Melvyn Stokes Senior Lecturer in American History,University College London Rick Halpern Lecturer in American History, University College London

'Issues of immense importance pervade every chapter...It seems likely that this volume will be a standby for students and teachers for years to come. It is conclusive, if too often distressing, proof that the history of the South is not yet an exhausted topic...The great merits of Race and Class in the American South since 1890 owe everything to old-fashioned scholarship and intellectual honesty.'TLS'... based on wide reading and a sophisticated understanding of the issues involved.'Vernon J. Williams, Professor of History, Purdue University, USA'Rick Halpern's insightful historiographical essay in Race and Class is a helpful introduction to the current state of scholarly opinion on this topic. A practitioner of the so-called new labour history, Halpern proves a reliable and objective guide to the ways in which recent works by Michael Honey, Joe Trotter and Ronald Lewis have advanced our understanding of 1930s labour radicalism beyond the position staked out by exponents of the

• Introduction, M. Stokes and R. Halpern. Part 1 Race, class and industrialization: "through the rugged gates of the penitentiary" - convict labour and Southern coal, A. Lichtenstein; organized labour, black workers and the 20th-century South - the emerging revision, R. Halpern. Part 2 The rural South: the legal basis of agrarian capitalism - the South since 1933, P. Daniel; the legal system and sharecropping - an opposing view, M. Crawford; the disappearance of sharecropping - a South African comparison, W. Beinart. Part 3 Race, class and culture: "we were no class at all" - Southern women as social reformers, V.G. Lerda; black social science and black politics in the understanding of the South - Du Bois, the Atlanta University Studies and "The Crisis", 1897-1920, D. Turley; the role of intellectual history in the histories of the civil rights movement, R. King; racial politics, culture and the Cole incident of 1956, B. Ward.