"A fresh look at the South through the lens of larger global forces. Frederickson links the global and local in new ways that point to a model for future work in the field."--Richard Greenwald, Drew University

"Frederickson has delivered compelling essays that brim with fascinating details and cogent observations about the past, present, and future of working people in the South. Connecting the New South, the Nuevo South, and the Global South seamlessly, she writes southern workers onto a world stage."--Cindy Hahamovitch, College of William and Mary

In the United States, cheap products made by cheap labor are in especially high demand, purchased by men and women who have watched their own wages decline and jobs disappear. Looking South examines the effects of race, class, and gender in the development of the low-wage, anti-union, and state-supported industries that marked the creation of the New South and now the Global South.

Workers in the contemporary Global South--those nations of Central and Latin America, most of Asia, and Africa--live and work within a model of industrial development that materialized in the red brick mills of the New South. As early as the 1950s, this labor model became the prototype used by U.S. companies as they expanded globally. This development has had increasingly powerful effects on workers and consumers at home and around the world.

Mary E. Frederickson highlights the major economic and cultural changes brought about by deindustrialization and immigration. She also outlines the events, movements, and personalities involved in the race-, class-, and gender-based resistance to industry’s relentless search for cheap labor.

Mary E. Frederickson, professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is coeditor of Sisterhood and Solidarity.

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"Mary E. Frederickson has long been one of the keenest and most thoughtful observers of the modern South." "Mary Frederickson’s new collection of essays deserves a wide audience. She helps us see more clearly on the contested nature of local power while drawing connections between the South and the global economy. This is exactly the right frame for viewing the region, not just now, but in the past as well.”"
--The Journal of Southern History

"Spanning more than a century of southern history, Mary Frederickson's essays are each gems of dogged research often beyond the usual suspects and familiar narratives. Readers will find their assumptions about the South and its distinctive regional history constantly complicated and challenged in many engaging and fruitful ways."
--The North Carolina Historical Review

"Rich and provocative essays…Frederickson puts labor front and center, reminding us that the social division of labor is the cornerstone of every political economy, whether community based, regional, national, or transnational…all the essays highlight relevant secondary sources as well as Frederickson’s own impressive forays into primary sources, including archival collection, printed material, and oral interviews."
--Labor