Book Talk: Max Fraser's "Hillbilly Highway"

"Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class" presents the largely untold story of the great migration of white southerners to the industrial Midwest and its profound and enduring political and social consequences. Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway, Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture-from the modern industrial labor movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives.