In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now. Dixie be Damned engages seven similarly "hidden" insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region's long arc of revolt, from early maroon and slave rebellions to labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more. In this adventurous retelling, the reader encounters a South where the exploited refuse to quietly suffer their fate, a region in which the accepted narratives of citizenship, rights, and democracy fail to fully explain the rage of the dispossessed. Combining years of intensive research with theoretical insights drawn from lived experience in contemporary social movements, Dixie be Damned further opens the door to a new kind of critical Southern history. - Book cover