United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award

The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country.

Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers.

The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today.

Contributors: David M. Anderson Deborah Beckel Thomas Brown Dana M. Caldemeyer Adam Carson Theresa Case Erin L. Conlin Brett J. Derbes Maria Angela Diaz Alan Draper Matthew Hild Joseph E. Hower T.R.C. Hutton Stuart MacKay Andrew C. McKevitt Keri Leigh Merritt Bethany Moreton Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan Michael Sistrom Joseph M. Thompson Linda Tvrdy

Matthew Hild is a lecturer of history, specializing in southern history and U.S. labor history and agricultural history.  He earned his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech’s School of History and Sociology (then called the School of History, Technology, and Society) in 2003.  

He has taught intermittently at Georgia Tech since 2002, and he 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 Arkansas's Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest (University of Missouri Press, 2018).  

The latter won the Arkansas Historical Association's J.G. Ragsdale Book of the Year Award in 2019.  He is also the co-author (with fellow HSOC/HTS Ph.D. alumnus David L. Morton) of Georgia Tech (Campus History), published by Arcadia Publishing in 2018. He is the co-editor of and a contributing co-author (with Keri Leigh Merritt) to Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), which won the United Association for Labor Education's Award for the Best Book Related to Labor Education in 2019. 

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,  Modern America, Technology and Science in the Industrial Age, and Engineering in History.  

He also has taught a course in the history of Georgia many times at Georgia State University and the University of West Georgia.

Research Interests 

Agricultural History
History Of Georgia
U.S. Gilded Age History
U.S. Labor History
U.S. Southern History

Education 

Ph.D., History of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology