In 1948 and 1949, three doctoral students in sociology and anthropology conducted ethnographic fieldwork in York, SC (called Kent), a mill town. Through interviews, white town elites, black mill workers, and white mill workers revealed their lives to the scholars. What resulted were three remarkable studies on southern town life in the immediate post World War II period. Although segregation had begun to weaken in the face of postwar socioecomic change, it still held whites and blacks in its grip. The “thick description” of community life provided by the ethnographic interviews, as well as the authors’ analysis of life in York, makes these three books invaluable still to scholars of the history and sociology of the South.