This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.At the close of his RNC speech accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in July, then-Senator J. D. Vance lingered on the specific patch of earth where he hoped he would one day be buried.“Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law-school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said, recounting how he had proposed to his wife, Usha. If they were to eventually be interred there, he explained, they would mark the sixth generation of his family buried in the region he called his “ancestral home”: Appalachia.Since the release of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s ties to Appalachia have been a perennial topic of discussion. His connection to the region, some assumed, conferred credibility to speak on behalf of Americans who felt they had been left behind, in Appalachia and elsewhere; many saw in his book’s depiction of poverty and addiction an explanation for why the “white working class” had fled the Democratic Party and backed Donald Trump in such great numbers. Others pointed out that Vance had in fact grown up in Middletown, Ohio, about 200 miles away from his family’s “ancestral home” and burial plot; they bristled at his bootstrap politics and claimed that Hillbilly Elegy didn’t reflect the Appalachia they knew.In advance of the 2024 election, the debate over Vance’s identity returned with heightened stakes. Donald Trump had picked Vance as his running mate at least in part because his “hillbilly” credentials could appeal to the voters his book purported to represent. Then, of course, there was the factual matter: Appalachia, many assumed, was a region like New England or the Pacific Northwest; you were either from there, or you weren’t. The day after Vance’s nomination-acceptance speech, the New York Times standards desk weighed in, issuing guidance to its staff that clarified that he was not “from Appalachia.” The memo, obtained by the reporter Justin Baragona, concludes by cautioning journalists against “anything that suggests he grew up there or is a son of Appalachia.”But ever since it was first defined as a region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has always existed as much in myth as in literal geography. A simple adjudication of Vance’s ties overlooks a complicated history of what “being Appalachian” really means in America.The term Appalachian America is believed to have been coined by William Goodell Frost, an Ohio educator who served as president of Kentucky’s Berea College from 1892 to 1920. Berea had been founded by an abolitionist and was intended to function as a racially integrated, coeducational liberal-arts college, the first in the South. But after a 1904 Kentucky law required that schools in the state be segregated, Frost pivoted the college’s mission toward educating the population he had called, in an 1899 Atlantic essay, “our contemporary ancestors”—the white inhabitants of Kentucky’s mountainous east. In his article, Frost recounts traveling through the area and being shocked by how its inhabitants lived. With their rudimentary homes and blood feuds, the mountain folk were, in his words, “an anachronism.” “Appalachian America may be useful as furnishing a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world!” he wrote. He had invented a region, one principally defined not by its place on a map but by its position in history: the past.Over the next decades, Frost’s conception gelled in the American mind. Appalachia came to represent an area spread loosely across the mountain range of the same name—portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee—but distinguished (at least in the eyes of outsiders) by its backwardness. In one 1929 Atlantic story, the writer Charles Morrow Wilson suggested that the region remained trapped in Elizabethan England, with a dialect and social mores that were centuries out of date. And in the 1960s, the Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill turbocharged Frost’s ideas with a series of Atlantic articles and best-selling books that helped make the region synonymous with poverty.Caudill, not unlike Vance, became an overnight celebrity. The success of his books, his son James told me, drew visitors from all across the country and even abroad; they were eager to see the desperation he described up close, and an obliging Caudill led “poverty tours” through the valleys around Whitesburg, where he lived. Caudill’s writing fleshed out stereotypes for the people Frost had diagnosed as backward: They were poor but scrappy, suspicious of outsiders but fiercely loyal to their families, unsophisticated but endowed with a certain sort of folk wisdom.Driven in part by Caudill’s writing, Congress finally affixed Appalachia to a map in 1965, creating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and tasking it with dispersing federal funds across a list of counties deemed sufficiently Appalachian. With money up for grabs, states wanted in. Included in the commission’s charter are decidedly mountainless counties in northern Mississippi; an advocate for the state had even submitted a doctored map as evidence, drawing in mountains with a fine-point pen. The ARC’s list of counties, which stretches from Mississippi into upstate New York, constitutes America’s “official” definition of Appalachia today.It’s true that Vance’s hometown isn’t included in the ARC’s charter, which the Times memo references to justify classifying Vance as not “from” the region. But the charter’s list is so expansive as to be meaningless. In a 1981 survey of college students in and around the ARC’s definition of Appalachia, fewer than 20 percent identified New York and Mississippi as part of the region.Perhaps whether or not Americans consider someone to be “from” Appalachia has less to do with where that person grew up on a map than with their embodiment or rejection of the myths we associate with the region—and, at least in some cases, with how those myths can serve our political priorities. One popular T-shirt in support of the Trump-Vance ticket read “It’s Gonna Take a Felon and a Hillbilly to Fix This,” as if the experience of Appalachian hardship afforded Vance a unique ability to tame inflation. But to strip from Vance his Appalachianness is to make a political argument, too—that his perspective is closer to that of the Silicon Valley billionaires with whom he associates than an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia.At the RNC, Vance invoked his Appalachian burial ground to challenge the notion that America was built on an idea; instead, he argued, you were an American if your ancestors had been buried in America, and if, over generations, they had fought and died for America. “That’s not just an idea, my friends; that’s not just a set of principles,” he said. “That is a homeland—that is our homeland.” He used his ties to the land to make a political argument of his own, to advance a nationalism rooted in the soil of a cemetery plot and the bones of the people buried there. His rejection of America as a nation of ideas was itself based on an idea—that of Appalachia.