Local history

In this masterful work of family-focused sociology, Lois Benjamin considers the lives of Pennie and Roscoe James and their children, revealing how a large, close-knit African American family with humble origins in a small town of North Carolina is shaped by the contours of its religious and ethical value system.

The nineteenth-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished.

A moving narrative that offers a rare glimpse into the lives of African American men, women, and children on the cusp of freedom, First Fruits of Freedom chronicles one of the first collective migrations of blacks from the South to the North during and after the Civil War.

Since the moment William Ferriss parents gave their twelve-year-old son a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, Ferris passionately began to photograph his world.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army.

The foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina.

In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the Souths poor both white and black to listen, borrow, and learn from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle.

When UNC Press published Stella Gentry Sharpes Tobe in 1939, it was hailed as one of the first childrens books to offer a dignified portrayal of an African American child and his family.

The Pequot Indian intellectual, author, and itinerant preacher William Apess (17981839) was one the most important voices of the nineteenth century.

By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward.

The rural roads that led to our planet-changing global economy ran through the American South.

In 2015, the beautiful jazz funeral in New Orleans for composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments.

In Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne E.

This collection of essays profiles a diverse array of North Carolinians, all of whom had a hand in the founding of the state and the United States of America.

For many African Americans, getting a public sector job has historically been one of the few paths to the financial stability of the middle class, and in New York City, few such jobs were as sought-after as positions in the fire department (FDNY).

Available for the first time in English, The Color of the Third Degree uncovers the still-hidden history of police torture in the Jim Crow South.

In this book, Lindley S.

Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess the use and meaning of language in the South, a region rich in dialects and variants, this comprehensive edited collection reflects the cutting-edge research presented at the fourth decennial meeting of Language Variety in the South in 2014.

For many, the struggle over civil rights was not just about lunch counters, waiting rooms, or even access to the vote; it was also aboutChristian theology.

During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.

With emancipation, a long battle for equal citizenship began.

During the half century preceding widespread school integration, black North Carolinians engaged in a dramatic struggle for equal educational opportunity as segregated schooling flourished.

During the half century after 1650 that saw the gradual imposition of a slave society in Englands North American colonies, poor white settlers in the Chesapeake sought a republic of equals.

Now thoroughly updated and revisedwith a new chapter on the Dreamer movement and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA)this book offers North Carolinians a better understanding of their Latino neighbors, illuminating rather than enflaming debates on immigration.

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region.

In the Jim Crow South, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and, later, Vietnamese and Indian Americans faced obstacles similar to those experienced by African Americans in their fight for civil and human rights.

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture offers a timely, authoritative, and interdisciplinary exploration of issues related to social class in the South from the colonial era to the present.

Transcending familiar categories of black and white, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture complicates and enriches our understanding of southernness by identifying the array of cultures that combined to shape the South.

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture examines how mass media have shaped popular perceptions of the South and how the South has shaped the history of mass media.

When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own womens conference for the very next day.

For years, North Carolina has been one of the nations fastest-growing states, bringing tremendous change to the states people, industries, jobs, places, environment, and government.

This book is about the other Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community organizing, liberal politics, and civil rights activism.

Much of the violence that has been associated with the United States has had particular salience for the South, from its high homicide rates, or its bloody history of racial conflict, to southerners' popular attachment to guns and traditional support for capital punishment.

Southern music has flourished as a meeting ground for the traditions of West African and European peoples in the region, leading to the evolution of various traditional folk genres, bluegrass, country, jazz, gospel, rock, blues, and southern hip-hop.

The Oconaluftee Valley, located on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, is home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site).

In telling the story of the North Carolina Railroads independent years (1849-71), Trelease covers all aspects of the company and its development, including its construction and rolling stock; its management, labor force, and labor policies; its passenger and freight operations; and its role in the Civil War.

In this illuminating study, Steven E.

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture reflects the dramatic increase in research on the topic of gender over the past thirty years, revealing that even the most familiar subjects take on new significance when viewed through the lens of gender.

On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousandsalmost all African American.

In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the postCivil War nation.

Evangelical Protestant groups have dominated religious life in the South since the early nineteenth century.

In 1928 New York native Muriel Earley Sheppard moved with her mining engineer husband to the Toe River Valleyan isolated pocket in North Carolina between the Blue Ridge and Iron Mountains.

How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans?

Until the mid-1700s, law was not thought of as a science or profession.

Railroads, tourism, and government bureaucracy combined to create modern religion in the American West, argues David Walker in this innovative study of Mormonisms ascendency in the railroad era.

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diegos volatile border region.

While Washington, D.

In 1700, a young man named John Lawson left London and landed in Charleston, South Carolina, hoping to make a name for himself.

Southern folklife is the heart of southern culture.

Discovered as a typewritten manuscript only after her death in 2006, Family of Earth allows us to see into the young mind of author and Appalachian native Wilma Dykeman (19202006), who would become one of the American Souths most prolific and storied writers.