, his likeness occasionally appears on anti-fracking literature as a supernatural defender of the mountains.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the first Mothman sighting, and the 15th anniversary of Point Pleasant’s Mothman festival, here are 5 images that celebrate the patron saint of rural poverty line. Hail the misunderstood monster who’s still trying to save his small corner of West Virginia.

White Flight in the Heartland: The (Un)Built Landscape of Cairo, Illinois

White Flight in the Heartland: The (Un)Built Landscape of Cairo, Illinois

To some degree, what compels those who seek to untangle Cairo’s complicated past is the refusal to believe that a town – an entire town – is an artifact of racism.

In May 2011, the governor of Illinois called for the evacuation of Cairo, a sparsely populated and predominately African American town located at the confluence of the flooding Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Years of neglect left the town’s levees in poor repair, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers assessed an imminent breach. The Corp of Engineers made the decision to intervene and perform a controlled breach to divert flood waters several miles upstream in Missouri, instigating a federal lawsuit that placed the interests of productive heartland farmers against socially and economically devastated black families. Although the Supreme Court dismissed the suit, the controversy served as an uncomfortable reminder that past struggles, when detached from collective memory, can quickly resurface in new battles.

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Cairo, 2014. Photograph by Elizabeth Catte

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The Event Has Left Marks: A Nostalgic Review of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

The Event Has Left Marks: A Nostalgic Review of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Walking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness

With its soaring elegiac score and beautifully detailed environment, you can be forgiven for describing Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture through poetry. It is in Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” after all, that we learn that the end of the world comes not with a bang, but a whimper.

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Rapture is that whimper, recreated in the fictional town of Yaughton, Shropshire. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” isn’t the only immediate literary reference that springs to mind during your gradual introduction to Rapture’s picturesque lanes and public footpaths. Yaughton also telegraphs the sinister coziness of Agatha Christie’s infamous St. Mary Mead remixed with elements of John Wyndham’s unique brand of pastoral science-fiction. Village homes boast comforting British tidiness in the form of floral wallpaper and gleaming sinks, front doors left ajar as if the occupant had simply stepped out for a moment. In the pub, half-smoked cigarettes still smolder and turn to ash underneath a dartboard paused in the middle of a never-to-be finished game. Advertisements for the annual church fete and village production of Peter Pan – a sweet bit of foreshadowing to the importance of stars to this unfolding story – appear on bulletin boards and shop windows next to official council notices that Yaughton is under quarantine.

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