Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World

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Photo, Doffers at the Bibb Mill No. 1, Lewis Hine, 1909, Like a Family.
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The companion to a book of the same name, this website offers selected oral history resources that examine lives in southern textile mill towns from the 1880s to the 1930s. The site is divided into three sections. "Life on the Land" discusses agricultural roots of the rural south, changes in farm labor after the Civil War, and economic factors that caused the transition to mill work in the late 19th century. "Mill Village and Factory" describes work in the mills and life in the company mill towns. "Work and Protest" discusses labor protests of the 1920s, formation of unions, and the textile strike of 1934.

The site contains 15 photographs and nearly 70 audio clips drawn from oral history interviews with descendants of millhands and others involved in the history of the Southern textile industry. There are valuable links to Southern history, oral history, and textile mill history websites. This site is ideal for studying rural southern life and labor history from Reconstruction through the 1930s.

Death in the Haymarket

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Author and professor Howard Zinn and professor James Green look at the Chicago Haymarket Riot of May 1886, in which a bomb killed several policeman at a Chicago labor rally, and the resulting trial and executions. They also discuss the history of the working class in the U.S. generally.

Zinn Education Project

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Created by the nonprofit organizations Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project works to bring resources exploring the “role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history” into the classroom. Inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular A People's History of the United States, the website provides teachers with materials for expanding on these historical narratives.

“Teaching Materials” contains the bulk of the site's content, including more than 100 teaching activities. These can be downloaded in PDF form following free registration, and include essays, articles, interviews, and full lesson plans on topics related to marginalized groups and labor history. Titles range from “Exploring Women's Rights: The 1908 Textile Strike in a 1st-grade Class” to “What the Tour Guide Didn’t Tell Me: Tourism, Colonialism, and Resistance in Hawai'i”.

“Teaching Materials” also contains more than 300 annotations on audio resources, fiction and nonfiction books, films, posters, commercial teaching guides, websites, and Spanish/bilingual resources. Annotations consist of 2–3 sentences describing the resource and its relevance to Zinn's focus and classroom use.

“Teaching Materials” can be browsed by date (either selected on a timeline, or chosen from 16 time periods, ranging from “Colonialism” to “20th Century” ) or searched by one of 29 themes, five reading levels, or by type of material (teaching activity .pdfs, audio, books: fiction, books: nonfiction, films, posters, teaching guides, websites, or Spanish/bilingual).

Useful to teachers wanting to expand on the traditional textbook narratives on marginalized groups and labor history.