Michael Pierce is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party.

Calvin White Jr. is associate dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, where he is also associate professor of history. He is the author of The Rise to Respectability: Race, Religion, and the Church of God in Christ.

"This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation's deadliest labor conflicts - the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War"--