Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World is a history of the cotton textile industry in the American South, especially the Piedmont region of the states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. It was based in large part on an extensive body of oral history interviews conducted by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of the Piedmont Industrialization Project.
The book won several awards after its publication in 1987, including the 1988 Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association; the 1988 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award from the New York School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University; the 1988 Merle Curti History Award in American Social History (co-winner) from the Organization of American Historians; and an Honorable Mention Award for the 1988 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association.
In 2000, a paperback second edition was published that included a new afterword by the authors reflecting on the creation and reception of the book.
Eli Whitney Jr. was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
Person County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The population was 39,097 as of the 2020 census. The county seat is Roxboro.
Mount Gilead is a town in Montgomery County, in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, United States. The population was 1,181 at the 2010 census.
Winnsboro is a town in Fairfield County, South Carolina, United States. The population was 3,550 at the 2010 census. The population was 3,215 at the 2020 census. A population decrease of approximately 9.5% for the same 10 year period. It is the county seat of Fairfield County. Winnsboro is part of the Columbia, South Carolina metropolitan area. Winnsboro is a suburb of a Columbia, South Carolina.
High Point is a city in the Piedmont Triad region of the U.S. state of North Carolina. Most of the city is in Guilford County, with parts extending into Randolph, Davidson, and Forsyth counties. High Point is North Carolina's only city that extends into four counties. As of the 2020 census the city had a total population of 113,887 with an estimated population of 114,086 in 2021. High Point is the ninth-largest municipality in North Carolina, the third-largest municipality in the Piedmont Triad metropolitan area, and the 259th-largest city in the U.S.
The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest strike in the labor history of the United States at the time, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days.
Thomas Michael Holt was an American industrialist who served as the 47th governor of North Carolina from 1891 to 1893. Formerly a North Carolina State Senator and Speaker of the House of the North Carolina General Assembly, Holt was instrumental in the founding of North Carolina State University, as well as in establishing several railroads within the state and the state's department of agriculture. Holt was also responsible for the technology behind the family's Holt Mills "Alamance Plaids", the first colored cotton goods produced in the South – a development that revolutionized the Southern textile industry.
Southside, or Southside Virginia, has traditionally referred to the portion of the state south of the James River, the geographic feature from which the term derives its name. This was the first area to be developed in the colonial period.
Braxton Bragg Comer was an American politician who served as the 33rd Governor of Alabama from 1907 to 1911, and a United States Senator in 1920. As governor, he achieved railroad reform, lowering business rates in Alabama to make them more competitive with other states. He increased funding for the public school system, resulting in more rural schools and high schools in each county for white students and a rise in the state's literacy rate.
South Carolina was one of the Thirteen Colonies that first formed the United States. European exploration of the area began in April 1540 with the Hernando de Soto expedition, which unwittingly introduced diseases that decimated the local Native American population. In 1663, the English Crown granted land to eight proprietors of what became the colony. The first settlers came to the Province of Carolina at the port of Charleston in 1670. They were mostly wealthy planters and their slaves coming from the English Caribbean colony of Barbados. They started to develop their commodity crops of sugar and cotton. The Province of Carolina was split into North and South Carolina in 1712. Pushing back the Native Americans in the Yamasee War (1715–1717), colonists next overthrew the proprietors' rule in the Revolution of 1719, seeking more direct representation. In 1719, South Carolina became a crown colony.
The Cotton States and International Exposition was a world's fair held in Atlanta, Georgia, United States in 1895. The exposition was designed "to foster trade between southern states and South American nations as well as to show the products and facilities of the region to the rest of the nation and Europe."
The Loray Mill strike of 1929 in Gastonia, North Carolina, was a notable strike action in the labor history of the United States. Though largely unsuccessful in attaining its goals of better working conditions and wages, the strike was considered successful in a lasting way; it caused an immense controversy which gave the labor movement momentum in the South.
The Philip Taft Labor History Book Award is sponsored by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations in cooperation with the Labor and Working-Class History Association for books relating to labor history of the United States. Labor history is considered "in a broad sense to include the history of workers, their institutions, and their workplaces, as well as the broader historical trends that have shaped working-class life, including but not limited to: immigration, slavery, community, the state, race, gender, and ethnicity." The award is named after the noted labor historian Philip Taft (1902–1976).
Collins, Jeffrey. "The governor of South Carolina wants $1.3 billion to invest in a new EV plant that could employ 4,000 people". Fortune. Retrieved 2023-03-15.
Dorothy Cotton was an American civil rights activist, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and a member of the inner-circle of one of its main organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As the SCLC's Educational Director, she was arguably the highest ranked female member of the organization.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and 1970s, helped to inspire new research on Southern labor history and the long civil rights movement, and encouraged the use of oral history sources in historical research. She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching;Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World and Sisters and Rebels: The Struggle for the Soul of America.
A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Erwin Mill was a textile mill in Durham, North Carolina that operated between the years of 1893 and 1986. After seeing the success of other cotton mills in the Northeast and locally in Durham, entrepreneur Benjamin N. Duke incorporated the mill in 1892 and recruited William H. Erwin to manage the enterprise. The mill's success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the result of Erwin's and his successors' exceptional management tactics, even when the factory hit obstacles such as the Great Depression and the unionization of its workers. The mill grew quickly in the late 19th century and early 20th century, became one of North Carolina's largest cotton mills. It originally produced muslin pouches for tobacco, but the mill would later expand its production to other fabrics, becoming one of the largest producers of denim in the world during the early 1900s. Workers at the mill enjoyed some of the best working conditions and highest wages in textile factories throughout the southern United States. Mill employees would later sign union-friendly labor agreements that were radical to the southern textile industry in the early to mid 20th century. The establishment of homes, businesses and recreation areas in the mill village was a significant factor in the development of the West Durham, especially the Ninth Street business district and the Old West Durham Neighborhood. Erwin Mill No. 1 is on the National Register of Historic Places and the mill village of West Durham is a National Historic District. An apartment complex, office building and shopping center of the same name that are built on the original site also commemorate the factory.
Katharine DuPre Lumpkin was an American writer and sociologist from Macon, Georgia. She is a member of both the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and the Georgia Women of Achievement.
The 1914–1915 Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills strike was a labor strike involving several hundred textile workers from the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The strike, which involved about 500 millworkers, began on May 20, 1914 and ended almost a year later on May 15, 1915 in failure for the strikers.
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