South Carolina Books

This book was one I could not put down. Every chapter kept you in suspense.

This book traces the development of shallops along the Atlantic seaboard and Chesapeake Bay from open work boats suitable for a number of uses to fully decked vessels employed in the offshore fisheries of New England or for freighting service on the Delaware River. The book is illustrated with sketches of the various types of sloops and shallops afloat as well as line plans showing the development of hull forms.

This book provides not only an easy to read, step-by-step way to start your own business; but, the authors have included many place to write notes so you can keep your focus on starting your business, as well as all of the numbers and forms you would need to ensure you get your business started as quickly and painlessly as possible. One of the sections I especially enjoyed was the appendix in the back with the telephone numbers and addresses of all of the parties you need to contact with spaces for notes on when you contacted them, who you spoke with, what you talked about, etc. If you are considering starting your own business in South Carolina, you can do it without this book, but I would not recommend it. Oasis Press has simplified the process tremendously.

SNOWBIRD GRAVY AND DISHPAN PIE: Mountain People Recall, by Patsy Moore Ginns, 209 pages, illustrated by J.L. Osborne Jr., North Carolina

Unlike the model dour New Englander, Southern mountain folk love to tell stories, and the ones born around the end of the 19th century were very much aware that they had started out in one era and lived into another one, very different. This was my grandparents' generation, and they liked to tell about the old days.
In the 1970s and early '80s, Patsy Ginns, a teacher, collected stories from around 20 men and women who had grown up in western North Carolina. The oldest was born in 1979, the youngest in the 1920s.

For me, reading "Snowbird Gravy and Dishpan Pie" was like being a little kid at family reunions again. Ginns' old folks were way more country than my family was, but their world view was about the same as I remember: church, long walks, few money, haints and spirits, play parties, neighborliness, occasional hard feelings and violence.

As Stanley Hicks, one of the more talkative sources, says, "It was hard to get a nickel."

Ginns breaks up the recollections by category: school, community, work etc. So the longest entry is about three pages. Some entries, when the people fell into the easy, loping mountain style of talking, she has typeset as if it were free verse, which it almost is.

To me the most interesting personality is Ray Hicks, apparently Stanley's younger brother. The Hicks boys were a handful, when young, but Ray got religion -- which he explains at confusing length -- and became a preacher. Not, as slowly becomes apparent, a very uptight one.

"Snowbird Gravy and Dishpan Pie" is also full of bits of lore about living in the Southern mountains, many of them mostly forgotten in daily life, only preserved here and in books like Foxfire. Some of the lore here is more obscure than even the obscurest of the Foxfire collections, which came from a generation later.

The volume is liberally illustrated with evocative pen-and-ink drawings of rustic scenes by J.L. Osborne Jr. Charming to look at but not so charming to live in, these vistas were everywhere when I was growing up. It's hard to find them nowadays, and if you do, like as not there's a big highway down the middle, or a warehouse on the horizon.

[...] This five volume history of the victorian bourgeois follows a freudian schematic: the first volume dealt with love, the second with sex, and this volume with agression.

This book was my favorite of the three I've read so far. Gay picks apart the Victorian penchant for cloaked agression with admirable scholastic fortitude. His discussion of Foucault's theory of prisons is a high light for this entire five volume set.

His critique of what he calls the "social control" theorists is that they fail to take into account the ability of the powerful to delude themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing, even when they are most assuredly not.

Why stop here? Only two more volumes to go...

Most of the county records in this book are relevant to the Upstate of South Carolina. It has been a most important tool for me in my research. It doesn't include all of the Upstate counties, but it certainly has a good sampling of wills, deeds, etc. without making a trip to the library.

of the 2 ww1 fiction works i,ve read,All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got his Gun,I would have to say that this book is of the same quality and genre. It presents the point of view from the "grunt' in the trenches.These are not the kind of books a person would read for enjoyment,although a person could make a case for it.They are more the historical type that can make a more humane person for the read.The Coward was really interesting,it was about a British WW1 soldier who deliberately wounds himself to escape from the trenches on the eve of a major German assault in 1918.He tries to rationalize his "cowardice" but the letting down of his comrades haunts him thoughout the book and you leave the book realizing his desertion will haunt him throughout his life.At the field hospital he expresses jealousy of his comrads in the trenches,but not enough to want to return.He rehashes then rationalizes,condemned like Sisyphus,only instead of having push the boulder to the top and have it fall again,he must feel the guilt while he cashes a wounded soldier pension check.And so on!

Being raised a few miles from one of the first Gennett sawmills, I found this to be one of the most interesting books I have ever read. Gennett describes in fair detail various logging practices, and the technical vernacular is even footnoted to assist the reader with terms he/she has probably never heard.

The brothers' Gennett certainly had a knack for making money, but it was always after much investigation and hard work, and certainly risk. It was interesting to me how Andrew, from the upper crust of society, rolled his sleeves up and learned the art of cruising timber and sawmilling. Accounts of the long nights in the cold camping or boarding with mountaineer families while on timber cruises and logging operations were fascinating.

Gennett's views of the long arm of Uncle Sam and issues regarding private property rights are still echoed today.

I highly recommend to this book to anyone interested in the history of the Southern Appalchians, natural resource management, logging, or the American entreprenural spirit.

I've read almost every book in the America the beautiful seiries. They're great for Reports and papers. They give you so much information thats really intureting; not just facts. It is such a shame that Children's press is taking this wonderful seiries out of print. Buy these books now before they run out, belive me

There is a scene in the uncut edition of the movie version of the musical "1776" where the character of Edmund Rutledge from South Carolina explains to John Adams that his colony is interested in independence--For South Carolina. It was Rutledge of South Carolina that pushed for the clause condemning the slave trade to be dropped from the Declaration of Independence, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina who propagated the doctrine of nullification, and it was South Carolina that was the first state to secede from the Union and the place where the Civil War started when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. So the story of South Carolina is the story of a state that often did not always want to be a state, which makes it rather unique.

It is not without irony that in "A State of Change," Chapter One of this look at "South Carolina" for the American the Beautiful, Second Series, that R. Conrad Stein focuses on Strom Thurmond, the late senior U.S. Senator from S.C. who was the longest-standing senator in history, as a symbol of that change (even more so today, when we know that Thurmond, who once ran for president as a segregationist, secretly fathered a child with an African-American woman). The history of South Carolina is detailed in the next three chapters, beginning with Chapter Two, "A Colony Carved from the Wilderness," which begins with the "contact period" when the Cherokee first encountered Europeans and ends with South Carolina becoming the eighth state. Chapter Three, "A House Divided" focuses on the primarily on the Civil War but also recovers reconstruction, while Chapter Four, "Twentieth-Century South Carolina," traces the change from a backward, mostly rural state, to a new economy following the Civil Rights revolution. Throughout this volume, Stein's emphasis is on reconstructing the state's image as the place that sparked the Civil War.

Chapter Five explores South Carolina as "A Land of Contrasts," including the topographical changes from the Atlantic coastal plain, to the lowcoutnry, to the upcountry. "Life around the State" is explored in Chapter Six, which focuses on each area. Chapter Seven, "Palmetto State Government," covers the politics of South Carolina, which is where young readers get to find out about such state symbols as the state tree (the palmetto, of course) and the state hospitality beverage (tea, which it is the only stage to produce for business). "An Expanding Economy" is the subject of Chapter Eight, focusing on manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries. Chapter Nine, "Upcountry and Lowcountry Culture," looks at population trends in the state along with education. Finally, Chapter Ten, "Arts, Sports, Fairs, and Fun," looks at movies shot in the state (e.g., "The Abyss," "Forrest Gump") and sports stars like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Althea Gibson.

The back of the book includes a Timeline comparing U.S. and S.C. state history and several pages of Fast Facts with lots of key statistics. Like all of the volumes in this informative series, Stein's look at "South Carolina" has plenty of full-color photos, orignal maps, and a whole bunch of sidebars. These sidebars are where young readers get to find out about the buccaneer Anne Bonney, the "Swamp Fox," Battery Wagner, Jesse Jackson, and the Hilton Head Vacationland. The recipe for this volume is for Shrimp Perlou, the main rice dish of South Carolina, and the most famous (you can substitute sausage, chicken, or any other meat, so do not feel compelled to go with shrimp).