Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American IconIn this pioneering work of cultural history, historian Anthony Harkins argues that the hillbilly in his various guises of briar hopper, brush ape, ridge runner, and white trash has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values of family, home, and physical production, and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.