Hillbilly Highway

""Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians"" ""Fraser, a scholar of labor history at the University of Miami, corrects several misconceptions. . . . Many more poor white migrants left debt-burdened farms, dead-end jobs and shuttered mills, and ventured north on the ‘hillbilly highway’ to settle in poor white ghettoes such as Chicago’s Uptown, Muncie’s Shedtown and Dayton’s East End. . . . Fraser also challenges writers who blame poor white southerners for the rise of the anti-union right in the North. . . . The very humane stories in [Hillbilly Highway] could be just the thing to break the ice.""---Arlie Russell Hochschild, New York Times ""In an engaging, richly detailed volume that stretches from patterns of land use to shifting class politics to the evolution of country music, Fraser traces the migration and its economic, social, cultural, and political consequences. He does not use the word ‘hillbilly’ in a derogatory sense but to illustrate the great variety of meanings neighbors and contemporaries attached to it. He sees the marginalization of hillbilly culture and politics as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the conservative turn in post-1960s politics.""---Jessica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs ""Hillbilly Highway has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of a forgotten and consequential phenomenon in midwestern history, a movement of people across regions that transformed key midwestern cities in what would become the most coveted of swing states and may well have influenced the political evolution of the country.""---Colin Woodard, Washington Monthly ""[Hillbilly Highway] presents interesting conflicts between the rural transplants desperate for work and the employers who eagerly sought to employ them in the booming industrial centers. . . . The book benefits greatly from an extensive bibliography and chapter notes including government studies, industry reports, union records, oral histories and cultural notes such as the importance of country music.""---Steven Davis, New York Labor History Association ""A thoughtful and empathetic exploration of worker mobility, the structural constraints that white Southerners worked to overcome, and the social ostracism that ultimately led to their political alienation. . . . This story has been told many times in many ways by many people but, in the case of Hillbilly Highway, it has never been told so well.""---Phillip J. Obermiller, Appalachian Journal ""Fraser explores a thousand nooks and crannies of life . . . showing how a mining town dies or how families can’t survive on a small farm anymore. He brings this to life with the words of those he has interviewed, tearing down Appalachian stereotypes as he goes. . . . The breadth and depth of Fraser’s scholarship is impressive.""---Michael E. Maloney, Journal of Urban Affairs ""Fraser not only provides a passionate account of the migration experience for individuals, but a brilliant analysis of the impact of that migration on working-class politics and culture in modern America. . . . Good social history connects the past and the present and the lived experience of its subject with that of its readers. Hillbilly Highway accomplishes both goals while offering timely insight into the political and cultural conflicts of contemporary America. . . . This is good history, beautifully written, well researched, and carefully argued. It should become a staple in regional, labor, and American political history.""---Ronald D. Eller, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society ""Essential."" * Choice *