“The principal authority for the general treatment of the history of coal, and of iron and steel, in Alabama is the work of Miss Ethel Armes. The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama is a comprehensive and scholarly work portraying in attractive style the growth of the mineral industries in its relation to the development of the state and of the South, in preparation of which the author spent more than five years.” —Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography

In 1891, thousands of Tennessee miners rose up against the use of convict labor by the state's coal companies, eventually engulfing five mountain communities in a rebellion against government authority. Propelled by the insurgent sensibilities of Populism

In this study of Birmingham's iron and steel workers, Henry McKiven unravels the complex connections between race relations and class struggle that shaped the city's social and economic order. He also traces the links between the process of class formation and the practice of community building and neighborhood politics. According to McKiven, the white men who moved to Birmingham soon after its founding to take jobs as skilled iron workers shared a free labor ideology that emphasized opportunity and equality between white employees and management at the expense of less skilled black laborers. But doubtful of their employers' commitment to white supremacy, they formed unions to defend their position within the racial order of the workplace. This order changed, however, when advances in manufacturing technology created more semiskilled jobs and broadened opportunities for black workers. McKiven shows how these race and class divisions also shaped working-class life away from the plant, as workers built neighborhoods and organized community and political associations that reinforced bonds of skill, race, and ethnicity.

The first comprehensive, illustrated history of Alabama's railroad system

The Labor History Reader celebrates the first quarter century of the premier journal in its field and provides the richest available source of contemporary thought on American labor history. The result is not only a revealing look at the history of American labor but also a better understanding of our changing attitudes toward that history.''The list of authors in The Labor History Reader reads like an honor roll of the most distinguished labor historians in the United States. The volume itself is excellent in chronological scope, wide-ranging in subjects treated, and representative of the main currents of thought which stimulate the writing of American working class history today.'' -- Maurice F. Neufeld, professor of labor and industrial relations, Cornell University

A detailed history of a vitally important year in Alabama history The year 1865 is critically important to an accurate understanding of Alabama's present. In 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. examines the end of the Civil War and the early days of Reconstruction in the state and details what he interprets as strategic failures of Alabama's political leadership. The actions, and inactions, of Alabamians during those twelve months caused many self-inflicted wounds that haunted them for the next century. McIlwain recounts a history of missed opportunities that had substantial and reverberating consequences. He focuses on four factors: the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves, the destruction of Alabama's remaining industrial economy, significant broadening of northern support for suffrage rights for the freedmen, and an acute and lengthy postwar shortage of investment capital. Each element proves critically important in understanding how present-day Alabama was forged. Relevant events outside Alabama are woven into the narrative, including McIlwain's controversial argument regarding the effect of Lincoln's assassination. Most historians assume that Lincoln favored black suffrage and that he would have led the fight to impose that on the South. But he made it clear to his cabinet members that granting suffrage rights was a matter to be decided by the southern states, not the federal government. Thus, according to McIlwain, if Lincoln had lived, black suffrage would not have been the issue it became in Alabama. McIlwain provides a sifting analysis of what really happened in Alabama in 1865 and why it happened--debunking in the process the myth that Alabama's problems were unnecessarily brought on by the North. The overarching theme demonstrates that Alabama's postwar problems were of its own making. They would have been quite avoidable, he argues, if Alabama's political leadership had been savvier.

From the early day of mining in colonial Virginia and Maryland up to the time of World War II, blacks were an important part of the labor force in the coal industry. Yet in this, as in other enterprises, their role has heretofore been largely ignored. Now Roland L. Lewis redresses the balance in this comprehensive history of black coal miners in America. The experience of blacks in the industry has varied widely over time and by region, and the approach of this study is therefore more comparative than chronological. Its aim is to define the patterns of race relations that prevailed among the miners. Using this approach, Lewis finds five distractive systems of race relations. There was in the South before and after the Civil War a system of slavery and convict labor—an enforced servitude without legal compensation. This was succeeded by an exploitative system whereby the southern coal operators, using race as an excuse, paid lower wages to blacks and thus succeeded in depressing the entire wage scale. By contrast, in northern and midwestern mines, the pattern was to exclude blacks from the industry so that whites could control their jobs and their communities. In the central Appalachians, although blacks enjoyed greater social equality, the mine operators manipulated racial tensions to keep the work force divided and therefore weak. Finally, with the advent of mechanization, black laborers were displaced from the mines to such an extent that their presence in the coal fields in now nearly a thing of the past. By analyzing the ways race, class, and community shaped social relations in the coal fields, Black Coal Miners in America makes a major contribution to the understanding of regional, labor, social, and African-American history.

From the colonial era to 1914, America was a debtor nation in international accounts--owing more to foreigners than foreigners owed to us. By 1914 it was the world's largest debtor nation. Mira Wilkins provides the first complete history of foreign investment in the United States during that period. The book shows why the United States was attractive to foreign investors and traces the changing role of foreign capital in the nation's development, covering both portfolio and direct investment. The immense new wave of foreign investment in the United States today, and our return to the status of a debtor nation--once again the world's largest debtor nation--makes this strong exposition far more than just historically interesting. Wilkins reviews foreign portfolio investments in government securities (federal, state, and local) and in corporate stocks and bonds, as well as foreign direct investments in land and real estate, manufacturing plants, and even such service-sector activities as accounting, insurance, banking, and mortgage lending. She finds that between 1776 and 1875, public-sector securities (principally federal and state securities) drew in the most long-term foreign investment, whereas from 1875 to 1914 the private sector was the main attraction. The construction of the American railroad system called on vast portfolio investments from abroad; there was also sizable direct investment in mining, cattle ranching, the oil industry, the chemical industry, flour production, and breweries, as well as the production of rayon, thread, and even submarines. In addition, there were foreign stakes in making automobile and electrical and nonelectrical machinery. America became the leading industrial country of the world at the very time when it was a debtor nation in world accounts.

Twice the Work of Free Labor is both a study of penal labor in the southern United States, and a revisionist analysis of the political economy of the South after the Civil War.

A fascinating story of the collaborative efforts of an Englishman and a Connecticut Yankee to develop the iron resources of northeast Alabama Anniston"s early years constitute a fascinating story of the collaborative efforts of an Englishman and a Connecticut Yankee to develop the iron resources of northeast Alabama at a time when the area was struggling to recover from the devastating effects of the Civil War. The result was a robust, successful new town that benefited from their profit-minded business acumen and from their paternalistic but utopian mind-set. With town-building and boosting efforts, Anniston soon became known to contemporaries as "the model city of the New South." The town's economic survival through booms and busts is a study in marketing and diversification, of reliance on old liaisons in hard times. Originally published in 1978 and now reprinted in a paperbound edition with a new preface, the book explores Anniston's first quarter century and yields rich material because it cuts across several historical fields, including urban, economic, quantitative, social, and political history, as well as labor and race relations