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A History Of Arkansas Ozarker's And Their Image By Brooks Blevins

1107 Words5 Pages

Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarker’s and Their image by Brooks Blevins, a book that’s title aptly describes what this book is about. It is trying to show more of a realistic view of the people and culture of the Ozarks in Arkansas. With the majority of information seemingly coming straight out census reports. Though these reports may not have been as accurate as they could have been census reports would not have been biased by popular views of the outside world. He is trying to refute the image that Ozarker’s are all backward hill folk that do little other than wrestle pigs and make moonshine. This view of the Ozarks has been perpetuated by popular culture since Schoolcraft first made his venture to the southwest of St. Louis. …show more content…

Such as, those residents of Washington and Benton counties moved on from the cotton industry well before much of the rest of the south. These two counties were his most frequent examples the supported his thesis. These two counties were continuously the top grossing counties in the most recent of agricultural trends. It even seemed that Blevins thought these residents were almost clairvoyant in their ability to change which crops to plant before they lost profitability. Anytime Blevins would move forward in time and talk about the Ozarks new cash crop, it would always start in these northwestern counties and spread from there. These two counties even had were home to, or very close to the University of Arkansas and its very forward looking School of Agriculture. This was what made these counties outshine other counties but is also something that helped them keep up with modern practices and get out in front of the market. In the public eye at the time, and even in modern times, Universities do not correlate to backwardness, especially when the college works so closely with the surrounding community. You could see throughout the book that no matter how Hill-Billy some of the people were in that area there were always people in those counties that were just as modern as anywhere else in rural United States. When the apple business was booming in the Ozarks, these two counties were leading the country in production. Being a leader in production of any crop is not a sign of a backward community and more closely related to forward thinking regions. Though these counties are not the norm for the Ozarks, they reflect some of the regions people being progressive in their techniques and in their

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