Elna Green

 Allen Morris Professor of History & Department Chair

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The South is my home; my family has farmed cotton and tobacco in North Carolina for generations. But my generation has grown up in the urban—or even suburban—South. And it's this transition—from rural to urban, from farming to white-collar salaries, from insular homogeneity to metropolitan diversity—that drives my historical interests.

My focus on Southern history began as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University. Sparked by the inspired teaching of Southern historians like David Smiley, Richard Zuber, and Buck Yearns, I was drawn to this regional history. After completing a B.A. there in 1982, I also attended Wake Forest for my M.A. degree.

By then, my interest in Southern history was directed more clearly at the social history of the region, and my thesis examined Jewish philanthropy and social reform in the 20th century urban South. After working for several years as a reference archivist at the N.C. State Archives, I returned to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. At Tulane University, I trained under the Southern historians Sylvia Frey, Clarence Mohr, and Lawrence Powell, who helped me combine my interest in social history, especially women's history, with the history of the South. My dissertation, completed in 1992, analyzed the opposition to woman suffrage in the South. Published in 1997 by the University of North Carolina Press, under the title Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question, this revised version of my dissertation was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by Choice magazine.

My current research returns to the same time and place, but now focuses on poverty, poor relief, and social welfare as another angle from which to examine the transition from Old South to New South. My second monograph looked at the evolution of social welfare policy in the postbellum South, concentrating on the City Almshouse in Richmond, Virginia, an institution that provided public welfare for more than a century. This book, entitled This Business of Relief, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. This area of research has also resulted in my two edited anthologies, Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930 (University of Georgia Press, 1999), and The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South since 1930 (University of Georgia Press, 2003). I have also recently edited and published a collection of women’s letters from the Great Depression (University of South Carolina Press, 2007).

Researching the activism of Southern women in social welfare movements leads inevitably to religious motivations and organizations. In the progressive era, Lily Hammond—a leading figure in Methodist women’s missions and wife of a Methodist minister—came to her social welfare work through her religious commitments. She was one of the South’s most prominent women in the social gospel movement. I am editing two of her books—In Black and White, a sociological examination of race relations in the South originally published in 1914, and The Master-Word, a social gospel novel originally published in 1905.