Description: Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region.
Brief description: CHARLES D. CHAMBERLAIN is the museum historian at the Louisiana State Museum and an adjunct professor of history at Tulane University.
Review Quotes:
Chamberlain's work opens a window on a chaotic, explosive South, a region in which wartime labor shortages reshuffled the population and placed unprecedented strains on the social and economic workings of Jim Crow segregation. The research is deep, the information fresh, and the writing clear. By focusing on one critical issue--labor power for wartime production--Chamberlain's work sheds new light on the complex dynamics of the southern (and national) economy of the 1940s.
--Douglas Flamming