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 Ratings
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| Reviewed: |
Jan 20, 2007 by History Editorial Board |
| Overview: |
This web site is about the making and unmaking of the mill village system for textile manufacturing in the Piedmont region of the U.S. south between 1880 and 1934. The centerpiece of this web site is a collection of seventy audio excerpts from nine oral history interviews of women and men who worked in the textile mills in North Carolina during the early 20th century. The interviews are among those that were the primary source of evidence for the book "Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World." The web site also contains some images, three introductory short essays, and a few suggestions for class activities. |
| Learning Goals: |
To get students to use oral history materials in the classroom.
To enable students to understand the working class life in the South during the first half of the 20th century.
To describe the relationship between management and workers in the pre-World War II South. |
| Target Student Population: |
High school and College. |
| Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills: |
User will need computer with media player to hear interviews. |
| Type of Material: |
A history with ssays, photos,and oral history interviews with mill and farm workers. |
| Recommended Uses: |
Classes in U.S. history, southern history, labor history, and rural history. |
| Technical Requirements: |
The ability to receive MP3 or Real Media audio. |
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| Strengths: |
The interviews cover a wide range of topics and provide rich details about life in the textile mills. The content portion of the web site is grouped into three broad sections: (1)Life on the Land, (2) Mill Village and Factory, and (3) Work and Protest. This sectioning reflects the narrative structure of the original book, which starts with the difficulties of life for small farmers that led many to leave their farms for mill towns and which ends with the General Strike of 1934. Each section is divided into four subsections: an introduction, images, interviews, and teaching. The introductory essays are short but provide enough information to allow students to make sense of the interviews. Within each section, the authors have chosen excerpts from interviews that cover a wide variety of topics including work on the farm, decisions to move from the farm to the mill town,friendships within the mill village, work in the mill, work injuries, the stretch-out, union organizing, and strike violence. The digitalized interviews are an excellent resource. Restricting the interviews to just the mill workers is a plus because it keeps the learning object to a more manageable scale. |
| Concerns: |
The site features excerpts from the interviews of only nine workers. On one hand, the small number of interviews might make it easier for students to work with the material. On the other hand, this seems like a small sample from which to ask students to draw general conclusions. The authors should include some of the maps from the book as well as more images. One link was broken. |
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Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool |
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| Strengths: |
While the site has the potential for classroom use, it is not constructed as a learning object. Read concerns section. |
| Concerns: |
The learning activities need more development. In what classroom context might teachers use each activity? What are the objectives of each activity? For example, what should students learn by comparing the lives of mill workers in the 20th century South to the lives of working women in Lowell? Some links for the learning activities, as well as some of the links on the Links page, are not working. The authors dont suggest any ways to incorporate the images into any of the learning activities. |
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Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty |
| Rating: |
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| Strengths: |
The web site is well designed. The authors provide a clear introduction to the site, and they have made it easy to navigate from section to section and within each section. The web site authors have broken the interviews apart into short segments none are longer than nine minutes and most are much shorter that focus on particular topics. This makes it easier for students to work with the interviews. The authors also provide a very brief description of the topic of each excerpt. There is no search engine, but because there are few excerpts and they are divided into the three sections, students can easily find what they need by browsing through the interview descriptions. Interviews are available in either MP3 format or Real Media format. The download times are very quick. |
| Concerns: |
None. |
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| Other Issues and Comments: |
Model learning object on the Southern farmer turned millhand. |
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