S01E09 | Poor Whites Then and Now: An Interview with Keri Leigh Merritt

C19: America in the 19th Century

Why discuss poor whites when thinking about race and class in nineteenth-century America and beyond? In this dialogue between literary studies and history Matthew Teutsch (Auburn University) and Keri Leigh Merritt (Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge UP, 2017)) talk about how wealthy white landowners manipulated the antiblackness of poor whites in the antebellum period, the image of poor whites in the cultural imagination, and the legacies of this racially divisive class warfare today. They discuss interdisciplinarity in the field, the effective use of archives in pedagogy, and academics on social media. Episode produced by Matthew Teutsch.