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About Me

Link to bio; https://www.converse.edu/people/melissa-walker/

Recent Publications

Books:
Women of the South: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1877-1920, co-edited with Giselle Roberts, University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming 2017. Recovering the Piedmont Past: Moments in Nineteenth Century Upcountry South Carolina History, edited with Timothy Paul Grady, University of South Carolina Press, 2013. The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens: The American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry, Routledge, 2012. Editor, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 16: Agriculture, University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History, University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Named CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2007. Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Rebecca Sharpless, University of Missouri Press, 2006. Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories, University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective, co-edited with Joe P. Dunn and Jeanette R. Dunn, University of Missouri Press, 2003. All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book in Southern history authored by a woman from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Refereed and Invited Articles:
“Inside the Farmhouse: Ruth Allen and Margaret Jarman Hagood Confront Rural Realities,”
invited chapter co-authored with Rebecca Sharpless in XXXXXXXX, co-edited by Karen Cox and Sarah Gardener, forthcoming 2017.
“A Slot Machine Approach to Dispensing Knowledge: New Agrarians and the Land Grant
Legacy,” invited chapter in Quintessentially American: Land-Grant Universities and the Making and Reshaping of the Modern World, 1920-2015, edited by Alan Marcus,
University of Alabama Press, forthcoming fall 2015.
“’To do justice to it either in observing or recording’: The Life and Work of Margaret Jarman
Hagood,” invited chapter in North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, co-edited by Michele K. Gillespie and Sally McMillen, University of Georgia Press, 2015.
“Mineral Water, Dancing, and Amusements: The Development of Tourism in the Nineteenth
Century Upstate,” in Recovering the Piedmont Past, 2013.
“Contemporary Agrarianism: A Reality Check,” Agricultural History, winter 2012. “
Complicating the Picture: Oral History and the Study of the Rural South,” co-authored with Lu Ann Jones, Adrienne Petty, Mark Schultz, and Rebecca Sharpless, Agricultural History, fall 2010.
Introduction, with Tom Moore Craig, to People of the Land: A Collection of Civil War Letters, edited by Tom Moore Craig, University of South Carolina Press, 2009
“Polly Hill Woodham and the Transformation of the Rural South,” invited article in South
Carolina Women, edited by Marjorie Spruill, Joan Marie Johnson, and Valinda
Littlefield, University of South Carolina Press, 2012.
“The Hearth and Map: The Life and Work of Wilma Dykeman,” invited chapter in Tennessee Women, edited by Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Bond University of Georgia
Press, 2009.
“From Cotton Fields to Classrooms: South Carolina Women Tell the Story of a Changing
Countryside,” 2005 Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association.
“One Foot in Each World,” invited chapter in Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American
Essays from Farm and Classroom, edited by Zachary M. Jack, University of South
Carolina Press, 2005.
“Shifting Boundaries: Race Relations in the Rural Jim Crow South,” invited chapter in Rural African Americans, edited by R. Douglas Hurt, University of Missouri Press, 2003.
“Rural Southern Women, the Family Economy, and Economic Change,” in Revolution in the
Land: Southern Agriculture in the Twentieth Century, proceedings of the Mississippi
State University History Forum, May 2003.
“Culling Out the Men From the Boys: Concepts of Success in the Recollections of a Southern Farmer,” Oral History Review, Summer 2000.
“Narrative Themes in the Oral Histories of Farming Folk,” Agricultural History,
Spring 2000.
“Farm Wives and Commercial Farming: The Case of Loudon County, Tennessee,”
Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Summer 1998.
“African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program,”
Agricultural History, Spring 1998.
“Making Do and Doing Without: East Tennessee Farm Women Cope With Economic Crisis:
1920-1941,” Journal of East Tennessee History, Spring 1997.
“Home Extension Work Among African Americans in East Tennessee, 1920-1939,” Agricultu

Media Coverage

MEDIA APPEARANCES South Carolina ETV documentary, “Cheating the Stillness: The Life of Julia Mood Peterkin,” Interviewed on camera about women’s education in the late nineteenth century, March 2010. “The American Revolution in the Southern Back

Social Media

@heydaycoaching

Country Focus

Usa

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

American Revolution, Capitalism, Economic History, Family, Gender, Higher Ed, Medicine, Museums, Race, Sexuality, Sexual Violence, Slavery, Religion, Women