North Carolina Books

Unique tales of the Old North State; not the same ones as every other NC story books

This is a deeply informative and highly personal diary (edited by the author after the fact, as most period diaries have been), especially valuable as the story of a soldier less than enthralled with war.

Berkeley spent most of the war in Kirkpatrick's Battery, attached to the Second Corps. His long account includes Yorktown, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Monocacy and a full recounting of the Valley Campaign of '64. (His repeated blaming of the Stonewall Brigade at Fisher's Hill and Cedar Creek should not be taken as gospel, though.) He was then captured and describes unpleasant experiences at Fort Delaware, with rampant illness the primary hardship.

Berkeley seems to have been quite war weary by '63, sooner than many of his comrades, and his depressed commentary punctuates his narrative--though he didn't take the oath until late April of '65, during imprisonment. Many of his quotes are worth keeping, and he gives an excellent picture of experience in the artillery.

This anthology includes the complete novel "Dagon," something of a literary oddity. It's part of a subgenre of horror fiction known as the Cthulhu Mythos, which comprises stories that make use of supernatural elements found in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft--mostly having to do with evil godlike monsters (or monsterlike gods) that ruled the Earth before the dawn of time. "Dagon" takes this premise, twists the genre from supernatural horror to Southern gothic, and presents it with utter psychological realism. The result is shocking and fascinating--sort of like reading a horror comic book written by William Faulkner. I wonder what fans of Southern literature make of "Dagon"--there's a few bits that must be baffling if you've never heard of Lovecraft. But the rest of the book isn't like this at all, so don't be scared off if this doesn't sound like your cup of tea. This is surely the best-written Cthulhu story ever. But few Lovecraft fans will ever find it here, with a generic title and a cover completely devoid of squiggly monsters. (The novel, I should note, has no squiggly monsters either--on the surface. But they're there--oh, boy, are they there.)

The publication of Thomas W. Zeiler's book, Free Trade Free World: The Advent of GATT is indeed timely. As recent WTO meetings in Seattle showed, there is much confusion in the minds of many people about what has happened to world trade in recent years. Zeiler's book deals with the establishment of the GATT and provides an excellent background to the early years of the free trade debate. Covering the period from 1940 to 1953, it shows that controversy and disagreement were common at the birth of the GATT and globalization much as they are today.

Zeiler, associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, provides a well-researched and detailed history of the very difficult discussions between the United States and its allies over free trade during and immediately after the Second World War. His book is well written and interesting. It shows that not only did the American supporters of free trade have to battle their foes at home, they had to constantly struggle to convince many other leaders of democratic nations that free trade was in their best interests, as well as America's. Economic arguments about the benefits of free trade to the world community often ran up against the realities of politics as well as the economic belief that protection was better for the public good. In the United States it was hard to argue with opponents of free trade that allowing in cheaper imports such as shoes helped to improve employment when workers in shoe factories lost their jobs.

Negotiations between the United States, Great Britain, and the British Commonwealth about the relaxation of protectionist measures began during World war 2. Britian and her former colonies devoted considerable time and energy to trade issues even when the British were involved in a life and death stuggle with Nazi Germany. Idealists were looking to the future when peace and an open world economy might prevail. Protection, of course, continued after the war. Much of the blame for the failure of the free trade negotiations at this time can be laid on the British and their Commonwealth. Facing considerable economic hardship as a result of the war, British politicians believed that protectionist policies would help their economy recover and allow them to regain some of their former world dominance.

In the United States, during the period covered by this book, presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were all in favour of free trade but with different degrees of conviction. Their strongest opposition came from Republican members of Congress. Roosevelt supported free trade because he believed it helped his New Deal but was never a free trade idealist. He had, of course, seen protectionist policies cause world trade to decline by 60% in the early years of the Great Depression. Truman was much more convinced of free trade's merits, having believed in its value since his high school days, but also "backed protectionism when needed." Eisenhower, who became President near the end of this history, had a much broader world perspective than his predecessors. He supported free trade unequivocally, believing it would strengthen the non-communist world in the global struggle to win the hearts and minds of Third World leaders.

Considerable international opposition to free trade came from Britain and her Commonwealth. In 1932, as a result of the "Ottawa Agreement", Britain had established a trade system that discriminated against non-Commonwealth members. Naturally, Commonwealth leaders wanted this to continue and opposed any move towards free trade. In Britain, opposition to free trade crossed party lines as it did in the United States. Churchill, the Conservative Party leader, who had seen his country's power dissolve during the war, believed "that Britain's postwar salvation lay in regulated, not free trade". Clement Attlee, the socialist, Labour Party leader, who became Prime Minister immediately after the Second World War in 1945, believed in protection and regulated trade as a matter of principle.

Meetings to establish free trade took place between 1946 and 1948 in London, Geneva, and Havana. At Geneva, from April to October 1947, a draft charter for an International Trade Organization (ITO) was created. This was approved in Havana in November by fifty-three nations, most of the trading world with the exception of the Soviet Union. However, these nations were not truly committed to free trade and the ITO died. Replacing it was the less comprehensive General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was signed by twenty-three nations on October 30th, 1947. The realities of Cold War politics destroyed the idealism that had surfaced during the war. American business interests and politicians who had strongly supported free trade throughout this period as a means of improving employment and prosperity had to be contented with a compromise that blended free trade with protectionism.

From Catharine Beecher To Martha Stewart: A Cultural History Of Domestic Advice by historian Sara A. Leavitt is a thoughtful and informative overview of the history of domestic advice, gleaned from research into hundreds of manuals written throughout the past 150 years. Cultural themes, the broad appeal of domestic advice across the decades in spite of radical changes in women's rights and roles in America, and the connection between women's homes, and the world outsides the home, mark From Catharine Beecher To Martha Stewart as a fascinating, accessible, insightful, scholarly treatise. Especially recommended for personal and Women's Studies supplemental reading lists and academic reference collections, From Catharine Beecher To Martha Stewart is also available in hardcover (0807827029).

In this volume, Joseph Reidy traces the development of Central Georgia from the period of its earliest settlement following the Revolutionary War through Reconstruction, focusing on economic, political, and social changes. Prior to 1830, most Georgians were yeoman farmers seeking self-sufficiency, owning only a few slaves with whom they lived and worked in a familiar manner. During the cotton boom of the 1830s, large planters moved into the area, establishing the plantation system, large numbers of slaves, and the ganging method of production. The depression of the 1840s allowed the planters to make gains at the expense of yeomen, as they bought up land and slaves at low prices from debt-burdened farmers. The process of planter consolidation and domination continued into the 1850s when cotton prices rose. Reidy argues that to respond to increased demand, rather than practicing scientific agriculture to increase output, planters in central Georgia simply increased the workload of their slaves, hiring additional overseers from the newly dispossessed white lower class. The increased tensions between planters, struggling yeomen, overburdened slaves, and the new landless poor whites played out in the Secession crisis and period of Reconstruction.

Despite their claims that a slave republic was the only form of government capable of producing harmonious social relations, planters were aware that the growing poverty in the region undermined this argument and threatened to turn the yeomanry and poor whites against them. Evidence of this division could be seen in the growth of party politics, with planters, town dwellers, and immigrants preferring the Democratic Party, and yeomen and poor whites turning to the Know-Nothings. Planters hoped to alleviate social tensions by funding poor relief, public education, and internal improvements that would bring new jobs, but the yeomanry, while approving in theory of public works, rejected them out of opposition to the higher taxes such projects would entail. Once the Civil War broke out, planter actions only furthered the destruction of the social and economic relations they had hoped to save, as planters refused to devote all resources to winning the war at the expense of current profits. They continued to plant cotton when grain was needed to supply troops and would not contract out their slaves to war materiel producers at low prices, resulting in rising prices for yeomen families who could not maintain self-sufficiency with their household heads away fighting the war and decreasing purchasing power for white laborers. Planters were unable to feed or protect their slaves from Union troops, destroying slaves' faith in paternalism and forcing them to take care of themselves, which prepared them for independence following emancipation.

Following the war, planters hoped to exercise the same control over free blacks as they had over slaves, but with the help of the Freedman's Bureau and Radical Republicans, free blacks negotiated for more control over working conditions, their families, religious institutions, and rights as citizens. While facing legal discrimination at every turn, they were in many cases able to negotiate contracts as sharecroppers, educate their children, exercise their right to vote (though not to hold office), and establish their own churches and political movements. Yeomen also benefited somewhat in that they now had unprecedented ability to hire black laborers, but were harmed by new laws limiting hunting and fishing on unenclosed lands, which diminished their ability to subsist as much as it did that of freedmen. Both black and white non-planters increasingly turned to wage labor, marking central Georgia's transition to a capitalist economic system. Planters lost a good deal of their political and economic dominance, but maintained as much of their social power as they could under the newly bourgeois order.

Any serious scholar or especially a writer of the American place will find this book to be essential reading. From the Fallen Tree traces foundations of the American romantic tradition from its enlightenment roots up to the nascent romanticism of James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving, though it is clear that the argument Thomas Hallock traces extends in a clean line to this day. Along the way Hallock explicates the various ways in which narrative shapes and is shaped by events "on the ground."

One of the more interesting aspects of Hallock's arguments is how aspects of privileged, aristocratic European traditions become conflated with republican ideals in order to create an American literature that can contain both imperial and democratic aspirations. Building and expanding on the work of earlier critics, Hallock's argument is accessible, cogent and convincing; furthermore, the breadth of Hallock's reading and scholarship is impressive.

What is especially appealing is that the book moves forward in an almost linear fashion. Each section builds on the last, which gives the penultimate chapter on Cooper's Pioneers a feeling of roundness, of having completed the book's mission. When Hallock asserts that Cooper's Pioneers completes the translation of the Euro-American into the American place, the reader feels that the author has turned a corner. It is quite a compelling sensation.

A literature major finishes the book feeling that he has gained a clearer sense of what is uniquely American (and what is not) about American literature; a history buff leaves with a better understanding of what shaped Teddy Roosevelt's environmentalism; a geography enthusiast leaves with a keener sense of reverence for the connection between cartography and letters, and how they shape culture; finally, any writer interested writing about America leaves with a sense of "this is where to begin."

"Amreica" is spelled incorrectly (i hope)! (And I haven't read the book, so don't publish this review, please!)

Raw Deal

Once in a while you read a book chock full of information you didn't know that you didn't know, or more importantly that you didn't know you needed to know. "The Fruits of Their Labor," by Cindy Hahamovitch, is such a book. The subtitle - Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 - only hints at the breadth of the subject matter, which stretches to include an economic and social history of agriculture in states from Maine to Florida and the Deep South. Though the author traces the changes in farming and truck-gardening that resulted from the partial mechanization of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the focus of the book is on the conversion of traditional year-round farm-hands into seasonal laborers, and thus to the lowest-on-the-totem-pole migrants whose welfare was of minimal interest to ever-larger farm businessmen. More than half of the book deals with the twelve years of the New Deal and the Second World War, revealing how ineffective the "reformers" were in the face of opposition from racists and conservatives of both parties. It's no surprise to learn that FDR threw farm labor to the wolves, excluding it from the benefits of collective bargaining. Likewise, it's hardly shocking to realize how little understanding of rural realities the urban reformers of the era were, in their hopes that paternalism and a little health education would restore the agrarian paradise envisioned by Tom Jefferson. The value of this book comes from observing the mechanisms of interest groups - owners, to be blunt - in turning the efforts of government at all levels to the service of their selfish interests. It's also quite astonishing to observe how capitalistic farm-owners and government at all levels colluded, first in the callous exploitation of recent immigrants from Italy and then in the cultivation of the harvest of easily manipulated "undocumented" workers from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia, which the same people are still hypocritically ranting against. And finally, at the broadest level, this text is a study of the malfunctional interaction of federal and state governments at cross purposes, with the worst outcomes invariably befalling the humblest citizens.

I know something about the history of agriculture in the Far West, from the days of the Southern Pacific "Octopus" to the heroic struggles of Cesar Chavez and the UFW. I know it academically, but also personally. During my high school summers in California in the late 1950s, I was a "fruit picker" - trailer court white trash - with most of my earnings going to feed my family while my father blew his paychecks on another recent-model car. I picked string beans, hops, tomatoes, and prunes. It was filthy, fatiguing, and unhealthy work, and a source of shame when my classmates heard of it. The idea that bringing in the harvest is healthful and noble was and is cow flop; breathing dust and pesticides in the hot sun for ten or twelve hours a day is not a pleasant interlude. I finally looked old enough to get a job picking apples from a ladder, the cleanest and most profitable sort of field work, if not the safest. At age eighteen, I was legally old enough to work in the cannery. It was still back-breaking; as the freshest face, my task was to lift boxes of apple sauce from a conveyor belt to a palette, and I estimate that I handled as much as thirty thousand pounds of apple sauce a night. But it was a union cannery! For work that was if anything less skilled than picking, I got paid an hourly wage that was eight times higher than I ever earned on the ladder. It was the Teamsters' Union, by the way. I kept my membership all through my four years at Harvard College, where two of my classmates were Richard Darman, Bush I's budget director, and Boyden Gray, the Bush Family legal counsel.

The history of farm labor and thwarted unionization east of the Mississippi is, if anything, even more dastardly than that of the West Coast. It's not a story that makes for pleasant reading, though Ms. Hahamovitch writes clearly and unpretentiously. Perhaps the best way to capture your interest will be to offer a few snippets.

Page 165 - Discussing the market-place economics of farmer labor, she writes: If labor prices are taken as a measure of farm labor supply , then it is difficult to explain why truck farmers complained of labor shortages when they were apparently well supplied with labor. [This was in the years just before WW2.] However, the notion of a "labor market" that operates according to rules of supply and demand ignores the impact of custom and culture, of deeply held assumptions about what labor is "worth." [The assumptions she refers to are the racial and class prejudices which have shadowed every aspect of labor history in the Land of Equality.]
Page 178 - Discussing the WW2 importation of workers from the Caribbean and Mexico, managed by the federal government, she writes: The WFA was reluctant to include Puerto Ricans in the program because, as U.S, citizens, they could not be "repatriated" at the end of a contracted period. The solution...was to withhold a portion of each worker's pay and deposit in a Puerto Rican bank. The workers.... could not withdraw these funds until they returned home....
On the next page, she describes the use of POWs to oversupply the labor pool in order to keep workers from successfully demanding higher piece rates: POWs represented a particular challenge to federal authorities, because although enlisted men could be forced to work...they could hardly be fired or deported. They were in some ways in a position analogous to that of slaves, but unlike slaves they could neither be whipped nor sold.

Pow! Did you know that the USA used forced labor during WW2? Actually, that's not nearly as shocking as the laws passed in several Southern states that required men to work in the fields or be immediately drafted, and women to work in agriculture or be jailed. Black men and women, of course. There were also laws during both World Wars that required agricultural workers to remain in specific counties, and those laws were enforced by local authorities even when various federal agencies tried to recruit workers to save crops in truly labor-short areas.

To recount all of Ms. Hahamovitch's amazing revelations, I'd need to quote the whole book. One further thought: States' Rights was born as a tactic to defend slavery, and States' Rights has remained inextricable from racism ever since. If that thesis seems unpalatable to you, then you are one of those who don't yet know what you don't know, and you'd better start informing yourself by reading "The Fruits of Their Labor" before you denounce me as a spawn of liberalism.

I recieved this book for Christmas and read it right away! This book has many sections that discuss famous players including Michael Jordan, Eric Montross, and Sean May! The book also discusses famous coaches, of course including the almighty Dean Smith! It talks about all the ACC and NCAA tounramnets and championships we have won! It also discusses the rivalries, of course including UNC vs. DUKE and NC State!

One thing that I really liked about the book was that it told how UNC got its colors, mascot, and name, TAR HEELS!

This is an awesome book for any Carolina fan and I really do think that true UNC fans should get this book to learn the history of their college they love so much! I hope my review was helpful to you!