Book Filter: Does anyone know what this history book is?
June 3, 2017 2:13 PM Subscribe
It was a history of the Deep South. It was probably an economic and legal history. It was probably for the time period after the Civil War and up to about WW2 or a little past WW2.
I recall the introductory chapter going on about how to define the Deep South. Some definitions included Florida, others did not. Ditto for Texas and some of the states on the northern border of the Deep South.
It had a really detailed resource list. I recall the author talking about going to some elderly guy like a professor and getting original copies of some things and how fortunate he was to get them.
It talked about the fact that the federal minimum wage in the U.S. was really passed as an antiracism measure. It did not occur to me at the time that I read it that the book had to be so very well sourced because this apparently runs counter to what most people believe. If you google it, you come up with articles that claim the opposite and say minimum wage was a racist measure.
The Deep South had a practice of paying black people half as much as whites. When minimum wage first passed, it caused an exodus of blacks from the South due to widespread unemployment. Whites in the South were unwilling to "pay a black man a white man's wage" and many blacks were just fired. It wasn't until WW2 when major labor shortages occurred that they were able to successfully enforce this.
The South generally paid less than other parts of the nation, so they sold this idea as an economic and an anti-regionalism policy. They were careful to NOT position it as anti-racist because racism was so rampant that this would have been the death knell of the policy.
I am hoping someone can name this book. I have no idea what the name was or who the author was.
Thanks.
I recall the introductory chapter going on about how to define the Deep South. Some definitions included Florida, others did not. Ditto for Texas and some of the states on the northern border of the Deep South.
It had a really detailed resource list. I recall the author talking about going to some elderly guy like a professor and getting original copies of some things and how fortunate he was to get them.
It talked about the fact that the federal minimum wage in the U.S. was really passed as an antiracism measure. It did not occur to me at the time that I read it that the book had to be so very well sourced because this apparently runs counter to what most people believe. If you google it, you come up with articles that claim the opposite and say minimum wage was a racist measure.
The Deep South had a practice of paying black people half as much as whites. When minimum wage first passed, it caused an exodus of blacks from the South due to widespread unemployment. Whites in the South were unwilling to "pay a black man a white man's wage" and many blacks were just fired. It wasn't until WW2 when major labor shortages occurred that they were able to successfully enforce this.
The South generally paid less than other parts of the nation, so they sold this idea as an economic and an anti-regionalism policy. They were careful to NOT position it as anti-racist because racism was so rampant that this would have been the death knell of the policy.
I am hoping someone can name this book. I have no idea what the name was or who the author was.
Thanks.
Response by poster: I think I read it in Kansas. I lived in Kansas when my now 30 year old son was between 5 and 8 years old. So, it would probably be at least 22 years old (assuming my flaky memory is right about when I read this).
I think it had a white cover with black text and maybe some kind of black line drawing. I probably bought it off the clearance rack for as little as a dollar. That may or may not suggest it was already old when I bought it. I bought a lot of geeky stuff off the clearance rack back it was too geeky for mainstream bookstores to sell in quantity. I would stock up on math books and crap like that for a dollar.
I don't think this included oral histories, though I will look up that author name. I think the title could have specified something like antebellum or reconstruction or post reconstruction to indicate the time frame it was talking about from the beginning. I am pretty sure it stopped just after WW2.
posted by Michele in California at 3:09 PM on June 4, 2017
I think it had a white cover with black text and maybe some kind of black line drawing. I probably bought it off the clearance rack for as little as a dollar. That may or may not suggest it was already old when I bought it. I bought a lot of geeky stuff off the clearance rack back it was too geeky for mainstream bookstores to sell in quantity. I would stock up on math books and crap like that for a dollar.
I don't think this included oral histories, though I will look up that author name. I think the title could have specified something like antebellum or reconstruction or post reconstruction to indicate the time frame it was talking about from the beginning. I am pretty sure it stopped just after WW2.
posted by Michele in California at 3:09 PM on June 4, 2017
Response by poster: Oh, sorry, this was not an academic text. I am just a geek.
posted by Michele in California at 3:12 PM on June 4, 2017
posted by Michele in California at 3:12 PM on June 4, 2017
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posted by Ginesthoi at 7:47 PM on June 3, 2017