Working History

Karen Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, discusses her new book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and what one murder case in 1930s Mississippi reveals about race relations, criminal justice, and life in the Jim Crow South.

J. Blake Perkins, assistant professor of history at Williams Baptist College, discusses his new book, Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks, regional relations with the federal government, and the evolution of grassroots politics.

Keri Leigh Merritt discusses her book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, and intersections of race, class, politics, and slavery in the pre-Civil War South.

Bryant Simon, Professor of History at Temple University, discusses his new book, The Hamlet Fire: A Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, and the tragic consequences of the ethos of "cheap" for workers, communities, and the nation.

Lane Windham, Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, discusses her book, Knocking on Labor’s Door, and why the 1970s should be seen as more than a moment of decline for the U.S. labor movement.

Traci JoLeigh Drummond, archivist for the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University in Atlanta, discusses the preservation of materials related to southern labor history, new collections open to researchers, digital access to archival sources, and what makes a collection of records "archive worthy."

Joshua Hollands, of the Institute of the Americas at University College London, discusses his award-winning essay, “There’s a Bigot in Your Biscuit’: Workplace Discrimination at Cracker Barrel, Civil Rights, and Corporate Activism in the Southern United States,” and the past and present of LGBT discrimination and activism in the southern workplace.

Professor Adrienne Petty discusses her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War, the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can't Eat Freedom, rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South.

Professor Cindy Hahamovitch of the University of Georgia discusses her research connecting the global histories of 19th-century indentured servants and today's guestworkers.