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)

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 cookbook^TM 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.

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. Tragic mulattos did occasionally turn up in other locales. Richard Hildreth’s novel The Slave (1840) and Emily Preston’s Cousin Franck’s Household (1853) were set in Virginia, and John Townsend’s Neighbor Jackwood in Vermont.^[5] The majority, however, were situated in New Orleans, giving the impression, to the antislavery reading public at least, that this was the place within the United States that was most, if not exclusively, tainted by the most odious features of slavery. In New Orleans, fathers sold their daughters into slavery, saw them auctioned off to settle debts, or died before they could free their children, condemning them to lives of misery in the fields or worse. New Orleans, with its population of beautiful quadroons, became the place to buy and sell women who, except for the “remarkable and undefinable expression of the eyes, which always betrays their remote Ethiopian descent,” appeared to be white. New Orleans was the only place in the United States where a man could purchase the makings of his own harem.^[6]

Fictional quadroon heroines were all either enslaved or faced the threat of being sold into slavery. Even Ingraham’s Moroccan princess Azèlie, though born free and noble, grew up believing that she was not free, dreading being peddled by her mother to the highest bidder for sex.^[7] The living quadroons described by journalists and visitors to New Orleans, however, were understood to be free women of color who chose to ally themselves with white men in an arrangement that Ingraham described as “a system of concubinage that has been without a parallel even in Oriental countries.”^[8] The New Orleans quadroons could not be bought as slaves against their will, but they agreed to exchange their favors on specified terms. This system came to be known in the twentieth century as plaçage. Since it is impossible to find good evidence for the use of the term plaçage by antebellum New Orleanians, the assemblage of features that defined it for twentieth-century authors is referred to here as the plaçage complex. The plaçage complex played a role as important as that of the tragic mulatto in distinguishing New Orleans and its mixed-race women. Abolitionists, fed on the fictional fare of the tragic mulatto, expected New Orleans to be filled with “white” slaves catering to the sexual appetites of immoral men. Other visitors to the city, informed by sensationalized travelers’ accounts, hoped for a glimpse of one of its renowned kept women of color, and perhaps contemplated engaging one for themselves. The literature that generated this prurient anticipation was nearly as prolific as the fictional evocations of the tragic mulatto designed to snuff it out.

The plaçage complex was delineated in nonfiction with a repertoire of standard elements. Foremost among them was a belief that New Orleans free women of color did not marry but instead formed relationships with white men on a contractual or quasi-contractual basis. The women were presumed to have chosen this way of life because law forbade their marriage to white men and they held themselves above men of their own racial background. Such a partnership was generally described as having been brokered by a woman’s parents, with terms including a house and provision for any children born of the relationship. Once the terms of the arrangements were settled, the woman was known as a placée, and it was understood that she would restrict her sexual favors to the man who supported her. The term of the engagement might be for months or years, but the common assumption was that it lasted until the white lover married a woman of his own race. New Orleans placées were often portrayed as wealthy heiresses to the fortunes of their white fathers, well educated and accomplished. Demure and proper in public, they were renowned for the pleasure they brought their lovers in private.

The origins of the plaçage complex have their roots in the figurative and literal immigration of the Dominguan mûlatresse to New Orleans, as we have seen.^[9] Subsequent accounts of it in English echo one another so consistently that it is difficult to credit any of them as original.^[10] All the same, these are the sources that not only informed travelers who visited antebellum New Orleans but have served as the basis of historical examinations of the city’s free women of color. And as we shall see in the next chapter, this literature created a circular feedback phenomenon that fed the invention and proliferation of activities in New Orleans designed to satisfy the market for encounters with quadroons aroused by the earliest accounts. The discursive construction of the quadroon and the plaçage complex in nineteenth-century travel literature may be nearly as fanciful as the tragic mulatto’s, but it was equally constitutive of the image of New Orleans free women of color that took up residence in the antebellum American mind and remained rooted there in the twentieth century.^[11]

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From The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark. Copyright © 2013 by The University of North Carolina Press.

1. ^[1] Reid, The Quadroon, 125-26. ↩
2. ^[2] Peacocke, Creole Orphans, 10. ↩
3. ^[3] “Letters from Mr. Bourcicault,” New York Times, February 9, 1860, http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/263/ (accessed January 25, 2012); “Pen Sketches for Sunday,” Daily True Delta (New Orleans), December 11, 1859, 1; “The Last of Mr. Bourcicault,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), December 24, 1859, 15; “The ‘Octoroon’ at the Winter Garden,” New York Daily Tribune, October 24, 1861, 8; “‘The Octoroon’ Director Withdraws,” New York Times, June 18, 2010, Section C, 2. ↩
4. ^[4] See Figure 11 and Chapter 6, below. ↩
5. ^[5] Hildreth, The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore; Pocahontas [Emily C. Preston], Cousin Franck’s Household; Trowbridge, Neighbor Jackwood. ↩
6. ^[6] Ingraham, The Quadroone, ix, note 2. ↩
7. ^[7] Ingraham, “The Quadroon of Orleans,” 265, suggests that many quadroons were actually enslaved, though they lived as free. ↩
8. ^[8] Ingraham, The Quadroone, ix. ↩
9. ^[9] See Chapter 2. ↩
10. ^[10] On the repetitious nature of descriptions of the plaçage complex, see Aslakson, “The ‘Quadroon-Plaçage‘ Myth. ↩
11. ^[11] Ibid. ↩

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. [ . . . ]

Rethinking how the representation of indigenous needs and interests works in local, national, and international politics, and reconfiguring the problematic relationship between indigeneity and dominant sovereignty, means more than Native peoples’ being inserted, or even inserting themselves, into existing political structures and institutions—however crucial and challenging that feat continues to be. At the very least, it must also mean rethinking sovereignty in collaboration with indigenous peoples and not for them, while taking into account their interests, values, renderings of the past, and policy proposals with regard to development, education, social welfare, environmental protection, land tenure, governance, and freedom. As Marcos Terena suggested more than two decades ago, reforming politics and rethinking the political to the collective benefit of Native peoples means building and strengthening interindigenous connections and collaboration across national borders, as well as nationally, while at the same time restructuring the colonialist configurations of power that have shaped relations between Native and non-Native peoples since the Conquest. Seeking to explain his own political trajectory in the context of the Brazilian indigenous movement, he conceded: “After seeing so many of our brothers decimated over the course of four centuries, we discovered that we could not walk alone. It [was] necessary to discover allies for our cause and for the survival of our . . . peoples among the [then] 140 million [nonindigenous] members of Brazilian society.”^[5]

“We Are Xingu.” Demonstration against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in downtown São Paulo, 20 August 2011. Photo by the author.

The population numbers have changed dramatically over the past two decades, but the urgency of forming such alliances across the dividing lines between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples, and among individuals and groups working within the parameters of other socially and historically formed notions of ethnicity, “race,” class, and geography (for example), most certainly has not. Shared and increasing interest among indigenous and nonindigenous Brazilians in preventing the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam—because of the social and economic ills it will engender, the environmental destruction it will wreak, and the human rights it will violate—is surely the most significant example of our day. National and transnational opposition to the initiative articulates these issues as ultimately inseparable from one another, thus resonating with the traditional indigenous belief in the inexorable interconnectedness of all human experience, and an increasingly widespread questioning of dominant notions of progress.^[6] “The hurt of one is the hurt of all,” Phil Lane Jr. has long argued, “and the honor of one is the honor of all. . . . Unless justice animates all that we do in human and community work, what we are doing is not development.”^[7]

Reflecting on his many years of political activism and the culmination of that experience in his candidacy for public office, Marcos Terena expressed optimism about Native participation in the selection of Brazil’s national self-government despite the growing improbability of success for his own bid: “An indigenous candidacy is an odd human feat, but one that manifests democracy—democracy that inspires us to throw off the discrimination that has until now placed us at the margins of the decisions that affect us, and that every four years gives us hope for a voice in a representative body like the National Congress.”^[8] That dozens of Native candidates chosen by mainstream political parties to defend mainstream political platforms sought in nationwide elections to represent indigenous interests in concert with the interests of their nonindigenous constituencies destabilizes the colonialist foundations of twentieth-century indigenism. The fact that they continue to work toward this goal in the wake of defeat, and the fact that at least part of the coalition against Belo Monte has come to articulate its opposition in resonance with Native conceptions of sovereignty, give us cautious hope that despite—and perhaps also, because of—the great challenges that together we face, a new political order may be on the horizon.

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From Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence, by Tracy Devine Guzmán. Copyright © 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Tracy Devine Guzmán is associate professor of Latin American studies, Portuguese, and Spanish at the University of Miami.

“Lucid, intelligent, and thoroughly researched, this book tracks 150 years of public policy and official imaginings around Indigenous peoples in Brazil and the continuing contestatory work of Indigenous leaders and thinkers. Native and National in Brazil offers students of global indigeneity indispensable access to the Brazilian scenario, whose unfolding will shape the future of Indigenous peoples worldwide.”
—Mary Louise Pratt, New York University

1. ^[1] On the circulation of ideas about Native peoples in nonindigenous classrooms and curricula, see A. Lopes da Silva and Grupioni, A temática indígena. ↩
2. ^[2] On such initiatives across Brazil, see Nincao, “Kóho Yoko Hovôvo”; “Primeiro Encontro Nacional de Educação Indígena”; Professores de Pataxó, Uma história; and Troncarelli, Kaiabi, and Instituto Socioambiental, Brasil e África. ↩
3. ^[3] As of late 2011, such programs are in place at the Universidade Federal de Roraima (UFRR); Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG); Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM); Universidade Federal do Tocantins (UFT); Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG); Universidade Federal de Bahia (UFBA); Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso (UNEMAT); Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL); Universidade Estadual do Amazonas (UEA); Universidade Estadual da Bahia (UNEB); Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS); and Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná (UNIOESTE). See Rede, “Conheça a REDE.” ↩
4. ^[4] Recent initiatives also exist to offer classes in indigenous languages to nonindigenous students, teachers, and researchers (Paulo Baltazar, personal communication; “Base de Estudos Indígenas”). ↩
5. ^[5] Terena, “Vôo do índio.” ↩
6. ^[6] And yet the problem of popular perception and media representation remains. The day following the 20 August 2011 manifestation against Belo Monte in São Paulo, the print version of the Folha de São Paulo included not a word about the protest. Instead, it highlighted a new Globo TV reality show called Expedição Xingu, in which eight (nonindigenous) university students would “leave the comforts of the city” and head to the forest, suffering various hardships of the 1950s and otherwise following in the footsteps of the Villas-Bôas brothers. Their adventure “even included participating in indigenous celebrations and fighting with them [sic].” See Castro Torres, “jovens refazem expedição.” ↩
7. ^[7] Lane, “Indigenous Guiding Principles.” ↩
8. ^[8] Terena, “Uma candidatura indígena.” ↩

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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. Historical voices also lend their wisdom to our understanding of this river, which has been a main artery of commerce, culture, settlement, and war for the entire region since it was first discovered by Verrazzano in 1524.

Gerard explores the myriad environmental and political issues being played out along the waters of the Cape Fear. These include commerce and environmental stewardship, wilderness and development, suburban sprawl and the decline and renaissance of inner cities, and private rights versus the public good.

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For further information and resources about the Cape Fear River visit the North Carolina State library website. Remember to look out for more reading suggestions in our NC Icons series.

[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 150^th 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. The Civil War thus began Atlanta’s emergence as a major southern urban center.

At the same time, the Civil War brought destruction and devastation to Atlanta. During their evacuation of the city in September 1864, Confederate military forces destroyed the remaining military stores in the city, while they burned the transportation center. Sherman burned much of the city when he left it two months later. Sherman aide Henry Hitchcock described “tongues of flame . . . huge waves of fire” which rolled “up into the sky” and with “the skeletons of great warehouses” standing out “in relief against and amidst sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames.”

There were few cities in the occupied South suffering as much devastation as Atlanta, but destruction provided a basis for the city’s future growth. Indeed, the “New South”—a social construction fashioned in the 1880s—rested on the ability of a city such as Atlanta to embrace a clean slate and to reinvent its future. Atlanta’s white boosters embraced a new narrative about the city’s past which wiped clean the slaveholding past and adopted a message of openness to investment by northern capitalists. Wartime destruction became an emblem of Atlanta’s embrace of modernity, its ability to fashion itself as a resurgent phoenix leading toward a New South future. “As ruin was never before so overwhelming,” New South enthusiast and booster Henry W. Grady announced in December 1886, “never was restoration swifter.”

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William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. He is author or editor of thirteen books, including Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism and Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia.

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?

A:  The short answer is “political expediency.” Daniels did not foresee World War I. After the war began, he did not foresee U.S. entry into it. So, before the United States became entangled in the war, he saw the navy as primarily a means by which its men could be elevated to be more productive citizens once they left the service. “Every ship should be a school,” was one of his mottoes. However, once war came, and he saw how the British dominated the Germans in the war at sea, he realized the only way the United States could prevent being dominated in future conflicts was to build the world’s largest and most powerful navy.

As for his exercise of gunboat diplomacy, partly his intervention came from following orders from the president, Woodrow Wilson, who possessed a more idealistic view of the country’s foreign policy than Daniels did. (Wilson summarized his views on the matter with: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Daniels did not think that possible.) Daniels did not like it, but Wilson was a political winner, and Daniels backed him. Once war came, however, Daniels intervened in Mexico and Haiti to prevent the Germans from establishing bases or otherwise exercising influence in those countries.

Q:  Josephus Daniels took over his first newspaper, the Wilson Advance, at the age of eighteen. Can you describe how “the least academically gifted of the Daniels boys,” without a penny to his name, more than doubled the circulation of a weekly newspaper in just five years?

A:  Hard work. There was no magic fairy dust. Daniels worked from sun up to well past sun down, except on Sundays, nearly every day of his life from early boyhood until the week he died. To expand the circulation of his early papers he knocked on doors signing up subscribers and advertisers. Three of his four sons eventually went to work for the Raleigh News and Observer, and each started in the collection department.

Q:  Your book offers a behind-the-scenes look at Daniels’s role as the leader of the white supremacy movement in North Carolina early in his career. What are some of the things you discovered in regard to this that weren’t known previously?

A:  I don’t claim to have “discovered” anything, but I will say the emphasis in most of earlier literature is on race; whereas, my interpretation of Daniels’s actions emphasizes politics. Daniels used race as means to an end; rather than as an end in itself. He exploited the racism of a majority of the state’s voters to obtain political power for the Democratic Party at the expense of black voters, who at that time voted overwhelmingly Republican.

This is not to excuse his behavior, which was clearly racist. But, as I quote another writer in the prologue, “It is easy to condemn the villains of the past and hard to understand the world that made them.” In the book I strive to help the reader understand Daniels’s world and his actions.

Q:  During his tenure as secretary of the navy, Daniels became famous (or notorious) for banning the use of alcohol onboard navy vessels, associating himself with the increased consumption of coffee. The drink came to be known as “a cup of Josephus Daniels” and was allegedly shortened to “cup-a-Joe.” Most people don’t realize that Daniels also significantly impacted the navy’s organizational structure and started a major dreadnought building program. In what area did he make the biggest impact to the navy as it was known then and today?

A:  It would not be possible to overstate Daniels’s influence on the navy. He essentially created the two-ocean navy. When he left office, the navy had nearly two thousand ships, and it was the most powerful in the world. Only a generation earlier it had not even been in the top ten. The German defeat in World War I was, in Daniels’s view, largely the result of the German navy’s failure to break the British blockade of the continent. Daniels was no Anglophile. He thought in the future, the British, who had possessed the world’s most powerful navy for over a century, were as likely to be our enemy as our allies. If it came to another world-wide conflict, then he wanted to control the largest possible navy in that fight.

Q:  Can From 1933 to 1941, Daniels was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico, but you say that Daniels “coveted a return to the Navy Department.” How did he view this transition so late in his career?

A:  Phlegmatically. He wanted the navy post, but it was not that important to him. He was seventy years old and enjoying running the News and Observer with his sons. He was willing to serve, and, if given a choice would have chosen the navy, but another high-ranking appointment was acceptable, and no appointment would have been as well.

Q:  In your prologue, you talk about having been “both served and hindered by [Daniels's] voluminous written record.” Can you describe your research in these archives and how they gave you a better understanding of Josephus Daniels as a person, not just another prominent politician?

A:  I could go on at length in response to this question; however, just to give you a concise feel for the more lengthy answer, let me give one example. In public and in his postwar biography of Wilson, Daniels gave the impression that he and Wilson saw eye to eye on the administration’s main policies. However, in his diaries and other correspondence, he revealed large and important differences between them.

For example, Daniels thought Wilson’s neutrality policies were excessively pro-British (Daniels was correct); he thought the president botched the postwar peace by first being too hard on the defeated Germans (Daniels was correct), and by then refusing to compromise on the peace treaty, which was eventually defeated in the Senate (Daniels was probably correct here, as well). On a personal level, Daniels thought Wilson too often mingled his religious views with his pursuit of public policies.

Q:  Were there any aspects of Daniels’s life that were more challenging to get information about? If so, what were they?

A:  Daniels left a voluminous paper trail (nearly 400,000 pieces of correspondence), but the paper trail increased as he aged. Not surprisingly, I can find a lot more about his life in 1942 than I could in 1872. So, without question, the early years of his life were the hardest to reconstruct. I had to rely on his memoirs and other secondary sources more than I would have liked.

Q:  Daniels wrote several books, including his five-volume memoirs published between 1939 and 1947. Can you tell us about what these books reveal about Daniels and why such a prominent voice and influence in the newspaper industry decided to write books?

A:  Broadly speaking, there are two reasons: one was setting the record straight, from his viewpoint, concerning the Wilson administration’s prosecution of World War I. This resulted in his first two postwar volumes: Our Navy at War (published in 1922) and a biography of Wilson (1924). The biography of Wilson is a hagiography, which focuses on justifying Wilson’s policies. Our Navy at War focuses specifically on Daniels’s management of the Navy Department. As I note in the book, during the last two years of the Wilson administration, the combination of Republican control of Congress and Wilson’s poor health resulted in the administration achieving very little while being subjected to much criticism. These two volumes are Daniels’s answer to that criticism.

The second reason he wrote books, which led to his memoirs, all 2,000-plus pages of them, was to set the record straight for his entire life! He wanted to tell his story.

Q:  Has your view of Daniels changed during the process of researching and writing this book? If so, how?

A:  I once heard a sermon in which the minister said, in effect, when the Bible contradicts itself, seemingly offering two versions of the truth, then one should believe both versions. As a scholar, this was not a very satisfying message, but in researching Daniels’s life and times, I’ve become comfortable with the contradictions of the man. He was a progressive, a warm-hearted family man, a man who genuinely cared about the country’s less-fortunate and down-trodden, at least as he defined them. Yet at the same time, he was a white supremacist, who used the coercive powers of the state to keep blacks in a socially and economically inferior state for generations. He was a near-pacifist who tried to keep the United States out of the world’s worst war to date; yet, he was gunboat diplomatist. He was a capitalist who sought government regulation of capital.

Taken together, his life reveals what I once heard described as “the sometimes smallness of great men.” In short, just as we have to confront the fact that the author of the Declaration of Independence was a slaveholder, I had to confront the fact that the most consistently progressive American political leader between the Civil War and the Cold War was also the father of Jim Crow.

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. They failed to make a dent in the defenses, losing about three thousand casualties in the process. Only at one location, a small rise of ground that came to be called Cheatham’s Hill, did the Federals stay close to the Confederate works after their attack. They dug new field works within yards of the Rebels. Here they stayed for the remainder of the Kennesaw phase of the Atlanta campaign, sniping, digging a mine with the intention of blowing up an angle in the Confederate works, and cooperating with their enemy in burying the many bodies of Union men killed in the attack. When Sherman resumed his practice of flanking Johnston out of his works, the Confederates evacuated the Kennesaw Line on the night of July 2 and retired a few miles to the next fortified position. The Chattahoochee River, the last natural barrier to Sherman’s approach to Atlanta, lay only a short distance farther south.

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Kennesaw Mountain in the Atlanta campaign. It is based on extensive research in archival collections and published primary sources. The works of previous historians who have written on the campaign is also incorporated for context. Special attention is devoted to the engagements at Kolb’s Farm on June 22 and Sherman’s assault on June 27. The battlefield itself presented a valuable resource for understanding the action around Kennesaw in late June and early July 1864. Although the area where Sherman’s right wing tried to find and flank Johnston’s left has been developed, the ground within the park is well preserved. The locations of the three attacks on June 27 are in a natural state, even if the site of the battle of Kolb’s Farm is a mix of natural landscape and housing development.

The aim of this book is not only to describe the actions along the Kennesaw Line but to explain the significance of the Kennesaw phase of the Atlanta campaign and understand the outcome of operations along the line. By necessity, it is a study of high-command problems, decisions, and triumphs on both sides of no-man’s-land. But it is also a story of common soldiers enduring and adjusting to the special rigors of continuous contact with the enemy, living within holes while spring weather did its worst overhead. The endurance of the Federal rank and file was most severely tested by the order to approach well-constructed earthworks filled with Confederate soldiers, and the attack of June 27 serves as an excellent case study of the experience of battle. The use of field fortifications on the minor tactical and the larger strategic level is a major feature of this story, and the failure of column formations to give the Federals an advantage in their risky assault is highlighted. Sherman’s recurrent fights with newspaper correspondents came into play during the Kennesaw phase of the Atlanta campaign, and neither he nor Johnston could ever forget that higher-level authorities in Washington and Richmond kept watch over their every move. For Sherman, Kennesaw was a dangerous phase of his career, a time when he feared that weather conditions and Confederate fortifications had slowed his advance so much that Johnston might send reinforcements to General Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia. For Johnston, Kennesaw represented the best evidence he could muster to prove that his Fabian tactics were working to slow the Union advance into Georgia and were punishing the enemy with heavy casualties. There was much to be gained or lost for both commanders, depending on how this phase of the struggle for Atlanta came out.

“The most severe and trying experiences of the Campaign,” remembered John C. Arbuckle of the Fourth Iowa, “were those we endured in the trenches in front of Kennesaw. For 26 days, 17 of which were days of continuous rain, we never had our clothes off, or a chance to wash.” For Arbuckle, and for thousands of other men in blue and gray, Kennesaw Mountain loomed large in the lexicon of battle as much for its challenges to the campaigning life of the common soldier as for its threat of injury and death from bullets or shell fragments. “Such was our condition and personal appearance from grime, mud and burnt powder,” Arbuckle concluded, “that we were all but a fright to ourselves.”^[1]

Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park is one of the most valuable Civil War resources in the country. I first became acquainted with its riches in the summer of 1986 while traveling from West Lafayette, Indiana, to my first teaching appointment at the University of Georgia. On visiting the park, I was impressed by the remnants of earthworks preserved within its boundaries. Those earthworks in a sense haunted me, for they were the first major collection of these relics of Civil War military operations I had seen. During the course of my one-year stay at the University of Georgia, I made many trips to Kennesaw to study the system of fortifications, take field notes, and expose many photographs. This experience resulted in a major research project (still ongoing) to write books about Civil War field fortifications. It also eventually led to the writing of this battle book.

The significance of the ground enclosed within the Kennesaw Mountain Park cannot be overstated. It contains the most important collection of surviving Civil War earthworks in the Western Theater, remnants that are as important as those in the best battlefield parks of the Eastern Theater. It is remarkable that the large park at Kennesaw is perched so close to the con-urban expanse of Atlanta. If not for the veterans who initiated preservation efforts in the 1890s, and the efforts of those who followed them, the battlefield would likely be under concrete, houses, and commercial buildings by now.

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From Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign by Earl J. Hess. Copyright © 2013 by Earl J. Hess.

1. ^[1] Arbuckle, Civil War Experiences, 65. ↩

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. Theirs was an essential component, a separate front, of the larger war effort against the North, and they resolved “That the unexampled heroism and devotion of our soldiers, imperatively demand of those to whom is committed the mental and moral development of our infant Republic, corresponding exertions in their appropriate sphere,” the schoolroom.^[1] It was there that the “mind of the State” would be properly prepared so that while “the casualties of war are carrying off the present adult generation . . . those who are to succeed them should be able to appreciate the greatness of the trusts committed to their hands.” Thus these southern educators directed their attention to their new nation’s future, even as soldiers and politicians fought for its immediate survival.

At their meeting, the delegates discussed teacher training for native-born southerners and the establishment of statewide public education systems (still a relative rarity in the South), but their primary focus was encouraging the rapid wartime production of southern-authored and southern-published textbooks. Confederate independence required that southerners no longer depend on their enemies for their books and that southern children no longer be exposed to the poisons suspected to lurk within those pages. “Considering our former dependence for books, for teachers and for manufacturers, on those who now seek our subjugation, it is especially incumbent on this Association to encourage and foster a spirit of home enterprise and self-reliance,” these educators declared, and they pledged “to encourage our own citizens by every means in our power, to prepare and publish suitable text-books for our schools; and in all cases where such books are of equal merit with foreign works, to give them the decided preference.” To this end, the delegations presented reports on the textbooks recently published or in preparation in their respective states, compiling an impressive list of sixty-one titles.

Dignitaries from across the South sent letters of support. Confederate president Jefferson Davis, for instance, assured the delegates that their “object commands my fullest sympathy, and has, for many years, attracted my earnest consideration. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of primary books in the promotion of character and the development of mind. Our form of Government is only adapted to a virtuous and intelligent people, and there can be [no] more imperative duty of the generation which is passing away, than that of providing for the moral, intellectual and religious culture of those who are to succeed them.” North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance likewise congratulated the educators “that the desolation of war does not prevent the good men of the country from looking after this great and important matter. This is certainly the time to inaugurate the system of supplying our schools with our own books, and of impressing the minds of our children with the effusions of Southern genius.” Theirs was a cause “so patriotic,” he concluded, as “to be commended by every true Southern heart.”

Having adjourned on April 30, the members of the Educational Association of the Confederate States of America vowed to reconvene on September 2, 1863 in Atlanta. The difficulties of war, however, prevented it. Nevertheless, the organization did manage to assemble one last time before the southern nation that gave it purpose collapsed—meeting for one day on November 9, 1864, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Travel had become ever more difficult in the shrinking Confederacy, and most delegates, not surprisingly, hailed from the host state.

Ultimately, the significance of the Educational Association of the Confederate States of America lay more in what it symbolized than what it accomplished. These southern educators fought a different war for Confederate independence, one that in their view would legitimate southern nationhood and ensure the Confederacy’s future. They sought to separate the South from the North culturally as well as politically. In the end, their struggle for Confederate educational independence was inextricably linked to the war itself and their national organization could not survive without a nation. April 28, then, if it is to be commemorated, is to be remembered as a moment of optimism, a day when a group of white southern educators came together to imagine a great national future.

Michael T. Bernath is Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor in American History at the University of Miami and author of Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South.

1. ^[1] All quotations from Proceedings of the Convention of Teachers of the Confederate States, Assembled at Columbia, South Carolina, April 28th, 1863 (Macon, GA: Burke, Boykin & Co., 1863): Available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/teachers/menu.html. ↩

We welcome a guest post today from Eric S. Yellin, author of

In today’s post, Yellin addresses the centennial anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration and the introduction of Jim Crow discrimination in government offices.

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This year we celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50^th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Marking these two occasions serves to commemorate struggles that, despite the work still unfinished, led to lasting change. The Emancipation Proclamation, the result of Lincoln’s resolve and the forceful actions of ordinary black men and women, turned slaves’ demands for freedom into executive action. One hundred years later, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin encapsulated a national movement for equality in their March on Washington. They introduced millions to Martin Luther King, Jr. and forced Americans, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, to seek a greater society.

But halfway between these chronological markers of progress lies a different anniversary in African American history this year: the centennial of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration. Wilson’s arrival in Washington, D.C., in March 1913 was a bleaker moment for social justice: his progressive administration nationalized Jim Crow racial discrimination by institutionalizing it inside the federal government. Noting this anniversary can and should recall struggle and protest, but it cannot soothe us with overcoming. It is a reminder of the selectivity and fitfulness of American progress and the dominance of American white supremacy.

In 1912, thousands of black men and women were working in federal offices in Washington, D.C. Since Reconstruction, black civil servants in Washington had been treated as equals and moved up in the government to positions of decent pay and real responsibility. Federal employment was a powerful means of social mobility for African Americans. Washington was an island of possibility for ambitious black men and women at a time when racism cordoned them off from most of the economy and set ceilings on the jobs they could get. Never free of racism or hardship, D.C. and its federal offices offered nonetheless a promising future for African Americans in a nation in which disfranchisement, peonage, violence, and terror were becoming hallmarks of black life. Holding presidential appointments such as Register of the Treasury and Auditor of the Navy Department as well as hundreds of white-collar clerical jobs, black men and women were doing the nation’s business at the turn of the twentieth century.  They were participants in the modern American state, and their full citizenship was providing both political and economic rewards.

All of this began to unravel during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, but neither Roosevelt nor his successor, William Howard Taft, shut down the patronage network.  Both Roosevelt and Taft appointed a number of African American politicians to federal positions, and ordinary black civil servants in Washington were largely protected from the nation’s encircling Jim Crow racism.  They lost those protections in March 1913, when Democrats took the reigns of Washington with Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.  Wilson’s administrators were intent on whitening government as part of their progressive reform efforts.  Wilsonians combined criticism of Republican corruption with calls for more efficient public administration, and they viewed black Republicans in federal offices as a key impediment to “good government.”

As Wilsonians finally destroyed the complex political and administrative network that had helped to mentor, promote, and support black civil servants, they played a crucial role in fusing racial identification and economic opportunity in the United States.  The once-reliable path to status and stability for black civil servants ended.  Promotions vanished, harassment and indignities multiplied, and in some cases, careers ended entirely.  All that was left was low-wage work that lacked the status, pay, and dignity of the white-collar careers that Republican administrators had made possible.

It was not just careers that came to an end in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington.  African Americans also lost a claim to their legitimacy as American citizens and participants in the national state.  Marked as corrupt and untrustworthy, black Americans have struggled ever since to clear their names as honest and trust-worthy citizens, a struggle that continues into our own time.

As we observe more uplifting anniversaries, we cannot let our celebrations of overcoming allow us to forget the deliberate and tenacious work of racists. African Americans, of course, have never lost their will and agency in the face of such pervasive power. But for so much of American history, white supremacy has been an indomitable force. Remembering uglier moments frames other times when hard work brought justice. Black protest busted a crack in the white edifice to let through slaves pursuing freedom, citizens pursuing equality. Black agency made these moments, but the power of white supremacy made them necessary.

Eric S. Yellin is associate professor of history and American studies at the University of Richmond and author of Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America.

The annual special kudos, billed under the full name Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater, recognize legit industry individuals and organizations whose work isn’t eligible for the Broadway kudos’ annual round of competitive awards.

This year’s honorees include agent William Craver, stage production manager Peter Lawrence, the nonprofit Career Transition For Dancers, and North Carolina’s own historical drama “The Lost Colony.”

Honorees list is rounded out by “Lost Colony,” a 75-year-old production that plays every summer on Roanoke Island in Manteo, N.C. One of the last remaining Federal Theater Projects, the big-cast show is a symphonic drama inspired by the mysterious disappearance of English colonists from the area in the 16th century. Current production designer is Broadway costumer William Ivey Long, also the chair of the American Theater Wing, one of the orgs that co-presents the Tonys every year.

The Tony Honors are handed out at a private cocktail reception, set this year for June 8, just ahead of the full kudocast skedded to be broadcast live on CBS from Radio City Musical Hall June 9.

In 1937, The Lost Colony, Paul Green’s dramatic retelling of the founding and mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony, opened to standing-room-only audiences and rave reviews. Since then, the beloved outdoor drama has played to more than 3 million people, and it is still going strong. Produced by the Roanoke Island Historical Association at the Waterside Theater near Manteo, North Carolina, The Lost Colony has run for more than seventy summers almost without interruption. (Production was suspended during World War II, when the threat of German submarines prowling the coast made an extended blackout necessary.)

The model for modern outdoor theater, The Lost Colony combines song, dance, drama, special effects, and music to breathe life into shadowy legend. The latest edition of the play, published by UNC Press in 2001, is edited with an introduction by Laurence Avery.

Bonus trivia: Some famous folks have taken turns as cast members in the legendary production: Andy Griffith and Carl Kasell, for instance!