Hillbilly Elegy

the North needed: coal and hill people.
And Appalachia exported a lot of both.
Precise numbers are tough to pin
down because studies typically measure
“net out-migration”—as in the total
number of people who left minus the
number of people who came in. Many
families constantly traveled back and
forth, which skews the data. But it is
certain that many millions of people
traveled along the “hillbilly highway”—
a metaphorical term that captured the
opinion of Northerners who saw their
cities and towns flooded with people
like my grandparents. The scale of the
migration was staggering. In the 1950s,
thirteen of every one hundred Kentucky