On the latest episode of Working History, Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt discuss their new edited volume, Reconsidering Southern Labor History, the nexus of race, class and power in the history of labor in the South, and how a new generation of southern labor scholars are changing our understanding of labor's past, present and future in the region.

Keri Leigh Merritt works as an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her B.A. in History and Political Science from Emory University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. (2014) in History from the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on race and class in U.S. history. Merritt’s work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. With Matthew Hild she is the co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power. She is currently conducting research for books on radical black resistance during Reconstruction, and on the role of sheriffs and police in the nineteenth century South.

Matthew Hild is an instructor of history, specializing in southern history and American labor history and agricultural history at Georgia Tech. He earned his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech’s School of History and Sociology in 2003. He has taught intermittently at Georgia Tech since 2002, and has also taught at Auburn University, Georgia State University, Rhodes College, and the University of West Georgia. He is the author of Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late–Nineteenth Century South (University of Georgia Press, 2007) and a contributing author to Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).  He is currently writing Arkansas's Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest, which is under contract with the University of Missouri Press. Courses that he has taught at Georgia Tech include U.S. History to 1877, U.S. History since 1877, History of the New South, U.S. Labor History, America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Technology and Science in the Industrial Age.

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