Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

History

Committee Chair

Jessica Wilkerson

Committee Co-Chair

Kenneth Fones-Wolf

Committee Member

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf

Committee Member

Jennifer Thornton

Committee Member

Jinny Turman

Abstract

This dissertation works to integrate the growth of regional tourism into the existing historiography of economic development in Appalachia and the postwar American South. Regional leaders introduced an economic transition throughout western North Carolina that emphasized the growth of regional tourism. By centering this study on the growth of regional tourism, this research also analyzes regional boosters’ efforts to manufacture and commodify a racialized and classed folk culture within the region for tourist consumption. In the late nineteenth century, journalists and folklorists had emphasized the deviance of mountain life and simultaneously romanticized the area as a land of rugged, white frontiersmen. Regional leaders during the postwar period embraced many of the romanticized aspects of this Appalachian stereotype in tourist promotions. These narratives also served a political purpose, reinforcing the economic changes that regional leaders initiated and strengthening their calls for various political changes they facilitated in the name of economic development.

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