"Covering the Holt dynasty from the founding of the Alamance Factory in 1837 to the strike of 1900 that eventually shut down most of the mills the family had built, Alamance provides an excellent social history of southern industrial development. Bess Beatty intersperses chapters on the rise of the Holts with profiles on their workers to provide a thorough explanation of how industrialization affected sectional, familial, racial, and gender relations across class lines.

Focusing on class formation and conflict, she rejects the long-held view that southern owners were paternalistic and that workers were docile and deferential, instead arguing that owners and workers had a contentious class-driven relationship, with both sides.".

"Beatty's relatively narrow subject and geographic approach, combined with an unusually comprehensive timespan, enable her to effectively analyze social and industrial change - particularly the development of the textile industry in the southern Piedmont - through six decades."--BOOK JACKET.