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Summary Of Hillbilly Elegy

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Set in the Appalachian region of the United States, “Hillbilly Elegy,” tells the story of J.D. Vance, the author of the book. The book is written about Vance’s life, growing up in Appalachia, one of Americas poorest regions. Unexpectedly, the book came to be used as an explanation for the upset in the 2016 Presidential election, when republican candidate, Donald Trump, beat democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. The reason this was so shocking, was because the Appalachia region, has long been a democratic stronghold. In this paper I am going to look at two reasons why this democrat stronghold turned republican. The first reason we are going to look at, is the decline of the coal industry. The Appalachia region, has long been a coal miner country, and proud of it. The industrialization period that followed the American Civil War, saw an increase in the need for coal and the first mines started out in the Appalachia region. The need for coal was again driven up, with …show more content…

Coal production in the Appalachia region, peaked in 1990, and has been declining ever since. Between 2000 and 2015, the Appalachia region, saw the loss of 9,300 jobs (Hodge, 2016). With coal being biggest supplier of jobs in the region, the decline of the industry affected many people. Counties in the Appalachia region, lost large percentages of their population, the worst case was in McDowell County in West Virginia, which lost 2.2% of its population, leaving it with its lowest population since 1900 (Raby, 2016). There are many reasons for the decline of coal, these include: cheaper natural gas, renewable resources, and regulations introduced to protect public health (Roux, n.d.). In the book, Vance talks about how his family, and many other people he knew, were lifelong democrat supporters. Their reasoning being, they saw the democratic party, as a party of the working man. (Vance, 2016) It was this party

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I can only imagine these conditions gave the Appalachian South a bad reputation, and made individuals reconsider finding work in this area. Families living in the Appalachian South could not survive on one income. The time they would normally use for cooking, was spent working. It was also mentioned, “American mass culture no longer values old-fashioned, labor intensive

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J.D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a personal psychological, cultural and sociological analysis of poor white working-class Americans. Specifically, Hillbilly Elegy examines the life of the author in Middletown Ohio, a once booming post war steel town that today has a struggling economy, diminishing family values and a rapid increase in drug abuse. At the beginning of the memoir, Vance perfectly situates the reader to the uniqueness from his life in Middletown. Vance repeatedly wrote throughout the memoir that the youth living in this Ohio steel town has a bleak and troubling future. Vance illustrates the statistics that children like him living in these towns were lucky if they just manage to avoid welfare or unlucky by dying from a heroin overdose.

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