In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

An up-to-date and indispensable guide for film history buffs of all kind, this book surveys more than 500 major films based on true stories and historical subject matter. When a film is described as "based on a true story" or "inspired by true events," exactly how "true" is it? Which "factual" elements of the story were distorted for dramatic purposes, and what was added or omitted? Inspired by True Events: An Illustrated Guide to More Than 500 History-Based Films, Second Edition concisely surveys a wide range of major films, docudramas, biopics, and documentaries based on real events, addressing subject areas including military history and war, political figures, sports, and art. This book provides an up-to-date and indispensable guide for all film history buffs, students and scholars of history, and fans of the cinema.

Most film buffs know that Citizen Kane was based on the life of publisher William Randolph Hearst. But few are aware that key characters in films like Double Indemnity, Cool Hand Luke, Jaws, Rain Man, A Few Good Men and Zero Dark Thirty were inspired by actual persons. This survey of a clef characters covers a selection of fictionalized personalities, beginning with the Silent Era. The landmark lawsuit surrounding Rasputin and the Empress (1932) introduced disclaimers in film credits, assuring audiences that characters were not based on real people--even when they were. Entries cover screen incarnations of Wyatt Earp, Al Capone, Bing Crosby, Amelia Earhart, Buster Keaton, Howard Hughes, Janis Joplin and Richard Nixon, along with the inspirations behind perennial favorites like Charlie Chan and Indiana Jones.

Toward the end of 1931, the black dust was settling in the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal fields after one of the most bitterly fought labor struggles in our nation's history. The miners were beaten, their rank-and-file organization crushed. The epithet "Bloody Harlan" survived the day and remained a symbol for that battle and those that periodically erupted for the next half century. But the proper legacy of the Harlan wars, as the veteran Hobart Grills tells us, is not the chaotic violence but the spirit of steady resistance that smolders until the changing times fan the sparks into a new flame. During the long Depression era, the winds of change blew all across the South — from the coal fields of Appalachia to the tenant farms of Arkansas, from the cotton mills of Gastonia to the automobile factories of Atlanta. It was a period rich in the South's peculiar blend of semi-organized rebellion, individual courage, and rank-and-file militancy; but its lessons were omitted from the history books. To rectify that insult, Southern Exposure published a special book-length issue on the Depression, based largely on the oral testimonies of those who were the sparks for that era's struggles. Entitled "No More Moanin'," the collection — now near the end of its second printing — has been a popular source book in union halls, university classrooms, and informal study groups.

A collection of original essays based on oral history and archival research, this volume illuminates diverse aspects of southern workers' experience in the modern era. Included here are essays on agricultural workers, teachers, and fire fighters, as well as pieces on air transport, paper manufacturing, and aircraft production. Other topics include workers' organizations that fall outside the traditional labor movement and the role of cotton textile workers in the recent history of southern labor relations. Themes involving race, the varieties of union representation, and labor's impact on southern politics are especially prominent throughout this collection.