In the early nineteenth century, the southern poor white had a reputation for comic vulgarity and absurd violence; postbellum writers saw him as a quaint peasan

Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the dispa

This text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the m

A close-up look at country music argues that it has become a national art form, reflecting the same themes that have characterized American art and literature o

Of the wave of labor strikes that swept through the South in 1929, the one at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, is perhaps the best remembered. In Gas