Adrienne Petty

Professor Petty specializes in the social history of the United States, particularly the American South. The recipient of fellowships from the Schomburg Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the Ford Foundation, she has presented her work at meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, the Oral History Association, and the Agricultural History Society. She is currently completing a book about small landowning farmers and the transformation of southern agriculture since the Civil War.

• B.S., Northwestern University
• M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

• The U.S. South
• The Civil War and Reconstruction
  
• The U.S. 1914-1945
  
• Rebels and Reactionaries in the United States

Professor Petty is currently co-directing an oral history project, Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners in the South, along with Professor Mark Schultz of Lewis University. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project will yield hundreds of interviews that will become part of the Southern Oral History Collection at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill. Professors Petty and Schultz are at work on a book that draws upon the interviews and archival sources.

“Guess Who’s Coming to Interview,” Agricultural History 84, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 298-306.

 “I’ll Take My Farm: The GI Bill, Agriculture and Veterans in North Carolina,” Journal of Peasant Studies 35, no. 4 (October 2008): 742-769.