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New Edition of Like a Family Published by UNC Press (2000)

Like a Family
UNC Press' August 2000 reissue of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, encourages a new generation of readers to experience and enjoy what has become a landmark text in social history, labor history, and the history of the American South. When originally published in 1987, critics hailed Like a Family as "an instant classic," "a moving exploration of the transformation from rural farm to mill village," and "social history at its best." The new edition, which includes an updated afterward by the authors, explores Southern textile mills from their beginnings to the 1930s, drawing largely on the perspectives of mill workers themselves. The authors - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daly - relied on hundreds of interviews with working-class Southerners conducted by the Southern Oral History Program as part of its Piedmont Industrialization project of the late 1970s and early 1980s as well as letters and articles from the trade press to craft a richly detailed narrative of cotton mill life, work, and protest. The resulting text seamlessly blends the voices of workers with the analyses of the authors to create what oral historian Studs Terkel has called "a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse." Like a Family has received numerous honors and awards, including the 1988 Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, the 1988 Philip Taft Labor History Award, the 1988 Merle Curti History Award in American Social History (co-winner), and an Honorable Mention Award for the 1988 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association. Want to learn more?



The Southern Oral History Program
Center for the Study of the American South
Love House and Hutchins Forum
410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info@sohp.org