Building the New South: The Social and Economic Transformation of the Piedmont after the Civil War

FAIN: BI-50107-09

Elon University (Elon, NC 27244-9423)
James S. Bissett (Project Director: March 2009 to June 2011)

Two one-week workshops for fifty community college faculty members on industrial landmarks in western North Carolina.

Community college professors will work with scholars in the history of the American South to study and discuss the dramatic economic and social transformation of the South in the decades after the Civil War. The focus of the workshop will be the piedmont area, the portion of the South where the most dramatic change--industrialization--took place. Burlington, North Carolina, the site of the workshop, became one of the South's major textile centers, a distinction it held until the precipitous decline of the textile industry in recent years. Workshop participants will study the social and economic transformation of the Piedmont by reading texts and primary source documents--many of them tied to the Burlington area--and by visiting area historic sites and museums and will work under the tutelage of some of the most prominent historians in this field.