Carolina's Historical Landscapes


Book Description

Featuring contributions by leading scholars, this book goes beyond conventional archaeological studies by placing the description and interpretation of specific sites in the wider context of the landscape that connects them to one another.




Trace


Book Description

With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.




Black Landscapes Matter


Book Description

The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places—ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.




A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina


Book Description

Central North Carolina boasts a rich and varied architectural landscape. This richly illustrated guide offers a fascinating look at the Piedmont's historic architecture, covering more than 2,000 sites in 34 counties. 535 illustrations.




Exploring the Geology of the Carolinas


Book Description

How were the Appalachian Mountains formed? Are the barrier islands moving? Is there gold in the Carolinas? The answers to these questions and many more appear in this reader-friendly guide to the geology of North Carolina and South Carolina. Exploring the Geology of the Carolinas pairs a brief geological history of the region with 31 field trips to easily accessible, often familiar sites in both states where readers can observe firsthand the evidence of geologic change found in rocks, river basins, mountains, waterfalls, and coastal land formations. Geologist Kevin Stewart and science writer Mary-Russell Roberson begin by explaining techniques geologists use to "read" rocks, the science of plate tectonics, and the formation of the Carolinas. The field trips that follow are arranged geographically by region, from the Blue Ridge to the Piedmont to the Coastal Plain. Richly illustrated and accompanied by a helpful glossary of geologic terms, this field guide is a handy and informative carry-along for hikers, tourists, teachers, and families--anyone interested in the science behind the sights at their favorite Carolina spots. Includes field trips to: Grandfather Mountain, N.C. Linville Falls, N.C. Caesars Head State Park, S.C. Reed Gold Mine, N.C. Pilot Mountain State Park, N.C. Raven Rock State Park, N.C. Sugarloaf Mountain, S.C. Santee State Park, S.C. Jockey's Ridge State Park, N.C. Carolina Beach State Park, N.C. and 21 more sites in the Carolinas! Southern Gateways Guide is a registered trademark of the University of North Carolina Press




Born to Rebel


Book Description

Born the son of a sharecropper in 1894 near Ninety Six, South Carolina, Benjamin E. Mays went on to serve as president of Morehouse College for twenty-seven years and as the first president of the Atlanta School Board. His earliest memory, of a lynching party storming through his county, taunting but not killing his father, became for Mays an enduring image of black-white relations in the South. Born to Rebel is the moving chronicle of his life, a story that interlaces achievement with the rebuke he continually confronted.




Denmark Vesey’s Garden


Book Description

One of Janet Maslin’s Favorite Books of 2018, The New York Times One of John Warner’s Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago Tribune Named one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor “A fascinating and important new historical study.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.” —Civil War Times The stunning, groundbreaking account of "the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin" (Providence Journal) Hailed by the New York Times as a "fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most," Denmark Vesey's Garden "maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country" (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822. As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, "Kytle and Roberts's combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston's history and empathy with its inhabitants' past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called "a stunning contribution, " Denmark Vesey's Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America's deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery's enduring legacy in the United States.




North Carolina Architecture


Book Description

This award-winning, lavishly illustrated history displays the wide range of North Carolina's architectural heritage, from colonial times to the beginning of World War II. North Carolina Architecture addresses the state's grand public and private buildings that have become familiar landmarks, but it also focuses on the quieter beauty of more common structures: farmhouses, barns, urban dwellings, log houses, mills, factories, and churches. These buildings, like the people who created them and who have used them, are central to the character of North Carolina. Now in a convenient new format, this portable edition of North Carolina Architecture retains all of the text of the original edition as well as hundreds of halftones by master photographer Tim Buchman. Catherine Bishir's narrative analyzes construction and design techniques and locates the structures in their cultural, political, and historical contexts. This extraordinary history of North Carolina's built world presents a unique and valuable portrait of the state.




African American Historic Places


Book Description

Culled from the records of the National Register of Historic Places, a roster of all types of significant properties across the United States, African American Historic Places includes over 800 places in 42 states and two U.S. territories that have played a role in black American history. Banks, cemeteries, clubs, colleges, forts, homes, hospitals, schools, and shops are but a few of the types of sites explored in this volume, which is an invaluable reference guide for researchers, historians, preservationists, and anyone interested in African American culture. Also included are eight insightful essays on the African American experience, from migration to the role of women, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. The authors represent academia, museums, historic preservation, and politics, and utilize the listed properties to vividly illustrate the role of communities and women, the forces of migration, the influence of the arts and heritage preservation, and the struggles for freedom and civil rights. Together they lead to a better understanding of the contributions of African Americans to American history. They illustrate the events and people, the designs and achievements that define African American history. And they pay powerful tribute to the spirit of black America.




Lowcountry at High Tide


Book Description

2020 George C. Rogers Jr. Award Finalist, best book of South Carolina history A study of Charleston's topographic evolution, its history of flooding, and efforts to keep residents dry and safe The signs are there: our coastal cities are increasingly susceptible to flooding as the climate changes. Charleston, South Carolina, is no exception, and is one of the American cities most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Lowcountry at High Tide is the first book to deal with the topographic evolution of Charleston, its history of flooding from the seventeenth century to the present, and the efforts made to keep its populace high and dry, as well as safe and healthy. For centuries residents have made many attempts, both public and private, to manipulate the landscape of the low-lying peninsula on which Charleston sits, surrounded by wetlands, to maximize drainage, and thus buildable land and to facilitate sanitation. Christina Butler uses three hundred years of archival records to show not only the alterations to the landscape past and present, but also the impact those efforts have had on the residents at various socio-economic levels throughout its history. Wide-ranging and thorough, Lowcountry at High Tide goes beyond the documentation of reclamation and filling and offers a look into the life and the history of Charleston and how its people have been affected by its unique environment, as well as examining the responses of the city over time to the needs of the populace. Butler considers interdisciplinary topics from engineering to public health, infrastructure to class struggle, and urban planning to civic responsibility in a study that is not only invaluable to the people of Charleston, but for any coastal city grappling with environmental change. Illustrated with historical maps, plats, and photographs and organized chronologically and thematically within chapters, Lowcountry at High Tide offers a unique look at how Charleston has kept—and may continue to keep—the ocean at bay.