New Books in the American South

It may only be a slight exaggeration to say that one of David Dillon's career accomplishments was to put the words "Dallas" and "architecture" in the same sentence again. After a screed in 1980 entitled "Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?" launched his career as an architecture critic, Dillon took to the pages of the Dallas Morning News to praise, lament, explain, beg, scold, suggest, cajole, and influence how Dallas and its metropolitan region took shape throughout three revolutionary decades of development. To follow his career as a critic from the early 1980s, when downtown was dormant and street life an afterthought, to his retirement--when a new mindset for urban planning had largely set in, but still had far to go--is to listen to a larger story about how thinking about the built environment in North American cities has changed over the last generation, the new questions that have been raised, and the old ones that persist.Some of Dillon's most memorable and enduring columns were recently published by University of Texas Press in a collection called The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture, part of a series furnished by the Roger Fullington Endowment in Architecture. The book is edited and introduced by Kathryn Holliday, associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she is also the founding director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture.Holliday is the author of Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008) and Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century (Rizzoli, 2012).David Dillon was the nationally acclaimed architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, where his work received awards from the Associated Press, the Dallas Press Club, and the Texas Society of Architects.Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Today Professor Cindy Hahamovitch of the University of Georgia discusses her research connecting the global histories of 19th-century indentured servants and today's guestworkers.In 1933 Congress granted American laborers the right of collective bargaining, but farmworkers got no New Deal. In The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Hahamovitch shows how growers enlisted the aid of the state in an unprecedented effort to keep their fields well stocked with labor.This is the story of the farmworkers--Italian immigrants from northeastern tenements, African American laborers from the South, and imported workers from the Caribbean--who came to work in the fields of New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida in the decades after 1870. These farmworkers were not powerless, the author argues, for growers became increasingly open to negotiation as their crops ripened in the fields. But farmers fought back with padrone or labor contracting schemes and 'work-or-fight' forced-labor campaigns. Hahamovitch describes how growers' efforts became more effective as federal officials assumed the role of padroni, supplying farmers with foreign workers on demand.Today's migrants are as desperate as ever, the author concludes, not because poverty is an inevitable feature of modern agricultural work, but because the federal government has intervened on behalf of growers, preventing farmworkers from enjoying the fruits of their labor.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Professor Michelle Haberland of Georgia Southern University, author of Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South (University of Georgia Press, 2015), discusses the dynamics of gender, class, race and globalization in the southern apparel industry from the 1930s to today.Apparel manufacturing in the American South, by virtue of its size, its reliance upon female labor, and its broad geographic scope, is an important but often overlooked industry that connects the disparate concerns of women’s history, southern cultural history, and labor history. In Striking Beauties, Haberland examines its essential features and the varied experiences of its workers during the industry’s great expansion from the late 1930s through the demise of its southern branch at the end of the twentieth century.The popular conception of the early twentieth-century South as largely agrarian informs many histories of industry and labor in the United States. But as Haberland demonstrates, the apparel industry became a key part of the southern economy after the Great Depression and a major driver of southern industrialization. The gender and racial composition of the workforce, the growth of trade unions, technology, and capital investment were all powerful forces in apparel’s migration south. Yet those same forces also revealed the tensions caused by racial and gender inequities not only in the region but in the nation at large. Striking Beauties places the struggles of working women for racial and economic justice in the larger context of southern history. The role of women as the primary consumers of the family placed them in a critical position to influence the success or failure of boycotts, union label programs and ultimately solidarity.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Professor Kenneth Fones-Wolf of West Virginia University discusses his book, co-authored with Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (University of Illinois Press, 2015), the role of religion in the CIO's Operation Dixie, and provides perspective on the participation of faith communities in the modern labor movement.In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites.The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New Orleans in the 1920s, the subject of his book Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (LSU Press, 2012).In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice.Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking.Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2014), traces the roots of black protest politics to early 20th century Atlanta and the fight for equal education.In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters.In this pathbreaking book, Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Perla Guerrero is the author of Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place (University of Texas Press, 2017). Nuevo South explores the history of an ever diversifying U.S. South by examining the mixed reactions refugees, immigrants, and migrants, from different countries, received in Arkansas in the latter half of the 20th century. Comparing the experiences of Vietnamese, Cuban, and Mexican refugees and migrants, Guerrero demonstrates why we need a more nuanced understanding of how these groups, and others, changed the face of the South and its many regional racial thinking.Perla Guerrero is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland – College Park. Guerrero studies race and ethnicity, with a focus on Latinas/os/xs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration, labor, U.S. history, and the U.S. South specifically.Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south