Shoals of immigrants continue to settle in the United States, well into its third century as a nation, and many who are long here still seek to home in on their heritage. How do people from elsewhere become Americans while dealing with voices and values they bring with them? Until the middle of the twentieth century, the melting-pot theory held sway. It postulated that individuals and groups from all over the globe should largely give up their languages and ways to become assimilated in a homogeneous mass. But in recent decades, the notion of an American "stew" has gained favor, by which constituent tongues and cultures keep their identities and so add to the flavor and substance of the nation.
Appalachia was settled by the nation's earliest immigrants, and its residents are one of its most misunderstood groups. Mostly of Scots-Irish stock, they first settled the extensive mountainous region from Pennsylvania to Alabama well before the Revolutionary War. They represent a rock-ribbed past, a rugged heritage.
"My people have always been teachers on my mother's side,' said Laura Milton Hodges. "The first ones came to Appalachia way before the Revolutionary War....The books on our shelves were by philosophers, and on history, and even Greek plays, and English literature.
"We're also farmers, and that's real important. The main thing is, though, you have to value your own culture. Then you can go anywhere, fit in anywhere."
Hodges teaches remedial English and reading at Watauga High School in the northwest corner of North Carolina. She lives in Vilas, four miles from where she grew up in southern Appalachia. Her husband runs a bulldozer business; their 19-year-old son, Roy Lee, Jr., works with him. Two daughters, 26-year-old Joy Pritchett and 24-year-old Gay Isaacs, also live in Watauga County and continue the family patterns of studying and teaching.
More than twenty million people live in Appalachia, a thickly wooded area, roughly the size of Great Britain, that covers largely mountainous, often isolated areas from Alabama and Mississippi on the south to Pennsylvania and New York on the north. In between lie large chunks of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio.
Early settlers found land for the taking and either negotiated treaties (often broken) or fought with the Cherokees, Appalaches, and other Indian tribes. Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his Winning of the West that
the Watauga folk were the first Americans who, as a separate body, moved into the wilderness to hew out dwellings for themselves and their children, trusting only to their own shrewd heads, stout hearts, and strong arms, unhelped and unhampered by the power nominally their sovereign.
In other words, they were independent-minded. Their language, crafts, and culture have reflected this through the centuries. But living apart, often in remote hollers and valleys without decent roads or means to earn a fair income, also brought widespread substandard living conditions. "The very name of the region," wrote native son Harry Caudill in 1973, "has become synonymous with poverty and
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