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How the 'Hillbilly Highway' transformed labor politics and remade the white working class

View from an overpass near North Avenue looking north in Chicago, Ill., Dec. 1949. Volume of traffic is carried by eight lanes of pavement. (AP)
View from an overpass near North Avenue looking north in Chicago, Ill., Dec. 1949. Volume of traffic is carried by eight lanes of pavement. (AP)

Here & Now‘s Jane Clayson speaks with Max Fraser about his new book, “Hillbilly Highway.” It traces the largely untold story of the 20th-century migration of white Southerners to the industrial Midwest.

Book excerpt: ‘Hillbilly Highway’

By Max Fraser

Excerpted from HILLBILLY HIGHWAY: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class by Max Fraser. Copyright © 2023 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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