Like a Family

Like a Family
Author: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2012-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807882941

Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice

Linthead

Linthead
Author: Wilt Browning
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1990
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

It was never a term of endearment --linthead-- but some people whose lives were formed in the cotton mill villages of the South wore it as a badge of honor. One is Wilt Browning, part of the last generation to be born and raised on the mill hill. This book is a look at mill hill life from the 1940s through the early 50s, when the mills began selling off company houses and life on the mill hills began changing rapidly. Linthead is a revisiting of the life that thousands of Carolinians and other Southerners once lived, a life that exists now only in memories. Browning brings those memories to life.

FIRE!

FIRE!
Author: David Edwards Hulme
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 56
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788037995

The first book on the Vernon cotton mills fire of 1902. Local Stockport author’s personal story of how he was affected by the tragedy through the death of his great grandfather. The first book of its kind, FIRE!: The Cotton Mill Disaster That Echoed Down the Generations is both a forensic and personal account of the 1902 Vernon cotton mills fire. The book delves into the details of the tragedy, but also focuses on the author’s own dysfunctional early life, and how that likely resulted from the death of his great-grandfather in the blaze. While the book does look at the facts - the mill workers’ deaths, why these occurred, those blamed, and how factory inspectors directly saved lives in Edwardian Britain - FIRE! is very much a personal story as the author explains in the postscript. His search for his American soldier father, the subsequent discovery of his great-grandfather’s death and the impact on his own life, and ultimately his discovery of half-siblings in the USA is as much a part of the narrative as the details. And while inspiration came from family, there is also a disturbing relevancy in the text on how lax fire safety continues to be, especially in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower inferno. Ultimately, the book tells not only of a dramatic story of loss and disaster, but shows how determination can triumph over tragedy to bring a happy ending.

Lost Mill Towns of North Georgia

Lost Mill Towns of North Georgia
Author: Lisa M. Russell
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 1467143510

The textile era was born of a perfect storm. When North Georgia's red clay failed farmers and prices fell during Reconstruction, opportunities arose. Beginning in the 1880s, textile industries moved south. Mill owners enticed an entire workforce to leave their farms and move their families into modern mill villages, encased communities with stores, theaters, baseball teams, bands and schools. To some workers, mill village life was idyllic. They had work, recreation, education, shopping and a home with the modern conveniences of running water and electricity. Most importantly, they got a paycheck. But after the New Deal, workers started to see the raw deal they were getting from mill owners and rebelled. Strikes and economic changes began to erode the era of mill villages, and by the 1960s, mill village life was all but gone. Author Lisa Russell brings these once-vibrant communities back to life.

Mill Town

Mill Town
Author: Kerri Arsenault
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250155959

Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book Finalist for the 2021 New England Society Book Award Finalist for the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association Award A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for 2020 “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” —Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland Kerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to its demise. Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Children of the Mill

Children of the Mill
Author: David Hanson
Publisher: Headline
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2014-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472220420

Channel 4's The Mill captivated viewers with the tales of the lives of the young girls and boys in a northern mill. Focusing on the lives of the apprentices at Quarry Bank Mill, David Hanson's book uses a wealth of first-person source material including letters, diaries, mill records, to tell the stories of the children who lived and worked at Quarry Bank throughout the nineteenth century. This book perfectly accompanies the television series, satisfying viewers' curiosity about the history of the children of Quarry Bank. It reveals the real lives of the television series' main characters: Esther, Daniel, Lucy and Susannah, showing how shockingly close to the truth the dramatisation is. But the book also goes far beyond this to create a full and vivid picture of factory life in the industrial revolution. David Hanson has written an accessible narrative history of Victorian working children and the conditions in which they worked.

Hiring the Black Worker

Hiring the Black Worker
Author: Timothy J. Minchin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807882933

In the 1960s and 1970s, the textile industry's workforce underwent a dramatic transformation, as African Americans entered the South's largest industry in growing numbers. Only 3.3 percent of textile workers were black in 1960; by 1978, this number had risen to 25 percent. Using previously untapped legal records and oral history interviews, Timothy Minchin crafts a compelling account of the integration of the mills. Minchin argues that the role of a labor shortage in spurring black hiring has been overemphasized, pointing instead to the federal government's influence in pressing the textile industry to integrate. He also highlights the critical part played by African American activists. Encouraged by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black workers filed antidiscrimination lawsuits against nearly all of the major textile companies. Still, Minchin notes, even after the integration of the mills, African American workers encountered considerable resistance: black women faced continued hiring discrimination, while black men found themselves shunted into low-paying jobs with little hope of promotion.

Life in a New England Mill Town

Life in a New England Mill Town
Author: Sally Senzell Isaacs
Publisher: Capstone Classroom
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2002-06-07
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781403405258

An overview of life in a nineteenth-century town in which most people worked in the textile mill, including their housing, food, clothing, schools, and everyday activities.

Loom and Spindle

Loom and Spindle
Author: Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson
Publisher: Applewood Books
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2011-03-16
Genre: Factory system
ISBN: 1429045248

Author Harriet Robinson (1825-1911), born Harriet Jane Hanson in Boston, offers a first person account of her life as a factory girl in Lowell, Massachusetts in this 1898 work. Robinson moved with her widowed mother and three siblings to Lowell as the cotton industry was booming, and began working as a bobbin duffer at the age of ten for $2 a week. Her reflections of the life, some 60 years later, are unfailingly upbeat. She was educated, in public school, by private lesson, and in church. The community was tightly knit. She also had the opportunity to write poetry and prose for the factory girls' literary magazine The Lowell Offering. When mill girls returned to their rural family homes, she says, "...instead of being looked down upon as 'factory girls, ' they were more often welcomed as coming from the metropolis, bringing new fashions, new books, and new ideas with them."

The Last Generation

The Last Generation
Author: Mary H. Blewett
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1990
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Contains primary source material.