America’s fascination with Appalachia gained new life after former President Donald Trump named “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate. Vance, a junior senator from Ohio, has received praise and criticism for the 2016 memoir about his chaotic upbringing in Ohio and summers with his grandparents in Kentucky. Proponents of the bestseller that was made into a movie laud Vance’s account of his journey from hardscrabble childhood to Yale Law School. Critics say it paints the mountainous region that extends across 13 states from New York to Mississippi and Alabama with too broad a brush and unfairly blames Appalachians for their economic circumstances.
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, is familiar with the region. She spent a year in West Virginia doing research for her book on a Russian Orthodox community, “Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia.” She answered questions for Northeastern Global News about what it was like to live in the only state completely within the geographic boundaries of Appalachia, and what myths about the region need to be dispelled.
