American Rambler With Colin Woodward

A native of Georgia with humble roots and a love for music (including Johnny Cash), historian Keri Leigh Merrit has been busy. She is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017) and is the co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (2018). As she tells Colin, since she graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2014, her scholarly path has not been a traditional one. Throughout her life, Keri has been fascinated by questions of class and race in America, whether in discussion of the antebellum period, labor movements, or the southern prison system. Listen as she discusses how historians outside academia have to carve their own path and how very often, it involves doing things no one ever talked about in graduate school.