Ken Fones-Wolf

Jennifer Egolf

Louis C. Martin

Culture, Class, and Politics in Modern Appalachia takes stock of the field of Appalachian studies as it explores issues still at the center of its scholarship: culture, industrialization, the labor movement, and twentieth-century economic and political failure and their social impact. A new generation of scholars continues the work of Appalachian studies' pioneers, exploring the diversity and complexity of the region and its people. Labor migrations from around the world transformed the region during its critical period of economic growth. Collective struggles over occupational health and safety, the environment, equal rights, and civil rights challenged longstanding stereotypes. Investigations of political and economic power and the role of social actors and social movements in Appalachian history add to the foundational work that demonstrates a dynamic and diverse region.

Essays in Honor of Ronald L. Lewis

Culture, Class, and Politics in Modern Appalachia

Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf

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. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South

James Philip Danky

James P. Danky

Elliott Shore

Chicago's German-language socialist weekly, Der Vorbote, claimed in 1880 that "the history of the workers' movement in the United States is at the same time the history of the workers' press." Hyperbolic perhaps, but to judge by the energy and resources German-American radicals devoted to their press, many immigrants agreed. The radical movement in the United States met with problems as well as support. Language and culture frequently divided the radicals, and class considerations splintered the German-American community. Cultural radicals like Robert Reitzel and Ludwig Lore ran afoul of rank-and-file taste or party discipline; attempts by the New Yorker Volkszeitung to coach women on proper socialist positions resulted in bitter arguments over the importance of woman suffrage and pacifism

The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940

The German-American Radical Press

Ken Fones-Wolf

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