North Carolina Books

If you are thinking of a gift for someone that happens to be an Alumnus of Appalachian State, this is it! A great look into the past. Lots of pictures, lots of information. It offers up some geneology information, but not focused on it at all, a great read. No color pictures, what a drag.

I bought this book because I understood that a few of my ancestors were quoted in it; as a genealogist, I look for every mention of my ancestors possible! But this book brought home the staggering (to me, I never said I was smart) fact that not all conflict between settlers and Native Americans took place on the plains. Many, many conflicts took place right here in the midwest, in Ohio, Michigan, etc. And this book provides an excellent description of the people and events of this period of settlement. It adds a dimension to my research, and is an fascinating study.

I am a direct descendent of Henry King Burgwyn Jr, with the exact same last name. I know all about my great great uncle and this book is a very good describer of him, his family, and life and times. I have lent this book too many Civil War buffs and it always comes back with a raving review.

BUY IT!!!

The men of the 15th and 16th centuries who first explored the Eastern seaboard of the New World left written records of their travels that have been of significant interest to 21st century scholarship and academia. Thomas Hariot's "A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia" is a facsimile edition of the 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin Edition featuring the modernized English text is a four hundred year old document published for the Library at the Mariners' Museum by the University of Virginia Press. The original, highly illustrated edition served to provide Europeans with their first introduction to the American continent and shaped contemporary European perceptions of North America -- and subsequent research on that period ever since. Containing hand-colored illustrations from the period, the original is one of only three recorded copies with colored plates still in existence. This superbly produced and highly recommended edition with the inclusion of a contemporary English text for present day academia should be considered an essential and core addition to academic library American History reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

I am truly surprised that nobody else has submitted a review of this book! It certainly deserves to be widely read as an original contribution to African-American studies, to food studies in general, to cultural studies, and most importantly, by anyone who wants to understand how sterotyping works as part of the process of oppression. I also learned a great deal about what 'signifying' means, and how it can be used as an analytical tool.

This is not a perfect book. Sometimes I found it moved to quickly from the general to the specific and vice versa. But Williams-Forson has taken a really tough topic - the way Chicken has been attached to African American women, and she treats it with sensitivity, creativity, wit and an eclectic set of tools from literature, social science and history. In the process she gets to the heart of how stereotypes cut in a lot of different directions; they reveal weaknesses and strengths, solidarities and divisions. She is not interested in passive victimology, nor does she ignore the violence and pain of slavery and prejudice.

The result is a book which really does teach you something new about the Black experience. It is the opening, I hope, of a new generation of black history which shakes off some of the old narratives which have served their purposes, and gets into really complex terrain. I look forward to more complex counterpoint with the work being done in the Caribbean and on the Black experience elsewhere in the Americas. I will certainly be using this book in the classroom, and I hope it gets the broader readership it deserves!

A great read for anyone with Burke county or Western Nc ties, some history along with some entertaining stories. a great gft for anyone with Morganton or burke county connections.

Here is a good example of a book which is the only one to cover a Civil War Campaign. I tend to recommend these every time, regardless of quality. With that said, Sauers' book is of very high quality. The maps are good, and Sauers fully covers the Burnside expedition to North Carolina in 1862. The author has an extensive bibliography, citing and using many sources to give the reader excellent coverage of the Campaign. 542 pp., 10 maps

Glenn Eskew has detailed the history of the civil rights movement in Birmingham from 1945 to almost the current time. His account is a detailed view of the struggle within the African-American community to find a way to confront segregation that was regnant in Birmingham. He has told a story riveting in its details and close observations. I lived through the period covered as a white liberal in a city undergoing enormous change. I knew many of the players who stride across these pages--Fred Shutttlesworth, Eugene T. "Bull" Connor, Abraham Woods, C. Herbert Oliver,Police Chief E.H. Brown Lucius Pitts, James A. Head, David Vann, Erskine Smith,James Bevels, Tommy Wrenn, Meatball Dothard, John and Addine Drew,Tom King,James Mills,and James A. Simpson. Culiminating in the 1963 marches lead by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., Eskew shows the interaction of the local civil rights movement impacted by a national movement. Before King ever came to Birmingham the struggle for civil rights was carried on by local people who deserve to be valorized. Eskew does not do this. His careful and balanced interpretations make this history at its best. If you want to know how a city becomes captive to an ideology (segregation of the races) in a way that permeates all of social, political, educational and cultural life it is revealed here. You will see how dissenters are rejected and punished. You will see how newspapers, churches, pastors, businessmen--indeed every segment of society--is made to bow down to the God of Segregation. Eskew is all balance and historical objectivity. I fault his account in only one way, which is subject to argument and interpretation. He misses the fact that "vigilante activity," the blowing up of houses, the beating of rebels against segregation, and the general terror that held segregation in place was "governmentally sponsored." The Klansmen who bombed, whipped, cut, tortured and attacked were protected by the police and approved in the community generally. This is a fine study and a wonderful corrective for a generation who think that Martin Luther King was the civil rights movement. It was an indigeous protest movement and different in every community in the South. Eskew tells Birmingham's bloody story, in a fine prose and sense of drama, that brings that old struggle to life.--W. Edward Harris

Currituck County (originally Currituck Precinct) was created from Albemarle County in 1681. Currituck County was a parent county, in part, of Dare and Tyrrell counties. For this book, Mr. Brayton has abstracted the earliest extant deeds for Currituck, complete with metes and bounds. The data found in these abstracts are of great genealogical importance because the deeds are replete with information concerning former owners, relationships between grantee and grantor, and other family connections. Worthy of special mention are Brayton's abstracts from unnumbered Deed Book 1, which has not been indexed to the grantor-grantee index at the Currituck Courthouse, and the author's success in reconciling conflicting versions of Deed Book 2.

Spanning the period 1696-1773, this book won the year 2000 award for Excellence in Publishing from the North Carolina Genealogical Society.

Dr. Ausband's elegant, easy, affable writing style (threaded with humor and just a hint of the bawdy) mirrors that of his subject, and reading this book is very much like listening in on a conversation between two men sharing their thoughts, observations, and tall tales about their adventures in a land they both love, while warming their hands around a steaming mug of coffee before an autumn campfire. The fact that they are separated by three centuries of "progress" is no barrier to their camaraderie, and because the book is so well written, the reader becomes a member of Byrd's expedition team, too, as Ausband does---without having to clean the mud off his or her boots, or cut through the brush in the Dismal Swamp. Almost incidentally, he or she also gets an education in botany, ornithology, and zoology along the imaginary line that separates Virginia from North Carolina, the descriptions of the animals, plants, and people Byrd encountered (and Ausband revisits) as colorful as the Carolina parakeet that once overran the area--and nowhere to be found is the cloying smell of leather elbow patches and tweed the one might expect such a book to exude.

It's a skillful piece of work, written by a master storyteller, and will be of interest to anyone who is a student of Byrd of Westover, a resident of the geographic area, a fisherman or hunter or hiker, or a bibliophile unable to resist the lure of an exceptionally well-wrought book.