Like A Family was written to illustrate the emergence of the wage labor movement in the South through the textile industry and how these cotton mills evolved into a major economic way of life for Southerners. The origins of this book began during the 1970's by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. The authors wanted to capture the industrialization of the New South through orations by men and women whose past lay in an agrarian lifestyle to the transformation of these people to factory workers. L

Primary sources are used that include oral accounts, pictorials, and written documents to support the ideas of the authors. The desire to present this book from everyday speech guided the treatment of sources by the authors. The interviews were edited with great care and were the words of the original people interviewed. Quotations from written sources were kept in their original form. The style of writing was both simple and technical with logical ideas conveyed in both elementary and scholarly ways.

Although the book is concise, I believe the authors could have been more methodical in their approach to the material. The book is written chronologically but the authors made sporadic points, which fell outside the consistency of the original idea. Overall, I feel the authors achieved their goal by engaging the audience in a factual, colorful,

Some common words found in the essay are:
North Carolina, York City, Christopher Daly, cotton mill, cotton mill world, mill world, cotton mills, north carolina, major economic, wage labor,
Approximate Word count = 576
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)