"Connections Between Appalachia and the Wider World"

"I've talked a lot about J.D. Vance's kind of fetish for Appalachia’s shared Scots-Irish heritage. And for me this is central to the book because without it his argument doesn't work. It transforms his book from a memoir of a family to a memoir of a culture in crisis. So without that kind of cohesiveness, the book doesn't work—and he’s obviously very, very wrong about this. He's wrong about it according to so many metrics, whether it's archaeological evidence, whether it's historical documents and primary sources, whether it's contemporary reporting about people's ethnic heritage in Appalachia.
"And of course he's wrong that corporations didn’t help create the problems of Appalachia. I think anybody with even the most remedial understanding of Appalachian history should have issue with that. Obviously the coal industry has reshaped Appalachia in ways that we would still be contending with even if the coal industry packed up and left today."

Sarah Jones at the New Republic interviews Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.