Hi, I'm Shannon, the podcast producer here at C-SPAN, and our summer school lessons continue this week with Shepard University Professor Benjamin Bankhurst on the Lectures and History podcast. He teaches a class on Appalachia in the American imagination. He describes how the regional stereotype has changed over time, from being viewed as

backwards hillbillies during the Industrial Revolution to a people respected for their folk culture

in the early 20th century. Hi, I'm Susan Swain. This summer, I'll be on the air from Milwaukee and

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All right. let's go ahead and get started, everyone. Welcome to class.

Over the course of this semester so far, we have seen how Appalachia, perhaps to a greater degree than any other American

region, is defined to the world and in the minds of its residents by outsiders.

We have seen, for example, how industrialists employed the negative stereotype of the violent

hillbilly to rationalize a seizure of thousands of acres of land on the boundary between Kentucky and West Virginia.

The image of Appalachia as an impoverished and backward area continues to haunt the region to this day.

Indeed, many residents have absorbed and inverted negative stereotypes of the region and its people,

and have also constructed new identities for themselves based upon how they think they are perceived.

A classic example of this, I think, is the recent best-selling book, J.D. Vance's Hillbilelli, a book we'll turn to later on in this lecture.

For these reasons, it is beholden on us, I think,

to understand how Appalachian stereotypes have evolved over time

...