Coeditors Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt take on a challenging task with the volume Reconsidering Southern Labor History. As they note in the introduction, it has been six years since the last edited volume on southern labor history, and almost all of their predecessors focused exclusively on the twentieth century. Their volume offers chronological breadth, portrays the complex and dynamic history of southern workers across race and ethnicity, and raises important questions about the state of southern labor history.
Hild and Merritt, who have published monographs on the nineteenth-century South in recent years, bring fresh insights. The book is divided into five sections: “Early Republic and the Old South,” “Reconstruction and the Gilded Age,” the “Twentieth Century and Civil Rights,” and the “Modern South,” followed by a set of concluding essays on the future of work and the state of labor history. The essays are short and focused,...
