Gabriel Winant is my new hero

I’d never heard of him before, but damn I liked his excellent article at Salon, a fascinating look at a Southern labor movement in the 1930s.

If that doesn’t sound all that fascinating, Winant does a good job of tying the failure of one union movement to larger issues (briefly, working-class Southern whites never unionized in the numbers that their Northern counterparts did; this left them out of the New Deal and the American left in general; they wound up being a reservoir for conservativism, and they’re the ones who gave us Reagan, Bush, and Bush, who fucked things up for everyone else).

AND, he provides a bibliography in the article. Not just links to websites, but an honest-to-goodness bibliography. Seriously, my eyes are turning into little hearts as I write this.