Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® History Faculty Publications History Spring 2015 Colonels, Hillbillies and Fightin’: Twentieth- century Kentucky in the National Imagination Anthony Harkins Western Kentucky University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/history_fac_pubs Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, Appalachian Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Anthony Harkins, “Colonels, Hillbillies and Fightin’: Twentieth-century Kentucky in the National Imagination,”Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, v. 113 (Spring/Summer 2015), 421-52. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Colonels, Hillbillies, and Fightin’: Twentieth- Century Kentucky in the National Imagination By Anthony Harkins When I announced in 2003 to my in-laws (born and bred in New York City) that I was going for an academic job interview in what to them was far off Bowling Green, Kentucky, they speculated about what the post-interview socializing might entail: “I guess you’ll be sitting on the porch drinking mint juleps,” suggested my mother- in-law. “Oh no,” corrected my father-in-law, “it’ll be fruit jars of moonshine!” Although speaking half in jest, their visions of, on the one hand, julep-sipping white-suited Kentucky colonels and southern belles luxuriating on a palatial estate with Thoroughbreds grazing in the distance and, on the other, unkempt, bearded, and barefoot rifle-toting hillbillies drinking homemade moonshine in front of a roughshod mountain cabin match the dominant public representa- tions of the state and its people for much of the twentieth century.