Person

Elizabeth Catte

Bylines

Good Bones

What is a small, historically-minded community meant to do with something like Western State Hospital?

by Elizabeth Catte via Popula on September 25, 2018
Appalachia Isn’t Trump Country

A region that outsiders love to imagine but can’t seem to understand.

by Elizabeth Catte, Regan Penaluna via Guernica on March 7, 2018
The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country

"Hillbilly Elegy" has been used to explain the 2016 election, but its logic is rooted in a dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.

by Elizabeth Catte via Boston Review on November 7, 2017

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Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma, at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, 1924

The Chilling Persistence of Eugenics

Elizabeth Catte’s new book traces a shameful history and its legacy today.

by Chris Lehmann via The New Republic on April 20, 2021

Elizabeth Catte and her book

'Pure America': Eugenics Past and Present

Historian Elizabeth Catte traces the history and influence of eugenics from her backyard across the country.

by Adam Willems via Scalawag on March 2, 2021

These Photos Will Change the Way You Think About Race in Coal Country

The myth that Appalachia is uniformly White lingers, but communities of “Affrilachians” were documented in the 1930s.

by John Edwin Mason via YES! on March 15, 2018

Photo of young woman looking at camera in blue-walled room. Above her an image of Jesus Christ is framed. Through the room's window a shirtless man can be seen on a porch, also facing the camera

Left Behind

J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and Steven Stoll's "Ramp Hollow" both remind us that the history of poor and migratory people in Appalachia is a difficult story to tell.

by Nancy Isenberg via New York Review of Books on June 28, 2018

Misremembering 1968

Fifty years later, the legacies of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy still loom large.

by Robert Greene II via Religion & Politics on April 24, 2018

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