In this volume, social history and ethnography have been inseparable. Recounted here are three decades of the experiences of ordinary people since the double-dip recession of the early 1980s. In the Piedmont Carolinas, where they lived, the textile mills, which had been their primary means of employment, disappeared. They scattered to find work and to adapt their lives to new locations, forms of work, schools, and housing situations. The political and economic dynamics of the next thirty years reached deep into their everyday habits and beliefs, particularly those affecting relationships between parents and children. Place and time keenly shaped how individuals aligned themselves in their families and communities and shifted their self-identities.

Though definitions of the sub-disciplines of social history and ethnography have never been firmly established, most scholars would agree that those who set out to work within either tradition have much in common, particularly the obligation to make as clear as possible their methods of data collection and interpretation. Both genres have put language and other symbol systems at the center of new viewpoints and theoretical approaches. Both social historians and ethnographers have considered language especially in relation to their efforts to identify the degree to which ordinary people have been conscious of larger meanings of their daily experiences.