Heart of the Blue Ridge


Book Description

On March 6, 1875, Sam Kelsey and C. C. Hutchinson paid $2 an acre for just over a square mile of the Sugartown Highlands in the Blue Ridge Mountains and began building a town 4,000 feet above the clouds. Perched on the shoulders of Satulah, Fodderstack, Black Rock, Whiteside, and Shortoff mountains, the Highlands Plateau was shaded by primeval forests of giant hardwoods and pyramidal pines and drained by quiet crystal streams and thundering cataracts that plunged over precipitous crags and down laurel-fringed gorges. Offering restoration of health and soul, this paradisial settlement provided common ground for settlers from both the North and South a decade after their great Civil War. By 1883 300 immigrants from twenty-seven Northern and Southern states were calling Highlands home. This is a history of the origin and growth of a town with a Northern climate set high in the South, including the ever-continuing struggle between those who would preserve and those who would exploit its unique appeal to year-round residents and summer visitors. In its attempt to be all-inclusive, this book contains much detail, but it also embodies a collection of matchless characters and personalities and their stories that have given the town and its history remarkable color and enduring interest. In short, the big world is here mirrored in the small world where little things that happen are no less important, indeed more so.







The Heart of Confederate Appalachia


Book Description

In the mountains of western North Carolina, the Civil War was fought on different terms than those found throughout most of the South. Though relatively minor strategically, incursions by both Confederate and Union troops disrupted life and threatened the




A Faithful Heart


Book Description

Emmala Reed's journals from 1865 and 1866 present a detailed account of life in western South Carolina as war turned to reconstruction. Reed's postwar writings are particularly important given their rarity - many Civil War diarists stopped writing at war's end. Also unlike many diarists of the period, Reed lived in a small town rather than on a plantation or in an urban center.




Lady's Realm


Book Description




Missions and Conversions


Book Description

This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of "missionaries" that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee. Thomas Pearson uses ethnographic and archival research to tell the story of cross-cultural contact in the highlands during the Vietnam War, Christian conversion, refugee exile, and the formation of the Dega refugee community in the United States. His insightful study considers not just evangelicals and Catholics, but humanitarian workers in the highlands, refugee resettlement volunteers in the United States, and the American Special Forces soldiers. This book makes the case that the Dega have appropriated the anthropological and religious discourses of this disparate group of missionaries to recreate themselves through a multivalent "conversion."




Murder in Their Hearts


Book Description

In March 1824 a group of angry and intoxicated settlers brutally murdered nine Indians camped along a tributary of Fall Creek. The carnage was recounted in lurid detail in the contemporary press, and the events that followed sparked a national sensation. Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre tells that, although violence between settlers and Native Americans was not unusual during the early nineteenth century, in this particular incident the white men responsible for the murders were singled out and hunted down, brought to trial, convicted by a jury of their neighbors, and, for the first time under American law, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of Native Americans.







American Heart of Darkness


Book Description

These days, most Americans know that the country has serious problems. Problems that will have to be addressed before the country can move forward. What are these problems? Where did they come from? Before we can move forward we have to know where we are and how we got there. American Heart of Darkness paints an unvarnished picture of the seeds of destruction that were sown into the foundations of the Republic from the very beginning. How did slavery come about in the land of the free? How did a pre-Columbian native population, in North America alone, of over eighteen million (yes, you heard it right) native peoples dwindle down to about two hundred thousand? Was it really Small Pox? Why has a people who constantly talk about freedom, democracy, equality, human rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness continually practiced racism, genocide, and war? How do drugs come into the country, and who is really behind the most profitable product sold in the world? There are also other unanswered questions that need to be explored: Why were thousands of the worst Nazi war criminals given refuge in the U.S.? Who financed Hitler? Where did Hitler get his master race and genocidal ideas from? Was Lee Harvey Oswald a C.I.A. agent? Were Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVey, and the Peoples Temple all mind control, MKULTRA, subjects? What really happened in the Jeffery MacDonald, so-called Fatal Vision case? How does hundreds of billions of dollars come into the United States every year without detection? The answers to these questions, and many more, will surprise you! They are not in the History books, although they should be. American Heart of Darkness, Volume I, explores the ugly side of America that has been hidden for far too long, and it is literally killing us. This book is not for the reader looking for an uplifting story to escape everyday life for a few hours. It is for true patriots who are sick and tired of being lied to and stolen from. It is for those who know they need to do something but do not know where to start. It is for those who feel powerless and that Americas problems are far too big for little ol me to handle. It is for those with the courage to go from darkness to light. As comedian and activist Dick Gregory once said, If you been in the DARK for so long, LIGHT will hurt your eyes. This book will hurt your eyes. The reader will be shocked, then angry, then motivated, and finally, in the authors next two books, empowered and liberated. It is better to see where we are and where we need to go, right now, before it is too late. Congratulations! If you have read this far this book is probably for you. Please keep in mind the universal truth that with any form of government, the leaders only have the power that the people allow them have. This was true in India when a little skinny guy named Gandhi with no money and only a rag wrapped around his middle took on the British Empire, and won! There is no question that the American people have the power to reclaim a government that is clearly not being run for them. We have to empower ourselves to take this government back from only a handful of selfish and greedy individuals, who have proven that they only care about making more and more money. Let us all stop giving them the power that belongs to us. Reading this book is a beginning, and then we will talk about what to do about it in the authors next two books!