Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association

In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the south used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century.

On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in the burgeoning Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers' rights by tapping into the powers of existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. A Modern Promised Land 2. Jerusalem 3. Saviors of Agriculture 4. No More Mourning 5. Bear Our Burdens Together 6. On Jordan's Stormy Banks Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index | Awarded the Missouri History Book Award, presented by the State Historical Society of Missouri, 2011. Received the Working Class Studies Association's C.L.R. James Award, 2011. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. — the State Historical Society of Missouri
Awarded the Missouri History Book Working Class Studies Association's Award, presented by the State Historical Society of Missouri, 2011. Received the C.L.R. James Award, 2011. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. — Working Class Studies Association
Awarded the Missouri History Book Working Class Studies Association's Award, presented by the State Historical Society of Missouri, 2011. Received the C.L.R. James Award, 2011. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. — Labor and Working-Class History Association
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Jarod Roll teaches American history at the University of Sussex, England, where he is founder and director of the Marcus Cunliffe Center for the Study of the American South.