The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of today’s working class. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing modern laborers have deep roots in the history of worker exploitation in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the United States. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, from the eighteenth century to the present, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine such topics as vagrancy laws in the Early Republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers.

The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today.

“This collection impresses with its chronological sweep, diverse subject matter, and fresh perspectives on southern labor history. It not only affirms the relevance of the southern working-class experience but also enhances our understanding of the broader contours of labor and working-class history.”—Robert Bussel, author of Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship “An outstanding collection of essays that promises to help solve America’s labor history illiteracy problem and that offers much to learn about the history of capitalism, management, labor, and the struggles of ordinary people in the South.”—Chad Pearson, coeditor of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism

Matthew Hild is lecturer in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and instructor in the Department of History at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of Greenbackers, Knights of Labor and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South.

Keri Leigh Merritt, an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South.