hillbilly epicurean.

"On the Naming of Appalachia" is a short essay, the kind you can read after you've consumed your lunch at your desk when you're looking to fill ten or fifteen minutes. As such it has all the things you're looking for for just a moment:

1. It is free and online - no need to print it out or buy it and remember to bring it to work. Your desk is far too clogged as it is.
2. It has pictures - a number of tremendous maps of the region, the earliest made by Spanish conquistadors. Lunchtime reading is like reading at the beach - it should be sound, but diversionary. An otherwise dense piece is made delicious with a visual spoonful of sugar.
   
3. It is scholarly without being incomprehensibly dense - you'll learn something but you won't feel flooded with incomprehensible jargon (which is how you'll inevitably feel once you close this window and go back to whatever it is you're being paid to do for a living).

Genuinely, though, this is a great single shot reading - self-contained, well-done, and well-researched. And, crucially, it addresses a topic I've often debated with myself but never have read a really interesting discussion of. You should be reading "On the Naming of Appalachia."

During the eighteenth century, the term Allegheny emerged as the principal rival to Appalachian. By convention the southern half of the eastern mountain chain was known as the Appalachians and the northern half the Alleghenies. The overall designation alternated between the two. Am­bivalence about the appropriate term for the entire region is apparent in Washington Irving's proposal for a more accurate name for the country than "United States of America." In a letter to the editor of the The Knickerbocker in 1839 signed "Geoffrey Crayon," Irving suggested, perhaps tongue in cheek:
"We have it in our power to furnish ourselves with such a national appellation from one of the grand and eternal features of our country; from that noble chain of mountains which formed its backbone, and ran through the "old confederacy," when it first declared our national independence: I allude to the Appalachian or Allegheny mountains. We might do this without any very inconvenient change in our present titles. We might still use the phrase "The United States," substituting Appalachia, or Alleghenia, (I should prefer the latter,) in place of America. The title of Appalachian, or Alleghenian, would still an­nounce us as Americans, but would specify us as citizens of the Great Republic. Even our old national cypher of U.S.A. might remain unaltered, designating the United States of Alleghenia."