Michele Gillespie, History

Michele Gillespie, the Kahle Associate Professor in History, collaborated with two professors from other schools to edit Southern Society and Its Transformations. The book challenges conventional perceptions of the antebellum South as an economically static region compared to the North.

Showing that the pre-Civil War South was much more complex than once thought, the essays in the book examine the economic lives and social realities of three overlooked by important groups of southerners: the working poor, non-slaveholding whites, and middling property holders such as small planters, professionals and entrepreneurs.