Faculty and Staff

Education

• Ph.D. from University of Tennessee (1998)

Research Interests

Modern South, agricultural, environmental and economic history

Recent Research Activities

Connie L. Lester is the author of Up From the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers' Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870-1915 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006) and several articles and essays including: "Lucille Thornburgh: I had to be right pushy'" in Tennessee Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, ed. Beverly Bond and Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). "Populist Scholarship as a Survey of American Political and Social Change," essay for "Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism" with Robert C. McMath, Jr., Peter H. Argersinger, Connie L. Lester, Michael F. Magliari, and Walter Nugent Agricultural History Volume 82, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 10-16."Balancing Agriculture with Industry: Capital, Labor and the Public Good in Mississippi's Home-Grown New Deal," Journal of Mississippi History. Volume 70, no. 3 (fall, 2008). She has been editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly since 2005. She is editing the Civil War diaries of Lucy Virginia French and is working on a book-length manuscript on Mississippi economic development in the twentieth century.

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Selected Publications

Books

• Up from the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers' Alliance, Populism, And Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870-1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

Articles/Essays

• "Balancing Agriculture with Industry: Capital, Labor, and the Public Good in Mississippi's Home-Grown New Deal," Journal of Mississippi History, Volume 70 (Fall 2008), 235-263.
• "Populist Scholarship as a Survey of American Political and Social Change," essay for "Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism" with Robert C. McMath, Jr., Peter H. Argersinger, Connie L. Lester, Michael F. Magliari, and Walter Nugent. Agricultural History Volume 82, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 10-16.
• "Let Us Be Up and Doing: Women in the Tennessee Movement for Agrarian Reform, 1870-1892." Tennessee Historical Quarterly 54, Summer 1995, 80-97.

Book Sections/Chapters

• Planting the Seeds of Racial Equality: Floridas Independent Black Farmers and the Modern Civil Rights Era, in Old South, New South, or Down South: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Irvin D.S. Winsboro, editor (Charleston: University of West Virginia Press, 2009), 113-133.
• "Lucille Thornburgh: I had to be right pushy'" in Tennessee Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, ed. Beverly Bond and Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Courses

• Spring 2021
• Fall 2020
• Summer 2020