In the early 1900s, Huntsville, Alabama, had more spindles than any other city in the South. Cotton fields and mills made the city a major competitor in the textile industry. Entire mill villages sprang up around the factories to house workers and their families. Many of these village buildings are now iconic community landmarks, such as the revitalized Lowe Mill arts facility and the Merrimack Mill Village Historic District. The "lintheads," a demeaning moniker villagers wore as a badge of honor, were hard workers. Their lives were fraught with hardships, from slavery and child labor to factory fires and shutdowns. They endured job-related injuries and illnesses, strikes and the Great Depression. Author Terri L. French details the lives, history and legacy of the workers.

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

After examining origins, Flynt (Southern history, Auburn U.) studies farmers, textile workers, coal miners, and timber workers in depth and discusses family structure, folk culture, the politics of poor whites, and their attempts to resolve problems through labor unions and political movements. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Jackson weaves a seamless tale stretching from the Native-American river settlements ... to the paper mills and hydroelectric plants of the late twentieth century". -- Southern Historian

The eleven essays in this volume probe multicultural interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in eastern North America's frontier zones from the late colonial era to the end of the early republic. Focusing on contact points between these groups, they construct frontiers as creative arenas that produced new forms of social and political organization. Contributors to the volume offer fresh perspectives on a succession of frontier encounters from the era of the Seven Years' War in Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina to the Revolutionary period in the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi basin in the early national era. Drawing on ethnography, cultural and literary criticism, border studies, gender theory, and African American studies, they open new ways of looking at intercultural contact in creating American identities. Collectively, the essays in Contact Points challenge ideas of either acculturation or conquest, highlighting instead the complexity of various frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in American history. The contributors are Stephen Aron, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Gregory E. Dowd, John Mack Faragher, William B. Hart, Jill Lepore, James H. Merrell, Jane T. Merritt, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Elizabeth A. Perkins, Claudio Saunt, and Fredrika J. Teute.