Continued work is needed to understand the material reality of the lives of poor whites and how they influenced surrounding social and political structures. Finding the ways in which their influence radiated through southern society can give us an image of the poor whites that is lost in the biased accounts handed down by elite contemporaries. The social and cultural history of this period, moreover, needs to be further integrated to disentangle image-making from social reality and show the place of poor whites in the South. ... While their voices are often unheard, we can gauge the broader importance of their presence through the social, political, and cultural developments of the period.