Greater Appalachia

The backcountry settled from 1717 by borderlanders from Ulster and the Anglo-Scottish frontier, who filled the Appalachian uplands and pushed into the Ozarks and the Texas hill country. A yeoman culture of fierce independence, personal honour, clan loyalty and suspicion of any distant authority. Its ambivalence — resenting both the planter gentry and the federal government — split the loyalties of the border states in the Civil War, most starkly when western Virginia broke away to form West Virginia.

• Existed: 1717 CE – present
• Type: Entity