University of Virginia Press, 2007 Helen Rountree knows more than anyone else about the Native Americans of eastern Virginia, and if anyone can write a history of the encounter between them and the English at Jamestown from their point of view, it is she. A recently retired member of the faculty of Old Dominion University »
“If national planners and the federal government first became interested in rural manufacturing as a development strategy in the 1930s and 1940s, the South had by that time been pursuing such a strategy for generations, albeit with mixed success.”
Basic Books, 2006 There is certainly no shortage of books on Thomas Jefferson, but Andrew Burstein’s latest effort attempts to view the man from an angle few others have tried. Rereading both familiar and less well-known sources, Burstein argues that our knowledge of Jefferson is incomplete without an extended study of his retirement years. He »
University of North Carolina Press, 2009 When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. went to war in 1861, he had almost no idea what he was getting into. He had seen a picture of a Revolutionary soldier, “a white-haired man with his flint-lock slung across his back.” And he had met a few Revolutionary war vets. (They »
“At the referee’s signal, the handlers let their roosters go, and the birds, as if filled with sacred rage, assault each other in a hurricane of feathers, beaks, glittering spurs, and flapping wings.” “Hundred on the black cock! Hundred on the black cock!” “Fifty-forty on the red!” “Fifty-forty, red! You and me, okay?” Two handlers »
“What was most moving was that it was here that the ghosts of the people we’d read about jumped out of history and into our lives.” Though it was early morning, the day was already hot. I could smell the salty earth smell of the sea marsh that stretched out in front of us, cut »
“The Mexican guys said, ‘Let me do it, let me do it!’ and they were peerless.” Bill Smith is an innovative, southern-cuisine chef famous for creating such unexpected culinary juxtapositions as honeysuckle sorbet—hot summer in a cool bite. The dessert’s main ingredient really is the flower, thousands of them, all gathered by hand. His peculiarly »
“You can almost always start an argument about southern unity versus diversity.” Is the South one place or many? Agreement is hard to find on this old chestnut, and you can almost always start an argument about southern unity versus diversity. On the diversity side, Chapel Hill sociologist Rupert Vance pointed out rather ponderously back »
Essay
Historians rely on documents from the past that have been preserved in archives, museums, libraries, sometimes basements and attics. What gets saved and what gets tossed out is often a matter of luck or circumstance. One of the more interesting cases is the fate of the tobacco industry’s internal documents. Long considered the most secretive »
“While the culinary atmosphere of 1977 Atlanta may have remained ‘traditional,’ the city itself was hardly reminiscent of the romantic world Margaret Mitchell depicted in Gone with the Wind.” In the summer of 1977, Robert Blazer opened a local farmers market in Decatur, Georgia, only a few miles from the heart of downtown Atlanta. The »
“My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of east Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn’t proud of her habit–tried to hide it, in fact.” My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of east Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn’t »
“It’s not necessarily that we want tobacco; tobacco wants us.” The last tobacco queen is having a rough morning. She’s struggling to complete her thought that “everybody’s gonna die of something, so . . . might as well die of something that’s going to help out the . . . what’s the word?” The filmmaker, »