Historiographical Essay

On this page is an historiographical essay on the topic of Enka and Western North Carolina labor history. According to Steven Knowlton, librarian at Princeton, a historiography “summarizes changing ideas about and approaches to the topic.”¹ The historiography analyzes how an author contributes to the area of history their book or journal article covers. A historiographical essay reviews past sources on the topic and writes about the changing ideas, then refers to ways in which specific authors makes their argument. These essays start with one particular argument and then counterpoints it with other writers and their own arguments.

Scholarship on certain labor histories is fairly limited but there are many books on sources relating to women’s labor and southern labor history like Habits of Industry, Disorderly Women, and Like Night and Day. They all provide insight into working conditions and what it was like to live in mill villages, through oral histories, newspaper articles, and manuscripts. There is also scholarship on Asheville history that provides a good analysis of the timeline of the city’s growth.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall published a journal article titled, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the South” in September 1986. This article explored a section of southern labor history that has often been overlooked: women.² Hall adds to the limited scholarship about labor history but focused her argument specifically on women in the south and how life was different for them as compared to women in industry in the north.

Another scholarly source is Kathryn Anne Franks’ “Enka North Carolina: New Planning in an Early Twentieth Century Southern Mill Town”. She began her thesis with a section about the layout of the Enka Mill Village which provides a lot of detail.³ Franks usesd manuscript collections, lots of maps and figures, oral history interviews, and more to support her argument.

The Textile Industry in North Carolina: A History by Brent Glass and published in 1992, explored the history of the textile industry in North Carolina. Glass wrote about events all the way into the 1980s.⁴ This book centered around industrialization and added to a section of scholarship in North Carolina industrial history that was previously not published. Glass used multiple different sources to construct an argument about how the industry impacted the state.⁵ It used chronological order but settles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Victoria Byerly wrote Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls which was published in 1986 around the time when a lot of scholarship on labor history began to change. The entire book consisted of just oral histories. Byerly failed to add much at all of her voice to it and even the introduction was written by someone else.⁶ Allen Tullos’ Habits of Industry focused on the many parts that make up industry. It analyzed race, how family can be considered a metaphor, and the Piedmont in relation to other areas of North Carolina.⁷ Tullos provided a wide variety of sources such as countless interviews, manuscripts, records, and newspapers. Tullos also used many different secondary sources so he failed to provide his own voice to most of the scholarship. Habits of Industry took s a top down approach, starting with major topics all the way to specific people, such as Ethel Hilliard.⁸

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s book titled Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World reviewed the southern mill industry using primary sources like letters and articles.⁹ Hall explored life as a southern mill worker, even pointing out how the survival of a mill village depended on the people who lived in them, that many of those workers were used to farm life. Comparing Hall’s scholarly work to that of Cathy McHugh’s “Schooling in the Post-Bellum Southern Cotton Mill Villages,” McHugh’s work was more narrowly focused on a particular topic. Lots of McHugh’s sources tended to be manuscripts or other official documents. She included a couple mathematical operations and a table to support her argument and draw conclusions.¹⁰

A Fabric of Defeat by Bryant Simon, published in 1998, was divided into different sections all pertaining to textile labor and mill villages. His storytelling style and addition of photos and maps made the scholarship easier to understand.¹¹ Toward the end, he began to focus more on race and more individual groups of people that were involved in labor history. 

Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town by Daniel Clark, told the stories and the reasons behind unionizing in the southern textile mills. He used official documents as an anchor for his argument, and essentially rejected the use of oral histories in his introduction, stating the lack of verified information.¹² Each part of the book was told within the context of certain years and periods of time. Clark drew conclusions as the overall argument is to find out what unionizing meant the workers that participated.

Christopher Wilhelm’s Master’s Thesis, published in 2004, added to another section of textile mill history. Wilhelm’s argument was about the issues that occurred between southerners who were used to farm life and those that grew up in the urbanized areas.¹³ He used a variety of sources to back his arguments up, anything from archives, to records, to lots of secondary sources. Many sources focused on cotton mill villages specifically, which contributes to his arguments as they relate to southern cotton mill villages.

Mira Wilkins’ journal article titled, “Dutch Multinational Enterprises in the United States: A Historical Summary” was published in 2005. Wilkins used chronological order to organize each part of the scholarship. She divided each section of the article into time periods, starting with the oldest instances to the newest operations. This helped place everything in a way that is easy to understand, but it was still more economically focused than historically based. The article was a study of these Dutch companies but it places them in a historical context.¹⁴ Wilkins also used some of her other work to quote herself in the article but does reach beyond that, using reports and information about historic events to construct her argument.

Nan Chase’ Asheville: A History took a wide approach to the history of Asheville. It examined the evolution and modernization of Asheville throughout the twentieth century as it became the city many know today.¹⁵ Chase used many different sources, such as interviews, manuscript collections, and official records to document the changes made over time. Asheville: A History broke the history into multiple parts, first focusing on early settlement in the area, concluding with current events and the future of the city.¹⁶ This timeline provided a classic take on the city of Asheville’s past, present, and future. Chase’s argument observed the many changes that took place to transform Asheville into the place by exploring two main questions, why Asheville is the way it is seen today, and why the downtown area became quite successful in commercial real estate.¹⁷ Chase’s scholarship addressed the many parts that became modern Asheville.

Unraveled by Travis Byrd was published in more recent history as it is from 2015. Unraveled used a variety of source material for his scholarship which focuses on labor history. His topic was extremely narrow as it is written about one event: the Marion textile strikes in 1929.¹⁸ While there may be prior scholarship about this particular mill’s strikes, Byrd analyzed many parts of the events that year that, according to Byrd, ultimately shifted the south. 

1. Steven Knowlton, “About Historiography – Historiography – Research Guides at Princeton University,” Princeton University (The Trustees of Princeton University, August 27, 2020), https://libguides.princeton.edu/historiography#s-lg-box-1604641.
2. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South.” The Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (1986): 354–82.
3. Kathryn Anne Franks, “Enka North Carolina: New Planning in an Early Twentieth Century Southern Mill Town,” (Drexel University, 1990).
4. Brent Glass, The Textile Industry in North Carolina: A History (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
5. Glass, Textile Industry in North Carolina.
6. Victoria Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (New York: Cornell University, 1986).
7. Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
8. Tullos, Habits of Industry.
9. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (North Carolina: University of North Carolina, 2000).
10. Cathy McHugh, “Schooling in the Post-Bellum Southern Cotton Mill Villages,” Journal of Social History, 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 150.
11. Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
12. Daniel Clark, Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town (North Carolina; University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
13. Christopher Wilhelm, “Cultural Modernization in Southern Cotton Mills,” (Florida State University, 2004).
14. Mira Wilkins, “Dutch Multinational Enterprises in the United States: A Historical Summary,” The Business History Review 79, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 207.
15. Nan Chase, Asheville: A History: Contributions to Southern Appalachia Studies (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2007).
16. Chase, Asheville: A History.
17. Chase, Asheville: A History.
18. Travis Byrd, Unraveled (Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2015).