Dr. Scott Huffard to present at the Business History Conference in April
Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor of History Dr. Scott Huffard will attend the Business History Conference in Portland, OR March 31-April 3. The annual meeting is a chance for scholars to meet, share and discuss current research in the field.
Dr. Huffard’s paper, Anti-Monopolism and the New South: The Southern Railway and the 1898 White Supremacy Campaign, is a part of the panel Reinterpreting the Railroad in Politics. The paper examines efforts in North Carolina to invalidate the Southern Railway’s controversial 99-year lease of the state-owned North Carolina Railroad. As the paper argues, the Southern Railway benefited greatly from the infamous White Supremacy Campaign, in which Democrats violently seized power from a bi-racial coalition of Populists and Republicans. The defeat of this coalition meant the end of this political attack on the railroad's consolidation efforts, and the paper examines this overlooked side of a critical turning point in the political history of North Carolina and the South.
