"West Virginians have hidden their weak sense of community behind a particularly strident form of state patriotism, but the disguise is very thin. The characteristic expressions are boasts, slogans, and distortions of historical fact. Traditionally schoolbooks adopted what might be called the "Soviet Encyclopedia" approach to local history, recalling the Stalinist propaganda that sought to establish a Russian inventor or setting for every important development of the modern world. West Virginia's boosters have not gone quite so far, but West Virginia children are still expected to believe that James Rumsey, not Robert Fulton, invented the steamboat; that Amos Dolbear, not Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone; that Point Pleasant, not Lexington, was the first battle of the American Revolution, and so on. They are also taught to memorize the West Virginia locations of such items as the world's largest clothespin factory, the world's largest ashtray, and to make an inordinate fuss about West Virginia natives who have become prominent nationally."