UC Davis

This dissertation explores the economic and cultural transformations in the Appalachian Mountains since the Civil War. It sets itself three goals: first, to trace the economic conditions that have made Appalachia a place of concentrated poverty; second, to explore the unique cultural forms that arise out of and respond to those economic conditions; and third, to use Appalachia as a case study to understand larger national and international economic transformations. Drawn early into regional, national, and global circuits of capital during the shift to coal extraction that drove capitalism’s industrial maturation, Appalachia passed early once again through the process of deindustrialization as increasing productivity and decreasing demand hollowed out the coal-based labor market. This process of transformation reorganized social relations, cultural forms, racial dynamics, and the relationship between region and nation. This dissertation argues that features of the Appalachian trajectory provide a useful heuristic for understanding the social dynamic of the United States in the early decades of the 21st century and especially the dynamics of region, race, and class as they develop within our own moment of crisis and volatility.In my analysis of economic transformation and its cultural effects, I am especially interested in the relationship between region and race. Appalachia has long been understood as a place of exceptional white poverty and has thus been the center of the national co-construction of whiteness, regionality, and class. Taken together, the three chapters of this dissertation trace a long arc in which the focus of struggles in the region shifts from land to labor to land again. In each chapter, I explore one stage of this progression, focusing on how this process has shaped and been shaped by negotiations over racial identification. The first chapter describes both the land-based struggles of subsistence farmers as they resisted the intrusion of coal capital into the mountains after the Civil War and the cultural justifications for that intrusion created by outside coal interests. I argue that as mountain people were absorbed into both the labor market and a hegemonic image of white America, national concerns for the mountaineer’s fitness for labor discipline were articulated through assessments of his whiteness and embodied in the figure of the “hillbilly.” The second chapter turns to the labor movement and the growth of the United Mine Workers in the early twentieth century, examining the frequent comparisons between white miners and Black slaves as miners negotiated the relationship between labor exploitation and citizenship. Finally, the third chapter narrates a return to the land in struggles over surface mining in the latter half of the twentieth century. I argue that discourses about Indigenous people and frequent settler claims to indigeneity appeared in this period as white Appalachians attempted to navigate both economic crisis and ecological destruction.While this dissertation focuses on Appalachia, it is also concerned with the nation, and my first three chapters explore how stereotypical images of white poverty in Appalachia, from dirty hillbillies to hardworking miners, have been used to delimit, preserve, and even remake racial and class boundaries in periods of crisis. In the conclusion, I turn to the present, asking what national discourses and on-the-ground struggles in the region can reveal about our present moment and possible ways forward.