Week Three: New South, Like a Family
by Prof. Hangen - January 30th, 2011
Mon 1/31 – The New South
Topics for today’s class: the “New South,” the cotton industry, mill life, class in the 19th century South, Lewis Hine, labor and unionization in the Southern textile industry. There is 1 short reading: “Henry Grady Sells the New South,” History Matters online.
Wed 2/2 – Discuss Like A Family Chapter Three, “From the Cradle to the Grave”
Chapter 3: PDF posted in two parts – Part One, and Part Two
This week’s document is a chapter from the collaborative oral history titled Like A Family. It’s a masterful, gigantic, award-winning, multi-year/multi-researcher oral history project to reconstruct life and culture in textile mill towns of the upper South in the 1920s and 1930s. Hall and her colleagues conducted hours and hours of oral history interviews with elderly mill workers about their memories, their working experiences, and their inner lives. We’re reading just one chapter, that discusses how textile company towns “established the contours of daily existence” from birth to marriage to death.
Questions to consider:
- The book’s subtitle is “The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.” How and why is this a “world”?
- Who peoples this world?
- What is life like?
- How does it differ (or not) from the experience of northern textile labor, e.g. the Lawrence strikers, or the shirtwaist factory workers?
- How did this team of researchers conduct their research?
- How do the voices of ordinary workers come through in this text?
- What do you learn about the Southern Piedmont as a region?
- What skills would you need to survive in their world?
Fri 2/4 – No Class This Week
There is no presentation day this week. However, if you are presenting next Friday you would be welcome to use this week’s topics as the foundation of your presentation. Some suggestions and places to begin -
Photos by Lewis Hine & Essays about his work at American Crossroads
Additional Lewis Hine photographs here, at HistoryPlace
Oral histories in the category “Textile” at Documenting the American South
Introduce us to the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in 1916, and its connection to child labor in the Southern textile industry. It was invalidated by the Supreme Court after just two years; why?
History of Scott’s Run/ Arthurdale – a pet project town of Eleanor Roosevelt during the Depression
A 4-minute silent film from a 1924 Cotton Mill, showing the textile factory process
A feature film starring Sally Field, Norma Rae, a compelling biopic of a plucky textile union organizer in the same kind of mill towns in which Like a Family‘s informants worked a generation earlier. Field won the Academy Award for her performance in 1979. You could review the film for us and show a brief key scene. I have the film to lend; see me if you’d like to do this option.
