“The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family — particularly women — into the history of the cotton-mill world. . . . This eloquent reconstruction of the cotton mill world allows us to understand and to pay homage to those who fought and lost.” — Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review
“A work of scholarship that is both authoritative and most refreshingly undogmatic. . . . [The authors'] sympathies lie, as well they should, with the ordinary people whose labors made the mills run, but they have sufficient breadth of mind to understand that it takes all kinds to make a world, or a mill; as a result their story is populated not by heroes and villains, but by people.” — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“A superb history of work and workers' culture in southern Piedmont textile mill villages from the 1880s through the General Strike of 1934. In clear and compelling prose, the authors weave the threads of social, labor, family, business, and cultural history into a rich tapestry that reveals the human dimensions of regional economic transformations over half a century.” — American Historical Review
“Diligent research and fine writing has produced a landmark work that someday may be considered one of a handful of indispensable works on the New South.” — Journal of Southern History
“Like a Family is that rare compelling book, a delight for the academic and the public, with much to say to both.” — Journal of American History
“Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.” — CHOICE
“Like a Family is the most important study of southern cotton mill workers we have ever had.” — Reviews in American History
“A wonderfully textured narrative of the emergence of mill culture and how it was shaped by the forces of class, race, and region. . . . Like a Family is a powerful historical account of the rise of southern industry that uses gender both to relay men’s and women’s experiences and to explore the ways in which gender shaped their lives.” — Signs
“A warm, sensitive, richly textured analysis of the role of the family, and family culture, in the social changes that came in the wake of the industrialization of the Piedmont South. . . . A deeply moving book.” — International Labor and Working Class History
“Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.” — Studs Terkel
