Hillbilly highway The transappalachian migration and the making of a white working class

Hillbilly Highway tells the story of the routes rural white southerners took to travel to (and from) the industrial Midwest throughout the 20th century. Fraser's smart history tells the story of "the Transappalachian migration's imprint on the social, cultural, and political map of recent American history," and the author is correct to note that the study fills a significant gap in the literature (p. 8). Built on a diversity of sources--from oral histories to country music recordings--Hillbilly Highway documents the industrial development that first forced rural southerners into extractive industries in their own region, and later pushed them to the manufacturing outfits of cities like Akron and Detroit. Fraser (Univ. of Miami) shows that, in spite of the misconceptions of contemporary observers and historians, Appalachian migrants were some of the more militant members of the national labor uprising of the 1930s, and that poor white southern migrants figured prominently, if ambiguously, in the War on Poverty's failed efforts to understand economic insecurity in the 1960s by focusing on the supposed cultural inadequacies of the poor. Given the dearth of scholarly research on the important phenomenon of white southern migration, this excellent book is a critical addition for academic library collections. Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay