Michael Wilder

Featured in Appalachian Free Press, Vol. 1, Issue 4. Appalachia is a cultural region in the eastern United States, nestled in the center of the Appalachian Mountains. The region and its people are some of the most misunderstood in the United States; they are known to the rest of America, the mainstream, and even sometimes to themselves, by stereotypes. Appalachia is one of the poorest regions of the United States, and thus, contrary to the mainstream view of the region, has a rich, sometimes outright militant, tradition of organized labor. [Read More]

Some 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982-1992…Afghan people don’t have a history of being religious zealots. To create the CIA-desired jihad required the recruitment of Arab, Egyptian, and Pakistani extremists. So the fundamentalism that emerged in Afghanistan is a CIA construct. -Ahmed Rahid, Journalist Afghan national identity is a relatively new phenomenon, emerging around the time of the Durrani Empire (1747-1823), when the whole of the region was practicing Sunni Islam. [Read More]

America is often called a “melting pot”, which describes the tendency for a culturally heterogeneous society to become more homogenous over time. Advocates of multiculturalism prefer the less discriminatory and more accurate “salad bowl” analogy. It is less discriminatory because “melting pot” implies that ethnic and cultural minorities must fully assimilate into mainstream, in a word, white, American culture. It is more accurate because, while the American people do integrate into one multicultural society, different cultures maintain separate identities, and in many cases an ethnic minority may dominate a particular territory. [Read More]