University of Georgia Press
Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South
Key Metrics
- Matthew Hild
- University of Georgia Press
- Paperback
- 9780820357089
- 9.02 X 5.98 X 0.77 inches
- 1.11 pounds
- Political Science > General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Historians have widely studied the late-nineteenth-century southern agrarian revolts led by such groups as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's (or Populist) Party. Much work has also been done on southern labor insurgencies of the same period, as kindled by the Knights of Labor and others. However, says Matthew Hild, historians have given only minimal consideration to the convergence of these movements.
Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion. Third-party movements fared progressively worse in Georgia and North Carolina, where little such coalition building had occurred, and in places like Tennessee and South Carolina, where almost no history of farmer-labor solidarity existed.
Hild warns against drawing any direct correlations between a strong Populist presence in a given place and a background of farmer-laborer insurgency. Yet such a background could only help Populists and was a necessary precondition for the initially farmer-oriented Populist Party to attract significant labor support. Other studies have found a lack of labor support to be a major reason for the failure of Populism, but Hild demonstrates that the Populists failed despite significant labor support in many parts of the South. Even strong farmer-labor coalitions could not carry the Populists to power in a region in which racism and violent and fraudulent elections were, tragically, central features of politics.
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
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