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Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)
Description: In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories--Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American...