The Civil War Monitor recently interviewed William A. Link, author of Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath.
In his conversation with David Thomson, Link discusses events in Civil War Atlanta and important figures in the rebuilding of the city. He also talks about his approach to teaching the Civil War. (running time: 16:36)
Today’s featured state icon is the Sandhills region, number 31 in Our State magazine’s 100 North Carolina Icons list. Our State describes the variety of the region: “Southern Pines is the horse capital of N.C., Pinehurst is the golf capital, and Candor is the peach capital.” Stretching into South Carolina and Georgia, the Sandhills are also known for a dry climate, sandy soils (hence the success of peaches), and vast Longleaf Pine forests that support threatened and endangered species like the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. The North Carolina State library website offers more resources for research and information about the Sandhills.
If interested in hiking the trails, Bruce A. Sorrie’s A Filed Guide to Wildflowers of the Sandhills Region: North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia will help you to identify the the beautiful flora of the area. Meanwhile, Kelly Alexander’s Peaches: a SAVOR THE SOUTH cookbookTM will give you the perfect recipes for the region’s plethora of peaches.
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Featuring over 600 wildflowers, flowering shrubs, and vines, this user-friendly field guide is the first to focus on the rare, fragile lands and species of the Sandhills region of the Carolinas and Georgia. Characterized by longleaf pine forests, rolling hills, abundant blackwater streams, several major rivers, and porous sandy soils, the Sandhills region stretches from Fayetteville, North Carolina, southwest to Columbus, Georgia, and represents the farthest advance of the Atlantic Ocean some 2 million years ago.
Wildflowers of the Sandhills Region is arranged by habitat, with color tabs to facilitate easy browsing of the nine different natural communities whose plants are described here. Bruce A. Sorrie, a botanist with over 30 years of experience, includes common plants, region-specific endemics, and local rarities, each with its own species description, and over 540 color photos for easy identification. The field guide’s opening section includes an introduction to the Sandhills region’s geology, soil types, and special relationship to fire ecology; an overview of rare species and present conservation efforts; a glossary and key to flower and leaf structures; and a listing of gardens, preserves, and parklands in the Sandhills region and nearby where wildflowers can be seen and appreciated. Wildflower enthusiasts and professional naturalists alike will find this comprehensive guide extremely useful.
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Whether you swear by peaches from Georgia or from South Carolina, there’s no doubt that the fruit is sacred to southerners. From the moment the first mouthwatering Elberta variety was grafted in the 1870s, the peach has been an icon of summertime and a powerful symbol of the South’s bounty. Peaches showcases the sweet richness of this signature fruit. Native Atlantan and award-winning food writer Kelly Alexander explores the fruit’s history, offers advice for selecting, storing, and cooking, and reflects on the place of peaches in southern identity.
Peaches includes forty-five recipes ranging from classic desserts to internationally inspired preparations. In this book, the desserts come first, and all the recipes—from The Best Peach Ice Cream and Roasted Peach-Basil Chicken to Pickled Peaches and Peach Clafoutis—will leave us certain that we should all dare to eat a peach, as often as we’re able.
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Check back at our NC Icons series to find great reads for other state icons.
Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a “quadroon,” she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans’s free women of color.
In the following excerpt from The Strange History of the American Quadroon (pp. 146-149), Clark shows how fiction associated the trope of the tragic mulatto with New Orleans, while sensationalized travel writing generated the myth of the plaçage complex, suggesting that mixed-race women entered relationships as concubines.
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By the 1850s the foreign qualities that designated New Orleans the natural habitat of the American quadroon were understood without the botanical and sartorial signifiers that accompanied the figure in its earlier appearances. The distinguishing physical markers of the orientalized quadroon herself, however, assumed a canonical quality. The “masses of glossy black hair, waving along the brows and falling over the shoulders in curling clusters,” of Mayne Reid’s 1856 quadroon heroine, Aurore, could have belonged to Ingraham’s Azèlie. And Reid’s depiction of Aurore’s eyes upheld the convention that made them the centerpiece of a quadroon’s distinction. “The eye I fancied, or remembered well—better than aught else,” Reid’s white lover relates. “It was large, rounded, and of dark brown colour; but its peculiarity consisted in a certain expression, strange but lovely. Its brilliance was extreme, but it neither flashed nor sparkled. It was more like a gorgeous gem viewed by the spectator while at rest. Its light did not blaze—it seemed rather to burn.”[1] Marie St. Vallé, the quadroon mother in James Peacocke’s Creole Orphans, conformed to the model set by Ingraham’s Azèlie. “Her form was of that voluptuous, flowing mould, whose every action is grace,” and her eyes, of course, “were large and dazzling, as ebon as her hair.” And Marie shared one other signature trait of her literary forebears. “As she entered the room, a smile illuminated her beautiful face and showed her pearly teeth.”[2]
Mayne Reid’s Aurore served as the prototype for the most famous tragic mulatto of them all, Zoe, in Dion Boucicault’s melodrama, “The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana.” The play opened in New York in 1859 to immediate notoriety North and South and has been frequently revived, including an Off-Broadway spinoff staged in 2010.[3] Zoe is the daughter of a quadroon slave and a white father who has freed her. She and a young white man, George Peyton, are in love with one another, and the wealthy belle of a neighboring plantation, Dora Sunnyside, is in love with George. The evil overseer, Jacob M’Closky, desires Zoe for himself and uncovers an obscure obligation of her father’s that not only renders her a slave but requires that she be auctioned to settle the debt. Zoe is taken to the New Orleans slave market, where M’Closky bids for her against Dora, who has nobly sold her own plantation so that George’s beloved will not be sold into sexual slavery. After Zoe is sold to M’Closky for the outrageous sum of $25,000, she commits suicide with poison. The scene of the apparently white Zoe on the auction block was the dramatic highpoint of the play, and with each restaging of the play New Orleans grew more powerfully linked to the figure of the tragic mulatto.[4]
Through the medium of the fictional quadroon, New Orleans was imaginatively construed as a place apart in the American polity, the only place in the nation where the strange fruit bred of slavery and white desire grew and met its inevitable, tragic destiny. Continue reading ‘Excerpt: The Strange History of the American Quadroon, by Emily Clark’ »
Thomas Day (1801-61), a free man of color from Milton, N.C., became the most successful cabinetmaker in North Carolina—white or black—during a time when most blacks were enslaved and free blacks were restricted in their movements and activities. Through in-depth analysis and generous illustrations, including over 240 photographs (20 in full color) and architectural photography by Tim Buchman, Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color by Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll provides a comprehensive perspective on and a new understanding of the powerful sense of aesthetics and design that mark Day’s legacy.
The Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery is currently hosting an exhibit, “Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color“, showcasing thirty-nine pieces of furniture crafted or attributed to the Day workshop, as well as his personal Bible, three period quilts, and both historic and contemporary photographs of architectural structures designed by Day. The exhibit is scheduled to run through July 28.
Marsha Dubrow from Examiner.com provided a review of the exhibit. Much like Marshall and Leimenstoll’s book, Dubrow describes the Smithsonian’s exhibit as, “doubly intriguing—combining his startlingly unique cabinets, bureaus, chairs, even a child’s Gothic-Classical style ‘commode’ (potty), architectural designs, with his extraordinary career.” The review from Examiner.com also features a slideshow presentation for a glimpse at the exhibit and some of the work of Thomas Day.
[This article is crossposted at FirstPeoplesNewDirections.org.]
In Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence Tracy Devine Guzmán examines the contested process of constructing Indianness from Brazil’s independence to the present. Engaging issues ranging from citizenship and national security to the revolutionary potential of art and sustainable development, Devine Guzmán argues that the tensions between popular renderings of Indianness and lived Indigenous experiences are critical to the unfolding of Brazilian nationalism, on the one hand, and the growth of a Brazilian Indigenous movement, on the other. In the following excerpt from the epilogue, she discusses contemporary Indigenous assertions of sovereignty and self-representation, especially in the context of opposition to the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam.
Notwithstanding such positive initiatives, the broader configuration of political, social, economic, and cultural power in which they take place reveals a steep road ahead. As a result of the intensified and institutionalized disempowerment of indigenous peoples and interests during the first decade of the twenty-first century, which culminates in state sponsorship of Belo Monte, it seems unlikely that a substantial number of nonindigenous politicians or citizens will in the near future embrace or even begin to consider the ideas and projects of indigenous intellectuals and communities seriously enough to assess their practical and theoretical implications for the future of national development policy, educational reform, environmental protection, governance, or international relations.
Founder of the Movimento Indígenas em Ação (MIA), Ysani Kalapalo (fourth from the left) leads a demonstration against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in downtown São Paulo, 20 August 2011. Also pictured (from left to right): Yamuni Barbosa, Samantha Aweti Kalapalo, Mariana Aweti Kalapalo, India Tikuna Weena Miguel, Guayra Wassu, I. Wassu, and Tayla Kalapalo. Photo by the author; reproduced with the permission of Ysani Kalapalo.
Native Brazilians’ efforts to counter the privatization of the indigenist bureaucracy and the deleterious effects of contemporary indigenist policy through intensified demands for land demarcation, ethnodevelopment, intercultural education, and other empowering social programs, as well as through heightened cultural activism and political participation at all levels of government indicate, indeed, that the struggle for indigenous self-representation has in some ways just begun. Nonetheless, the viral proliferation of indigenous political commentary and cultural production via the Internet in the form of journalism, fiction, film, video, blogging, and election campaigning (for example) continues to revolutionize the relationship between Native peoples and visual representation, on the one hand, and Native peoples and the written word, on the other. Continue reading ‘Excerpt: Native and National in Brazil, by Tracy Devine Guzman’ »
This week the NC Icon series takes a look at the Cape Fear River, number 5 in Our State magazine’s 100 North Carolina Icons list. Our State writes, “With 202 miles of river to enjoy, there’s plenty of room for kayaking, canoeing, fishing, or birding.” Newly published this spring at UNC Press, Philip Gerard’s Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina is the perfect compliment for any trip out to the Cape Fear River.
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In Down the Wild Cape Fear, novelist and nonfiction writer Philip Gerard invites readers onto the fabled waters of the Cape Fear River and guides them on the 200-mile voyage from the confluence of the Deep and Haw Rivers at Mermaid Point all the way to the Cape of Fear on Bald Head Island. Accompanying the author by canoe and powerboat are a cadre of people passionate about the river, among them a river guide, a photographer, a biologist, a river keeper, and a boat captain. Continue reading ‘North Carolina Icons: Cape Fear River’ »
[This article is crossposted at UNCPressCivilWar150.com.]
Today we welcome a guest post from William A. Link, author of Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath. After conquering Atlanta in the summer of 1864 and occupying it for two months, Union forces laid waste to the city in November. William T. Sherman’s invasion was a pivotal moment in the history of the South and Atlanta’s rebuilding over the following fifty years came to represent the contested meaning of the Civil War itself. The war’s aftermath brought contentious transition from Old South to New for whites and African Americans alike. In Atlanta, Cradle of the New South, Link argues that this struggle defined the broader meaning of the Civil War in the modern South, with no place embodying the region’s past and future more clearly than Atlanta.
In the following post, Link briefly depicts the great destruction Atlanta faced at the end of the Civil War and how it embraced a new narrative as the flagship of the “New South.”
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A little more than a year from now, we will be commemorating the 150th anniversary of William T. Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta in September 1864. This was a crucial moment in the Civil War which helped to defeat the Confederacy and assure Union victory. To be sure, the Atlanta Campaign had much to do with the shaping of the South’s vision of itself. Sherman’s invasion also defined the character, shape, and purpose of Atlanta for the next century and more.
Atlanta hadn’t been much of a city prior to secession, with about 10,000 in inhabitants in 1860. The town didn’t exist prior to 1847, when the village of Marthasville began to call itself Atlanta. For much of its antebellum history, the town struggled to define itself against a reputation for lawlessness and social disorder.
The Civil War remade Atlanta, which became the most important wartime center for the western Confederate armies. Its position as a central railroad depot, manufacturing, supply, military, and hospital center set it apart. Fortunes were made; housing and commodities were at a premium. In addition, the war provided new opportunities for African Americans to acquire property, assert greater economic autonomy, and begin to build the foundation of a new, free community. Continue reading ‘William A. Link: Atlanta Rising After Sherman’ »
As a longtime leader of the Democratic Party and key member of Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, Josephus Daniels was one of the most influential progressive politicians in the country, and as secretary of the navy during the First World War, he became one of the most important men in the world. Before that, Daniels revolutionized the newspaper industry in the South, forever changing the relationship between politics and the news media. Biographer Lee A. Craig follows Daniels’s rise to power in North Carolina and chronicles his influence on twentieth-century politics.
In the following interview, Craig, author of Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times, discusses the extraordinary life of one man and the circumstances in which he lived.
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Q: Josephus Daniels (1862-1948) helped revolutionize the newspaper industry; he led the white supremacy movement in the North Carolina (1898-1900); he served as secretary of the navy during World War I (1913-1921); and he was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico (1933-1942). As an expert in economic history, when did you first become interested in Daniels and how does your field lend itself to a biography of such an influential politician?
A: I first became interested in Daniels while I was in graduate school in the 1980s. Initially, he attracted my attention through his actions as secretary of the navy. The world’s leading navies were undergoing a technological revolution during Daniels’s tenure as head of the U.S. Navy, with the recent establishment of the submarine and the modern battleship, and I was curious about how he managed that transition. In addition, as the head of the U.S. Marine Corps, which was controlled by the Navy Department, he oversaw a dramatic expansion of U.S. gunboat diplomacy. I was fascinated by this near-pacifist who was also a leading gunboat diplomatist.
As for the question about how economic history contributes to our understanding of Daniels’s life, it is important to recall that he was first and foremost a businessman and a capitalist. He would never have described himself as a politician. He was a newspaper publisher, during a period in which that industry, largely thanks to men like Daniels, underwent tremendous change. Without some background in economics, finance, and accounting, it would have been difficult to understand the most important part of his public life.
Lee A. Craig, author of Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times
(photo courtesy NC State University Photography Services)
Q: Your prologue refers to Josephus Daniels as a near-pacifist who “created one of history’s greatest war machines” [i.e. the modern U.S. Navy] and a “staunch anti-imperialist [who] oversaw . . . a gunboat empire.” How does your book explain these contradictions? Continue reading ‘Interview: Lee A. Craig on Josephus Daniels’ »
[This article is crossposted at UNCPressCivilWar150.com.]
While fighting his way toward Atlanta, William T. Sherman encountered his biggest roadblock at Kennesaw Mountain, where Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee held a heavily fortified position. The opposing armies confronted each other from June 19 to July 3, 1864, and Sherman initially tried to outflank the Confederates. His men endured heavy rains, artillery duels, sniping, and a fierce battle at Kolb’s Farm before Sherman decided to directly attack Johnston’s position on June 27. Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign, by Earl J. Hess, tells the story of an important phase of the Atlanta campaign.
The following excerpt comes from the book’s Preface (pp. xii-xvi). Here, Hess explains how the nearly three weeks of battle at Kennesaw Mountain in the face of unyielding natural elements stand historically as a pivotal representation of military strategy and adaptation for both the Union and Confederate generals.
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Six weeks after setting out from Chattanooga in early May, 1864, Major General William T. Sherman hit a massive roadblock while fighting his way toward Atlanta. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee was heavily fortified along a line that stretched across the Georgia countryside, anchored on the twin peaks of Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta. It was the ninth fortified position Johnston had created thus far in the campaign, and it proved to be the most difficult to bypass. For two weeks, from June 19 to July 3, Sherman tried to find a way to turn Johnston’s left flank. Both armies were stretched to the breaking point in their extended positions as artillery duels, constant sniping, and a fierce battle or two erupted. As the two sides tested each other, heavy rains descended, and the dirt roads of Georgia became quagmires. Frustrated at the delay, Sherman decided to try a major frontal assault against three points of Johnston’s line on June 27. The Federals who survived that day would remember the attack for the rest of their lives.
The assault of June 27 was a significant departure from Sherman’s mode of operations during the Atlanta campaign. He had more often maneuvered parts of his massive force, an army group consisting of available troops from the departments of his Military Division of the Mississippi, in order to turn enemy flanks and force the Confederates out of their trenches. Sherman did mix attacks with his turning strategy at Dalton, Resaca, New Hope Church, and Pickett’s Mill, but most of those assaults had been exploratory efforts to find and develop enemy lines and take advantage of opportunities that occurred. On June 27, the Federals knew what to expect and were hitting a heavily fortified, well-manned position. It was, in a way, an experiment, and Sherman arrived at the decision after many days of deliberation.
Sherman threw eight brigades of veteran troops, some fifteen thousand men, at three locations along the heavily fortified Confederate line on June 27. Continue reading ‘Excerpt: Kennesaw Mountain, by Earl J. Hess’ »
[This article is crossposted at UNCPressCivilWar150.com.]
We welcome a guest post today from Michael T. Bernath, author of Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South, which is now available in a new paperback edition. During the Civil War, some Confederates sought to prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through the creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. Bernath follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers—whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists—in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on northern books, periodicals, and teachers. Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.
In the following guest post, Bernath highlights April 28 as the sesquicentennial anniversary of delegates from the Confederate states forming the South’s first and only national teachers’ organization.
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2013 will mark many of the Civil War’s most famous sesquicentennial anniversaries—January 1 (Emancipation Proclamation), May 10 (Stonewall Jackson’s death), July 3 (Pickett’s Charge), July 4 (the fall of Vicksburg), November 19 (Gettysburg Address), just to name a few. By contrast, April 28 will pass with little notice (except perhaps among the most dedicated Civil War buffs interested in the fight at Choctaw Bayou, Louisiana). It was on that day, however, one hundred and fifty years ago, in Columbia, South Carolina, that nearly seventy delegates from six Confederate states met to form the South’s first and only national teachers’ organization, The Educational Association of the Confederate States of America.
Over the course of three days, the men (membership was restricted to male Confederate citizens) of the newly founded Association drew up a constitution, elected officers, and passed a series of resolutions that were then distributed and reprinted throughout the Confederacy. Their stated purpose was to aid the South in casting off its longtime dependence on northern textbooks and northern teachers and to ensure that a victorious Confederacy emerged from the war with both its political and its intellectual independence intact. Continue reading ‘Michael T. Bernath: Confederate Teachers United in a War of Their Own’ »
