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To: abclily
"Red Necks acquired red necks by bending over in the sun while they built this country."

That isn't the origin of the term. The first time it appeared in print was in connection with coal miners at the Blair Mountain mine in West Virginia when miners marching in support of collective bargaining all wore red bandanas as a sign of their solidarity.

24 posted on 12/19/2019 5:38:30 PM PST by Paal Gulli
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To: Paal Gulli
Actually the first use of the term in print can be traced to the 1830’s. It must have been in use well before the literati caught up with it. The term, at least in the South, referred to a yeoman farmer who plowed his own fields and got a deep red tan on all of his neck as he had to lean forward between the plow handles to watch the plow cut the turf and keep the furrow relatively straight.

In other words a redneck was a man few possessions but one who owned his own land. The very figure Jefferson extolled as the backbone of the agrarian order.
Poor Whites, whom the term is confused with were entirely different. They were the marginalized people who owned no land and in the ante-bellum South squatted on marginal land and at the edge of forests. After the war the impoverishment of the South grew and contracted with the passage of time and many of the yeomanry were forced into the ranks of the broken people through the effects of monoculture and crushingly cheap staple prices after 1873 crash and monetary crisis.

48 posted on 12/19/2019 7:27:50 PM PST by robowombat (Orthodox)
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To: Paal Gulli
The first time it appeared in print was in connection with coal miners at the Blair Mountain mine in West Virginia

Hmmmmmm. No. It isn't. Redneck was in common usage long before the miners of West Virginia acquired the term.

The term characterized farmers having a red neck caused by sunburn from hours working in the fields. A citation from 1893 provides a definition as "poorer inhabitants of the rural districts ... men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin stained red and burnt by the sun, and especially is this true of the back of their necks".

By 1900, "rednecks" was in common use to designate the political factions inside the Democratic Party comprising poor white farmers in the South.[13

Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck#19th_and_early_20th_centuries

The term "redneck" in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members who wore red bandanas for solidarity. The sense of "a union man" dates at least to the 1910s and was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.[17] It was also used by union strikers to describe poor white strikebreakers.[18]


53 posted on 12/19/2019 8:35:44 PM PST by RedMonqey
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