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Podcast: New Books in the American South
Episode: Blake Perkins, "Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks" (U Illinois Press, 2017)
Description: Blake Perkins, assistant professor of history at Williams Baptist College, discusses his new book, Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks (University of Illinois Press, 2017), regional relations with the federal government, and the evolution of grassroots politics.Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different...