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African American schools in the segregated South faced enormous obstacles in educating their students. But some of these schools succeeded in providing nurturing educational environments in spite of the injustices of segregation. Vanessa Siddle Walker tells the story of one such school in rural North Carolina, the Caswell County Training School, which operated from 1934 to 1969. She focuses especially on the importance of dedicated teachers and the principal, who believed their jobs extended well beyond the classroom, and on the community's parents, who worked hard to support the school. According to Walker, the relationship between school and community was mutually dependent. Parents sacrif...
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Drew A. Swanson has written an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the author provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. Swanson, who brings to his narrative the experience of having grown up on a working Virginia tobacco farm, explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. He weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this innovative study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.
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Following the Glorious Revolution, the supporters of the House of Stuart, known as Jacobites, could be found throughout the British Isles. The Scottish county of Angus, or Forfarshire, made a significant contribution to the Jacobite armies of 1715 and 1745. David Dobson has compiled a list of about 900 persons--including not only soldiers but also civilians who lent crucial support to the rebellion. Arranged alphabetically, the entries always give the full name of the Jacobite, his occupation, his rank, date of service and unit (if military), and, sometimes, the individual's date of birth, the names of his parents, a specific place of origin, and a wide range of destinations to which the Jacobites fled after each of the failed insurrections.
Thomas Day (1801-61), a free man of color from Milton, North Carolina, became the most successful cabinetmaker in North Carolina--white or black--during a time when most blacks were enslaved and free blacks were restricted in their movements and activities. His surviving furniture and architectural woodwork still represent the best of nineteenth-century craftsmanship and aesthetics. In this lavishly illustrated book, Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll show how Day plotted a carefully charted course for success in antebellum southern society. Beginning in the 1820s, he produced fine furniture for leading white citizens and in the 1840s and '50s diversified his offerings to p...
A Guest of Mr. Lincoln: The Wartime Service of Sergeant Joseph W. Wheeless, Company K, 32nd NC Infantry Regiment, Confederate States Army is a must-read story of four years of America’s colorful history. It is also the story of how the Wheeless family came from England to America in the late 1600’s and spread out across the new Republic to participate in its growth from infancy during the American Revolution to the Internet Age and beyond. This book is a story about the legacy of the Wheeless family and how Joseph survived four years of the bloodiest war ever fought in North America. The book also provides snapshots of Joseph’s life and experiences before, during, and after the war, most based on available documents, letters, and newspapers of the day, and some based on suppositions. This book is not a political statement about the war or its aftermath; it simply adds another chapter to the story of the Wheeless’ long history that helps educate current and future generations.
In the 1820s, young congressman Willie Mangum imbibed the political philosophy of North Carolina's senior senator Nathaniel Macon, the "prophet of pure republicanism." From his election in 1824, Mangum was at the epicenter of national and state government. In the 1830s, he emerged as leader of an opposition party--the Whigs--and became an opponent of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. Mangum's career offers insight into the ideology and politics of North Carolina's Whigs. Opposition to executive power was fundamental to the Whig platform but in North Carolina the party was a coalition that melded the Old Republicans' creed with the National Republican economic agenda touted by Henry Clay, a combination that enabled them to dominate. Mangum and the Carolina Whigs have received little attention from scholars. This book traces their rapid rise to power and their even more rapid fall in the years prior to the Civil War.