Robert H. Zieger, ed.,Southern Labor in Transition, 1940-1995. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. x + 346 pp. $42.00 cloth.

Abstract

Beginning with the surge of interest in slavery a generation ago, the South has steadily emerged as an integral part of America's labor past. From the mid-1970s into the early 1990s, attention flowed chiefly to the period from Reconstruction through World War One. And pathbreaking studies continue to appear on the women and men, white and black, who worked the farms, homes, docks, mines, forests, craft-shops, railroads, factories, and service trades of the New South. Lately, though, the frontier of research has shifted to the eras of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), World War Two, the early Cold War, and the civil rights movement—a chapter of Southern labor history once left to journalists, activists, and social scientists. Southern Labor in Transition, 1940–1995, edited by Robert H. Zieger, offers a valuable road map of current scholarship.