Will McCollum conducts historical, ethnographic and archaeological research in Birmingham, Alabama, where he is examining late nineteenth-century mining camps and company towns that formed the basis for the growth and development of the industrial capital of the “New” South at the turn of the twentieth century. Most fundamentally, Will asks questions related to the transition from a racialized agrarian labor regime to a racialized industrial labor regime in Birmingham and what this might tell us about continuities across the supposed Antebellum-Postbellum cultural/political/economic rupture.