Transappalachian Migration News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

When the celebrated country musician Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day in 1953 in a car on his way to a performance in Canton, Ohio, he had been traveling from Charleston, West Virginia, on U.S. Route 19, one of a series of north-south arteries that had conveyed millions of struggling Southern white people from Appalachia to new lives in the industrial Upper Midwest. This “Hillbilly Highway,” as historian Max Fraser calls it, was a dense network of interstate roads that couriered the job-seekers northward. It played a pivotal role in facilitating one of the most consequential migratio...

As autoworkers strike across the country, “Hillbilly Highway” and “Black Folk” offer two views of the search for a better life by working-class migrants in the middle of the 20th century.

Of note this fall: deep dives into storied American lineages, reckonings with racist forebears, reconsiderations of the Roman empire, and biographies of both prominent and obscure African Americans of the 19th century.