Introduction
The Social Sciences and Southern History
Stories of Enslavement: A Person-Centered Ethnography from an Eighteenth-Century Virginia Plantation by Rhys Isaac
Texts, Texture, and Context: Toward an Ethnographic History of Slave Resistance by Charles Joyner
Reading the Slave Body: Demeanor, Gesture, and African-American Culture by Shane White and Graham White
Deadly Amusements: Spectacle Lynchings and Southern Whiteness, 1890-1940 by Grace Elizabeth Hale
Who Were the Victims of Lynching? Evidence from Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940 by Terence Finnegan
Southern History through Life History
Thomas Thistlewood Becomes a Creole by Trevor Burnard
Doing God's Service: Adelbert Ames and Reconstruction in Mississippi by Warren A. Ellem
Frank Cushing and W.E.B. Du Bois: Religion, Social Science, and Traveling South in the Late Nineteenth Century by Sam Elworthy
Race, Gender, and Modernism: The Case of Lillian Smith by Bruce Clayton
Labor in the New South
Aspects of Modernization in the Loray Mill Strike of 1929 by John Salmond
Coming into the Real World: Southern Textile Workers and the TWUA, 1945-1951 by Timothy J. Minchin
Bibliographical Essay
Index

Bruce L. Clayton, John A. Salmond

This book reflects the best of contemporary scholarship on the history of the American South. Each contributor is an authority-one a Pulitzer Prize winner. The essays examine what life was like for the slaves; for the victims of terror and lynchings; for workers who dared strike and demand fairness; and for dissenters who challenged the accepted truths. The essays are grouped around three major research areas: history and the social sciences, history and biography, and the new labor history.
This is a unique collection of essays by some of the world's leading historians of the South, together with work by younger scholars. All contributors, however, are working at the cutting edge of their particular methodological approaches. The book, for example, includes both an essay by Pulitzer Prize winner Rhys Isaac, and one by Rutgers University graduate student Beth Hale. Yet, both have a common concern to explore the reaches of the Southern past through the dimension of ethnography.
The essays in the book are grouped according to theme. The largest section, the social sciences and Southern history, includes essays drawing heavily on the insights of anthropology of ethnography and of statistical analysis. Each essay in the second section is designed to illustrate how life history can be used to illuminate much larger histoical themes and processes. The essays in the last section on labor in the new South all illustrate, among other things, the importance of drawing on the insights of historians of women in order to redress the masculinist presuppositons of labor historians. All the essays in the book, in fact, reflect current concerns with gender and race in the re-interpretation of the Southern past.