Arkansas's Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest

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AuthorMatthew Hild
PublisherUniversity of Missouri Press
PublishedSep 22 2018
Book FormatHardcover
ISBN-139780826221667
Dimensions9.1 X 6.2 X 0.9 inches
Weight 1.05 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesHistory > United States - State & Local - South (AL,AR,FL,GA,KY,LA,MS,NC,SC,TN,VA,WV)
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

This book is the first devoted entirely to an examination of working-class activism, broadly defined as that of farmers' organizations, labor unions, and (often biracial) political movements, in Arkansas during the Gilded Age. On one level, Hild argues for the significance of this activism in its own time: had the Arkansas Democratic Party not resorted to undemocratic, unscrupulous, and violent means of repression, the Arkansas Union Labor Party would have taken control of the state government in the election of 1888. He also argues that the significance of these movements lasted beyond their own time, their influence extending into the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and even today's Farmers' Union and the United Mine Workers of America.

The story of farmer and labor protest in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century offers lessons relevant to contemporary working-class Americans in what some observers have called the new Gilded Age.

Author Bio

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