Search Results

The prologue introduces the primary question of the discourse: why did the textual and visual icon of the hillbilly endure throughout the 20th century, long after similar racial and ethnic stereotypes had become publicly intolerable? It discusses how the concepts of cultural space, the “white other” (a group both within and outside the broader racial and cultural category of “whiteness”), and the twin mythic personas of “mountaineer” and “hillbilly” help explain the image's staying power. The central argument is then introduced, that the representation's unique intersection of the past and present, normativeness and otherness, and reality and invention made it malleable enough to be interpreted in strikingly different ways by diverse audiences and individuals, and to endure despite dramatic social and cultural transformation.

This chapter traces the literary antecedents of the hillbilly representation in America that grew out of the separate but overlapping “image streams” of the New England rustic yokel “Brother Jonathan”, the poor white of the Southern backcountry, and the mythic frontiersman of Appalachia and Arkansas. It examines the cultural construction of the Southern mountain folk from William Byrd's Secret History of the Dividing Line to the song-story “the Arkansas Traveller” to the turn-of-the-century “local colorists”. Although some authors and social commentators used the conception of the mythic mountaineer to denigrate, and others to celebrate the folkways and primitive conditions of the hill people, in all cases this idea ignored the reality of late 19th-century economic and social upheaval in the region, and instead defined the hill folk as a people caught forever in an unceasing past.

This chapter follows the evolution of the word and the image of “hillbilly” from its first appearance in print in 1900 to the end of World War One. Starting as a regional label with a specific localized significance, the term and persona were soon spread by jokebook writers, professional linguists and, above all, the new mass medium of motion pictures. In hundreds of action shorts, directors such as D. W. Griffith (himself a Kentuckian) depicted a violent and lawless people whose feuds and drunkenness posed a serious threat to the “proper” late-Victorian social order. By the mid 1910s, however, silent films and other popular culture media began to present a parallel but distinct interpretation of the mountaineer as a comical foil for bumbling urban naifs. Despite its evolving meaning, “hillbilly” remained a relatively uncommon and thoroughly ambiguous label throughout this era.

This chapter focuses on hillbilly depictions in motion pictures, the dominant media of the mid-century. The continual resignification of the mountaineer/hillbilly dual image from the end of World War One through the mid-1950s is traced through full-length features, animated shorts, government documentaries, and the long running Ma and Pa Kettle series. The initial focus on violence and social threat was steadily replaced by a growing emphasis on farcical comedy, particularly in the “B” level films produced by Republic Pictures. With the advent of an era of postwar prosperity, however, the vogue of mountain films faded and the hillbilly image primarily lived on only in the domesticated version the Kettles embodied. But as later films such as Deliverance (1972) would show, the early-20th-century characterization of mountain folk as depraved savages remained just under the surface of this supposedly light-hearted fare.

Chapter 3 focuses on the people inhabitant the mountains as defined according to the modern, scientific way. It focuses on the making of a social and political stereotype – the mountaineer – in the context of the making of modern societies and nations. In many cases such as Switzerland, Italy, the Balkans, and Scotland, the images of mountaineers has been a major political issue in the construction of a national imaginary from the nineteenth century.This chapter explains how the category “mountaineer” happened to point at, first populations living in the mountains, second mountain climbers using the reference to mountains as a mode of social distinction. Regarding the first group, it details the stereotypes at work in discourses on the nation : the brutal, thieving, bellicose mountaineer; the proud, hard-working, obstinate, and courageous mountaineer; backward communities; etc.

The Civil War brought privation, loss of life, and governmental power to western Carolinians' doorsteps to an unprecedented degree. Conscription officers, tax collectors, and soldiers became commonplace in the region during the war. White mountaineers greeted the Richmond government's policies with more of an attitude of exasperation than the defiant opposition that many later observers read into their responses. When the Richmond government inaugurated the first draft of the war in April 1862, its exemption for white men on farms with 20 or more slaves led to a spike in desertion and violence.

Despite efforts to integrate the Appalachian South into mainstream America being perceived as an “unfinished revolution” and how it caused various problems, this points out some of the fundamental lessons regarding the nature of change, change agents, liberal reform, and of those that opposed these changes and reforms. Also, looking at these events helps us to understand the War on Poverty. Since the first attempt at “reconstruction”, various government agencies and interest groups and the local elites dominated what was viewed to be beneficial change. The assumptions of both the AVs and the CSM revealed a cultural explanation of the inadequacies of the mountaineers in their efforts.

This chapter looks at the history of altitude physiology from the mid nineteenth to the late twentieth century, using it as a case study for the conflict between laboratory models and so-called "real world" experience. It argues that previous histories of biomedicine have neglected the role of the field, and of expertise based in experience, in making sense of changes in twentieth century biomedical research. It also overturns the persistent myth of "gentlemanly amateurism" in early twentieth century mountaineering, revealing teams of climbers who used the latest technology to give them an "edge" on the mountainside.

This chapter considers the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those of nineteenth-century mountaineering intellectuals John Veitch and John Stuart Blackie, land rights campaigners, and the poetry of Gaelic crofters, which, taken together, demonstrate a crucial shift towards a more bodily experience of the natural world, a new ‘feeling for nature’ spurred by developments in biological science which offered fresh perspectives on the relationship between self and world. It reports that the period from the 1850s until the end of the century saw the activity of mountaineering become increasingly popular in the British Isles, and become not only a sport but a ‘science of a highly complex character, cultivated by trained experts, with a vocabulary, an artillery, and rigorous methods of its own’.

This chapter describes Queensberry's experience of mountain scrambling. At Cambridge, Queensberry formed a close friendship that was, for a time, to supply a much-needed focus to his life. His twenty-first birthday was to shape the rest of his life, but in a way that no one could have anticipated. Queensberry was never to write about his journey, which must have been two to three days of grief and frustration. When he learned that Francis had still not been found, all hope vanished. Queensberry offered a large sum of money to anyone who could recover the body and, despite having no experience in mountaineering, decided to join the search party due to go out on the following day.

Chapter 7 chronicles the efforts of Berea’s leaders to construct Appalachians as a particular brand of poor whites, and without the stigma of the Confederacy attached to other Southern whites. By the mid-1880s, a new wave of benevolent agencies launched a new form of colleges designed for this newly categorized group— “mountain education.” The mountain education movement treated poor white Southerners as deserving of Northern philanthropic aid by arguing that class oppression could rival racial oppression. Here, competitive dynamics, as navigated by organizational leaders, produced not only particular types of education but also consecrated groups of people.

By looking at the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA, or International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation), an international organization created in 1932 “to promote mountaineering and climbing worldwide,” this chapter explores the “moral economy” of internationalism, or the dynamics through which internationalist groups used feelings to attribute moral values to specific beliefs and behaviors. It demonstrates that the UIAA used emotions to promote both its image and its mission. It presented alpinism as a means to engender “friendship” among nations, mimicking the League of Nations’ rhetoric and activities in this period. It also employed emotions as a tool to manage its relationships and as an essential ingredient to stage its events (e.g. international congresses and exhibitions). As such, it inaugurated a set of ideas and practices which would become normative in the subsequent decades.

This ‘Introduction’ establishes the importance of the activity Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ for the literature of the Romantic period. It discusses the etymologies of the words ‘mountaineering’ and ‘mountaineer’, showing how they indicated the creation of a new activity and identity. The chapter outlines the mountaineering pursuits and writings of a number of the period’s authors, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, John Keats, and Ellen Weeton, exploring the emerging link between ascent and literary authority. The introduction situates the overall study in terms of current research in the fields of mountaineering and Romantic-era literature.

This chapter investigates why the figure of the mountaineer became so important in Romantic-period literature, beginning with an examination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential account of the benefits of being in the mountains. It explores the politics of the mountaineering identity, examining the relationships between different types of climbers, especially between those who worked in the mountains and those whose economic and social positions made it possible to climb for pleasure. Through analysis of a number of travel texts and literary works, the chapter reveals the extent to which the summit was a place of negotiation between individuals, groups, and classes, rather than simply a scene of self-assertion or self-discovery for the solitary climber. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, which includes the instruction to ‘Climb every day’, and presents the mountaineer as the ideal post-war identity and the embodiment of the nation’s imperial future.

A disproportionately large percentage of the most prominent evolutionary naturalists, and almost every member of the X-Club, traveled and climbed in the Swiss Alps. John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen, in particular, were simultaneously the most vocal of the evolutionary naturalists and the two most accomplished alpinists of their age. The height of their climbing came in the early 1860s, the same years in which they formulated their agnosticism. This paper will examine their journals and letters to uncover the role that mountaineering played as they formulated and defended a naturalistic framework. The questions the mountains forced them to ask, whether through beauty or desolation, order or chaos (what William Clifford termed “cosmic emotion”) helped influence their common project of formulating an ethic based on nature rather than God.