Additional information
by Dan Huntley (Introduction by), John Kenneth Morland (Commentaries by), John Shelton Reed (Preface by)
The Kent Trilogy, consisting of Blackways of Kent (1955), Millways of Kent (1958), and the previously unpublished Townways of Kent, forms a remarkable southern ethnography that maps the social stratification of the Piedmont mill town of York, South Carolina, in the late 1940s, after the effects of the Great Depression and preceding the coming civil rights era. In 1946 the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science commissioned a series of southern community studies under the direction of anthropologist John Gillin from which these volumes resulted. This Southern Classics edition is expanded with a new preface by John Shelton Reed on the origins and impact of the Kent Trilogy and a new introduction by Dan Huntley assessing the lasting importance of Morland's telling case study. The volume is further supplemented with a 1995 interview with Morland and his wife detailing their experiences with the "Kent" research and including photographs from the period.
Author Biography
John Shelton Reed is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science and cofounder of the Center for the Study of the American South.
