Greater Appalachia

The backcountry, settled by people from a violent border who trusted nobody and were not trusted back. Scots-Irish migrants from the Ulster plantation and the Anglo-Scottish borderlands arrived through Philadelphia from the 1710s and moved down the Great Wagon Road into the Appalachian valleys and then west through Kentucky, Tennessee, the Ozarks and into Texas. They came from a region where central authority had been absent or predatory for centuries, and they brought a culture organised around clan loyalty, personal honour, herding rather than tillage, and deep suspicion of aristocracies and government alike - which put them in conflict with Tidewater and Deep South elites as much as with Yankees. The Regulator movements, the Whiskey Rebellion and the mine wars all came from this pattern. Its counties often opposed secession, and West Virginia separated from Virginia rather than leave the Union. Country music, bluegrass and a large share of American evangelical religion originate here. Coal shaped the twentieth century and left when it was finished. The region's political alignment has shifted more than any other. The region runs from western Pennsylvania down the Appalachians and west through Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and into north Texas and Oklahoma. The Appalachian Trail follows its spine. Its speech preserves features traceable to northern Britain. The Hatfield and McCoy feud is the best-known example of its honour culture. Blair Mountain in 1921 was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. Moonshining and later NASCAR both came out of the region, the second directly from the first.

• Existed: 1717 CE – present
• Type: Entity