The geographic Appalachians stretch from Labrador in Canada to Alabama. The cultural Appalachia is smaller, centered on the southern mountains from Georgia to West Virginia. The federal Appalachian Regional Commission, created in 1965 to address chronic poverty, defines a 13-state region of 423 counties from New York to Mississippi - a political map that includes some Mississippi lowlands for development funding and excludes some Virginia highlands for similar political reasons. West Virginia is the only state entirely within the ARC's Appalachian Region. About 26 million people live within the boundaries the ARC uses. Pronounced two ways: Appal-AY-shuh by outsiders, App-ah-LATCH-uh by most insiders. Either is acceptable. The pronunciation often signals which side of the cultural line you grew up on.

Outsiders often picture Appalachia as a region of small mountain hollows, but the metropolitan map tells a different story. Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Youngstown, and Scranton are entirely within the ARC region. Atlanta and Cincinnati are partly within it. Asheville, Charleston, Huntington, Johnson City, and Kingsport - the Tri-Cities of east Tennessee - are all Appalachian cities of meaningful size. The narrative of Appalachia as an exclusively rural, exclusively poor region was always incomplete. The reality has always been a mix of industrial cities, college towns, mountain hollows, coal camps, river ports, and federal lands.

Appalachians have spent more than a century being depicted by outsiders as toothless, ignorant, racist, drug-addled hillbillies. The stereotype was profitable for journalists in the late 19th century, and it remained profitable for filmmakers and television producers throughout the 20th and into the 21st. Some cities outside Appalachia have laws against discrimination based on Appalachian origin - Cincinnati's includes it explicitly - because people from the region faced systematic discrimination when they migrated for industrial work in the 20th century. The Wikivoyage entry handles the stereotype question with some delicacy, noting that most Appalachians are decent folk who practice the kind of hospitality the South is famous for, and pointing out that some of the historical stereotype is, in fact, historically inverted: most Appalachians were antislavery during the Civil War; Appalachian Tennessee produced more antislavery newspapers than any other place in America; Appalachian Kentucky had racially integrated colleges nearly a century before federal desegregation.

The Appalachian Trail runs 2,197.9 miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine. It crosses 14 states and follows the spine of the southern Appalachians for much of its length. About 3,000 people attempt to thru-hike the full trail each year; roughly 25 percent succeed. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border, is the most visited national park in the United States - more than 13 million people each year, more than the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone combined. Cumberland Gap National Historical Park preserves the mountain pass where Daniel Boone led settlers into Kentucky in the 1770s. The federal land in Appalachia is concentrated in the southern half of the region, where the mountains are highest and the population density lowest.

West Virginia's state motto is Montani Semper Liberi - Mountaineers Are Always Free. The phrase, adopted in 1872, captures something the region's own residents have often said about themselves: that the mountains breed an independent temperament that does not trust outside authority and does not particularly want to be governed by it. The historical record is more complicated than the slogan. Appalachians have been governed and exploited by outside interests - coal companies, timber operators, federal agencies - for most of the last 150 years. They have also resisted that exploitation in everything from the Mine Wars of the 1920s, when 10,000 armed miners marched on Blair Mountain, to the contemporary opposition to mountaintop removal mining. The freedom in the motto is partly an aspiration. It is also, in its stubbornness, a description of the actual political behavior of a region that has rarely voted the way Washington expected it to vote.