Press Release - For Immediate Release

Media Contact: Hayley Richards

(334) 353-1881 or hayley.richards@archives.alabama.gov

Montgomery, AL (11/8/2023) – The Alabama Department of Archives & History (ADAH) will continue its 2023 Food For Thought lunchtime lecture series on Thursday, November 16 at 12 p.m. CT. Dr. Christopher Rein will present Mobilizing the South: The 31st Infantry Division, Race, and World War II. The program will be held in the ADAH’s Joseph M. Farley Alabama Power Auditorium in Montgomery. It will also be livestreamed on the ADAH’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. Admission is FREE.

Drawn from his recent book on the topic, Rein’s presentation will focus on the 31st Infantry Division, a major Deep South infantry division initially formed from National Guard units in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Rein examines the service of the 31st from 1917 to 1967 and recounts the social, racial, and political dramas that attended the division’s deployment, both at home and abroad. Using official records and details drawn from correspondence and oral histories, Rein will describe how individual soldiers framed their exposure to a larger world, and how service alongside African American, New Guinean, and Filipino units both reinforced and modified views on race and postwar American society. 

Dr. Chris Rein is the managing editor at Air University Press at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. He earned his MA in History from Louisiana State University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Kansas in 2011. He is the author of four books, including Alabamians in Blue: Freedmen, Unionists, and the Civil War in the Cotton State (LSU, 2019) and Mobilizing the South: The Thirty-First Infantry Division, Race, and World War II (Alabama, 2022). He has served as a Navy ROTC instructor at Southern University in Baton Rouge, an associate professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and as an associate professor at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Airforce Base.

For additional information, contact Alex Colvin at archives.alabama.gov or (334) 353-4689. A complete schedule of our 2023 lunchtime lecture series is available at archives.alabama.gov. Food for Thought 2023 is sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Alliance and the Friends of the Alabama Archives. 

The Alabama Department of Archives and History is the state’s government-records repository, a special-collections library and research facility, and home to the Museum of Alabama, the state history museum. It is located in downtown Montgomery, directly across Washington Avenue from the State Capitol. The Museum of Alabama is open Monday through Saturday from 8:30 to 4:30. The EBSCO Research Room is open Tuesday through Saturday from 8:30 to 4:30. To learn more, visit www.archives.alabama.gov or call (334) 242-4364.

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