Introduction / Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt
Section 1. The early republic and the Old South
Origins of the Charleston Mechanic Society: white labor activism and slave competition in Charleston, South Carolina in the early national era / Thomas Brown
"Vagrant negroes": the policing of labor and mobility in the upper south in the early republic / Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan
Origins of the prison industrial complex: inmate labor in the deep south, 1817-1865 / Brett J. Derbes
To carry that burden: the Texas Cart War and the place of Mexican laborers in the southern landscape, 1854-1857 / Maria Angela Diaz
Section 2. Reconstruction and the gilded age
The promise of free labor: Carl Schurz and Republican conceptions of labor within the reconstruction south / Stuart MacKay
Haskins v. Royster and the liberty to be unfree: reconstructing North Carolina labor law / Linda A. Tvrdy
Unfaithful followers: rethinking southern non-unionism in the late nineteenth century / Dana M. Caldemeyer
Southern labor and the lure of populism: workers and power in North Carolina / Deborah Beckel
The Appalachian "gunmen of capitalism" / T.R.C. Hutton
Section 3. The twentieth century and civil rights
Rooted: black railroad shopmen, the 1922 strike, and southern civil rights struggles / Theresa A. Case
African American and Latino workers in the age of industrial agriculture / Erin L. Conlin
The Freedom Labor Union: economic justice and the civil rights movement in Mississippi / Michael Sistrom
"A threshold moment": public sector organizing and civil rights unionism in the postwar south / Joseph E. Hower
Section 4. The modern south
Pens, planes, and politics: how race and labor practices shaped postwar Atlanta / Joseph M. Thompson
Beyond boosterism: Fort Smith and the creation of a conservative economic culture / Adam Carson
From "the chosen" to the precariat: southern workers in foreign-owned factories since the 1980s / David M. Anderson & Andrew C. McKevitt
Section 5. Concluding thoughts
The historiographies of the labor and civil rights movements: at the intersection of parallel lines / Alan Draper
So goes the nation: southern antecedents and the future of work / Bethany Moreton
Why labor history still matters / Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt.