In celebration of National Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, we’ve decided to share a virtual conversation hosted by the Center for Political Education featuring UNC Press author Johanna Fernández and Nadya Tannous from the Palestinian Youth Movement. Johanna Fernández is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernández has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. This was the third event in CPE’s “Writing the Third World” series, in which authors and organizers discuss a recent work of scholarship on internationalist struggles for liberation.
Johanna Fernández is associate professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York and editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Celebrating the second edition of Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia, our Spotify playlist offers a soundtrack for the migration saga chronicled in the book. Some of the artists included here are mentioned or quoted within the pages, and they combine to create an accompaniment well worthy of the epic story. The running order follows themes as they unfold in Wayfaring Strangers, and Spotify shuffle offers an intriguing sonic setting for anyone just dipping into the book.
“Barbara Allen”
by Dolly Parton with Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Altan
(Traditional arranged by Dolly Parton)
from Heartsongs: Live from Home (Columbia/Sony Music)
In his famous seventeenth century diary, Samuel Pepys speaks of hearing the actress Elizabeth Knepp singing the “little Scotch song of Barbary Allen.” This is the earliest existing reference to the song, well loved on both sides of the Atlantic. After crossing the ocean, “Barbara Allen” appeared on American broadsides and in songbooks such as the Forget Me Not Songster (along with “The Farmer’s Curst Wife,” track 12). American music icon Dolly Parton acknowledged the ballad’s transatlantic journey and timeless appeal in this live recording. Trading verses in English matched to Irish ones sung by Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Parton creates a magical pairing that encapsulates the Wayfaring Strangers music migration.
“It Was a’ For Our Rightfu’ King”
by Dougie MacLean
(Traditional arranged by Dougie MacLean)
from Craigie Dhu (Dunkeld Records)
Beginning in 1610, King James VI (Scotland) and I (England, Wales and Ireland) decided to pacify his Irish kingdom by “planting” English-speaking Presbyterians there. Border Scots and northern English, scraping a living from depleted lands, were offered arable farmland. People had been navigating back and forth between Scotland and Ireland for thousands of years, but the Plantation policy created a substantial Scottish presence in Ulster and set off waves of migration. When his son James II was deposed, Jacobite Scots rallied in Scotland and Ulster to support his cause. Contemporary Scots songwriter Dougie MacLean sings these verses, set by Robert Burns to a traditional tune he had collected.
“Bidh Clann Ulaidh” (The Clans of Ulster)
by Catherine-Ann MacPhee
(Traditional arranged by Catherine-Ann MacPhee)
from Chi Mi’n Geamhradh (Greentrax Recordings)
“The Clans of Ulster will be at your wedding” promises the singer of this traditional Scots Gaelic lullaby, as she blesses her child’s imagined marriage. The families she names attest to the ancient links between the west of Scotland and Ireland, and the blood ties between some Ulster and Scottish clans, including Clan Donald. From Barra in the Outer Hebrides, Catherine-Ann MacPhee began her singing career at candle-lit ceilidhs in her native village and now resides in Nova Scotia, another location with historic links to Scotland through migration.
“Benton’s Jig/Benton’s Dream”
by Patrick Street
(Jacky Daly/Benton Flippen)
from No. 2 Patrick Street (Green Linnet Records)
There had been a modest flow of emigration from Ulster to America before 1718; in that year, it began in earnest. An estimated 250,000 people departed Ulster for America between 1718 and 1800, and 85 percent were Ulster Scots emigrating into Philadelphia and the Delaware valley ports. Onboard the emigrant vessels, music and dance became a mainstay of passengers’ lives at sea, and the fiddle accompanied many an Atlantic crossing. Irish band Patrick Street, with fiddler Kevin Burke and Jacky Daly on accordion, capture the spirit of the voyage. The music shifts from Irish-jig time to Appalachian old-time as Daly’s “Benton’s Jig” blends with North Carolina fiddler Benton Flippen’s composition “Benton’s Dream”. In this way, the tune crosses into the more-syncopated and rhythmic Appalachian style, which evolved from New World banjo-fiddle pairings.
“The Rambling Irishman”
by Arcady
(Traditional)
from Many Happy Returns (Shanachie Records)
A variety of threads and textures colored the musical fabric of Ulster as smaller ethnic groups were attracted there by the linen industry—Welsh, French Huguenots, and English Plantation settlers among them. So over time, people embraced other forms of singing, including two or more a capella singers joining in unison. This became a hallmark of the Ulster singing style that the Scots-Irish carried to the New World. Although homesickness was often the theme in emigration songs, other verses give the impression of maintaining a brave face as thoughts turned to anticipating the life that lay ahead. Here the song is sung by Niamh Parsons (with Arcady) as she is joined by The Voice Squad who do add harmonies in this recorded version.
“The Winding River Roe”
by Cara Dillon
(Traditional arranged by Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman)
from Sweet Liberty (Charcoal Records)
The first arrivals in Pennsylvania held clear images of home in their minds and fond memories of family close to their hearts. Not all Scots-Irish immigrants were able to settle though, and their lingering homesickness might find an outlet in sad songs. Especially poignant are the verses avowing that one day, the immigrant would return to the old home place. If they accepted that it would not happen in the physical realm, they might yet hope for return from exile in the spirit world and, until then, in their dreams. Irish vocalist Cara Dillon originally comes from Dungiven, County Londonderry, near the spot where the Rivers Roe, Owenreagh, and Owenbeg meet at the foot of Benbradagh. The gentle Northern Irish countryside provides the setting for this sad song, arranged by Cara and her husband and musical partner, Sam Lakeman.
“The Gypsy Laddies”
by Jeannie Robertson
(Traditional)
from The Great Scots Traditional Ballad Singer (Topic Records)
(paired with track 8). In Wayfaring Strangers, singer Jack Beck notes that of the top ten ballads collected in southern Appalachia, seven were Scottish, and the second most commonly sung was “The Gypsy Laddie.” Emerging hundreds of years ago in Scotland, the ballad is known throughout the British Isles, Ireland, and North America. It is associated with the Ayrshire house of Cassilis (pronounced “CA-sels”) and sometimes held to be based on a true elopement incident, although it is probably an amalgamation of historical strands. The story of handsome gypsies enthralling a noble lady with their sweet singing has made it very popular with the Scottish Travellers. More than a hundred versions have been collected in Britain, Ireland, and North America. Jeannie Robertson (1908-1975), who grew up in the traveller life, had a vast store of songs and stories and is recognised as a traditional singer of international standing.
– paired with –
“Gypsy Davy”
by Julee Glaub
(Traditional arranged by Julee Glaub)
from Blue Waltz (Toubadouress Music)
(paired with track 7). The song that originated in Scotland as “The Gypsy Laddie” or “The Earl o’ Cassillis Lady” traveled through Ireland as the “Raggle Taggle Gypsy” or “Seven Yellow Gypsies” and settled on American shores as “Black Jack Davy” and “Gypsy Davy.” It is one of the most popular and well traveled of the ballads, and a good example of what can happen to songs as they migrate, with the magical elements in this Scottish version brought back down to earth in Appalachia. The song’s narrative remains strong across the miles, although by the time it evolved into “Gypsy Davy,” it had moved among song cultures from other parts of the world, both old and new. Woody Guthrie recorded “Gypsy Davy,” and Bob Dylan included “Blackjack Davey” on “Good As I Been to You” (1992). Swannanoa Gathering Traditional Song Week Coordinator Julee Glaub Weems draws upon her North Carolina roots and Irish travels in her music. Pete Sutherland accompanies Julee’s singing and offers a clawhammer banjo welcome to the southern Appalachians for “Gypsy Davy.”
“Pretty Saro”
by John Doyle
(Traditional arranged by John Doyle)
from Evening Comes Early (Shanachie Entertainment)
Newfound freedom rarely brought immediate benefits. House and land ownership could be a long time coming to the Scots-Irish. Families struggling to find farmland and newly released indentured servants would dream of gaining the privileged “freeholder” status mentioned in the old ballad “Pretty Saro.” The term gives a clue to the British Isles origins of the ballad, originating in early seventeenth-century England. Early twentieth-century songcatchers, including Dorothy Scarborough, rediscovered it in the North Carolina mountains, where it is still widely sung. Bob Dylan had recorded the song in his “Self Portrait” sessions in 1970, but it did not make the final cut for the album. It was eventually released on Dylan’s box set “Another Self Portrait” in 2013. Singer and guitarist John Doyle—Irish native and Asheville, North Carolina, resident—bestows a dreamy quality upon his arrangement and notes the similarity between “Pretty Saro” and the Irish song “Bunclody.”
“Indian Whoop”
by James Bryan and Carl Jones
(Traditional)
from Two Pictures (Martin Records)
One of the very earliest American fiddle tunes, this one was included in G. P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels, an old collection of southern fiddle music with many tunes of Scots-Irish origin. Mississippi string band Hoyt Ming and his Pep Steppers recorded the tune named “Indian War Whoop” in the 1920s with Rozelle Ming flatfoot dancing to the rhythm. Historians of old-time music sometimes point to this tune as an example of “hollering,” as fiddlers would often shout along with the high notes at the end of phrases, with each player having a trademark whoop. A version of the tune was recorded by John Hartford for inclusion in the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? From Alabama, James Bryan is held to be the finest southern-style fiddler of his generation and was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. He has taught on the staffs of the Augusta Heritage Center and the Swannanoa Gathering, as has songwriter-musician Carl Jones.
“The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife”
by Connie Dover
(Traditional arranged by Connie Dover, Roger Landes)
from The Road from Erin (Sono Luminus)
(paired with track 12). Versions of this lively ballad have been traced back to the early seventeenth century throughout the British Isles and Ireland. Usually known as “The Farmer’s Curst Wife,” “Kellyburnbraes” is a Scottish variant collected by Robert Burns for The Scots Musical Museum, Vol IV. Folktales in many European countries tell of a wife so fierce that she terrorized the devil himself. Seosamh Ó hÉanaí (Joe Heaney), the great Irish traditional singer from Connemara, County Galway, was the original source for this particular version, sung by American folk singer Connie Dover, an inductee into the Missouri Music Hall of Fame.
– paired with –
“The Farmer’s Curst Wife”
by Pete Seeger
(Traditional)
from American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 2 (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)
(paired with track 11). The tale of a fearsome wife who terrifies even demons is ancient and widespread, appearing in a sixth-century Hindu fable collection, the Panchatantra. It seems to have traveled westward through the Middle East into Europe and onward to America early in the Scots-Irish emigration era. As with “Gypsy Davy” (track 8), the American version of the tale lightens up the story a bit, removing references to the terrifying spouse’s more violent acts toward the demons she encounters. Pete Seeger’s arrangement locates the ballad firmly within America’s folk song canon, his trademark long-neck banjo contrasting with the more urgent Irish instrumentation of track 11.
“Young Hunting/Elzig’s Farewell”
by Sheila Kay Adams
(Traditional arranged by Sheila Kay Adams)
from All The Other Fine Things (Granny Dell Records)
English variants of the song titled “Earl Richard” and “The Proud Girl” remain closely tied to the Scottish original, all detailing the violent act of a scorned woman. The song appears in Motherwell’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, so it would have likely been in the repertoire of Scots who migrated to the Ulster Plantations. In all the Scottish versions, a bird witnesses the murder, but it seems to have flown before the song arrived on U.S. shores, where it is often sung as “Henry Lee” and “Love Henry.” Sheila Kay Adams of Sodom, North Carolina sings her family’s version, passed through seven generations of ballad singers. She accompanies herself on banjo, with Josh Goforth, fiddle and John Doyle, guitar.
“Black is the Colour”
by Sara Grey
(Traditional arranged by Sara Grey)
from Sandy Boys (Fellside Recordings)
Musicologist and collector Alan Lomax asserted this song’s Scottish origins, calling the American versions “re-makes.” John Jacob Niles retained a modal setting when he contributed one of its more popular melodies. When African American spiritual singing spilled over from plantations, it flowed throughout other regions, including the Appalachians. Sara Grey identifies this song as a Scottish “parlour ballad” that traveled in and out of the African American tradition. She based her version on the singing of Dellie Norton—“Granny Dell” to Sheila Kay Adams—feeling that her treatment of the song was strongly influenced by the African American singing style.
“Nottamun Town”
by Jean Ritchie
(Traditional)
from Mountain Hearth & Home (Greenhays Recordings)
Jean Ritchie learned this song from her Uncle Jason Ritchie. It was one of many family songs she carried back to England, Scotland and Ireland in 1952-53 on her Fulbright scholarship travels, to trace their origins. English folk singer Shirley Collins learned it from Jean and recorded it in 1964, with Scottish guitarist and singer Bert Jansch following her in 1966 on his influential album “Jack Orion”. When Fairport Convention recorded the song with Sandy Denny in 1968, its return back across the Atlantic was complete. It is one of a number of ballad versions that were effectively repatriated by Jean. Back in the U.S., Bob Dylan heard Jean’s version of “Nottamun Town” and used the melody to record his own song “Masters of War” in 1963. Although a traditional song, this particular arrangement had been in the Ritchie family for generations. His lawyers paid Jean a legal settlement against any future writing credit claims. “Nottamun Town” is a great example of old songs continuing to influence contemporary writing, and of the music migration flowing in both directions.
“Single Girl, Married Girl”
by Atwater Donnelly
(Traditional)
from The Blackest Crow (Rabbit Island Music)
This early frontier favorite has many relatives, including the Irish song “Do You Love and Apple” and “Still I Love Him,” collected by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger for their anthology Travellers’ Songs from England and Scotland. The Carter Family made the song famous as their “Single Girl, Married Girl,” released in 1928 on a 78-rpm record. They re-recorded it during the last months of Sara and A. P. Carter’s marriage in 1935 at a slow pace, with Sara Carter singing at a much lower pitch. Aubrey Atwater and Elwood Donnelly explore the song in one of several collections they’ve recorded of traditional American/Celtic songs and Carter Family favorites, many collected during their performances throughout Appalachia. With Aubrey Atwater on Appalachian dulcimer, the song is very much at home.
“Shady Grove”
by Doc Watson and David Holt
(Traditional arranged by Doc Watson and David Holt)
from Legacy (High Windy Audio)
The English ballad “Matty Groves,” dating from the seventeenth century or perhaps even earlier, describes an adulterous tryst that ends in murder. When Francis James Child collected the ballad, he listed it as “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”. On its transatlantic travels, the melody ended up covering more ground than the ballad narrative; “Shady Grove,” based upon the “Matty Groves” melody, arose in the southern Appalachians around the time of the Civil War. The popular American descendant is noteworthy for its many lyric variations, all in a gentler, brighter vein than the root ballad. Doc Watson sang it as a courtship song to his wife, Rosa Lee, in the early 1940s when he was perfecting his signature flat-pick guitar style. This version, with David Holt partnering on clawhammer banjo, was recorded live at the Diana Wortham Theatre in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2001.
“Willie’s Lady”
by Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer
(Traditional arranged by Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer)
from Child Ballads (Wilderland Records)
Ballads flowed freely between Sweden, Denmark, and Norway and crossed into Aberdeenshire in Scotland’s North East. Scandinavian variants with similar plots to “Willie’s Lady” mark this ballad as an example of those music migrations, and it has all the hallmarks of classic North East balladry. James Francis Child collected only one version of this ballad from Scotland, but he cites a few other stories in his notes, including tales in “classic mythology” where women are prevented from giving birth. Child’s source was Anna Gordon, better known as Mrs. Brown of Falkland, who held one of the most significant and oldest ballad collections drawn from her family’s oral tradition. With all their twisting story lines and hypnotic melodies, the Child Ballad canon continues to captivate musicians. “Willie’s Lady” is one of many that endure in this way, having been recorded by English folksinger and guitarist Martin Carthy among others. Attracted by the archetypes and psychological dramas, Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer take the material to new audiences by reclaiming the songs in their own voices and allowing the stories to build in their vocal/guitar duo.
“Wayfaring Stranger”
by Johnny Cash
(Traditional arranged by Johnny Cash)
from American III: Solitary Man (American Recordings)
Although the exact origins of this popular spiritual are unknown, the lyrics of “Wayfaring Stranger” were first published in 1858 in The Christian Songster. Also known as “(I Am a) Poor Wayfaring Stranger”, the ancient Scottish ballad melody of “The Dowie Dens of Yarrow” is held to be the source spring of a tune stream that flows through this American spiritual. Its timelessness is reflected the number and range of artists to record the song, from Burl Ives and Emmylou Harris to Dolly Parton and Ed Sheeran. Johnny Cash recorded this version towards the end of his life, capturing the sense of vulnerability that infused many of his latter recordings.
“Wayfaring Stranger/British Field March” (instrumental version)
by Timothy Cummings
(Traditional adapted and arranged by Timothy Cummings, Caleb Elder, Pete Sutherland) from The Piper in the Holler (birchenmusic.com)
More than a few sets of bagpipes must have crossed the ocean from Scotland and Ulster, but they never became established on the Pennsylvania frontier or in southern Appalachia. Most theories explaining this settle around the timing of Scots-Irish emigration: in seventeenth-century Ireland, Oliver Cromwell’s troops destroyed many sets of pipes, while the instrument was sidelined for a while after the 1745 defeat of the clans in Scotland. Moreover, pioneers would surely have found them difficult to maintain in the New World, and pipe makers would have needed access to materials and some community of players to sustain their craft. So in Appalachia, it was left to fiddlers, dulcimer players, and banjo pickers to express the drones and modal moods of pipe music. Timothy Cummings is committed to reconnecting the musical traditions of Appalachia and Scottish piping, recording what may be the first bagpipe album devoted to Appalachian music including our book’s signature tune, “Wayfaring Stranger.” Alan Jabbour collected the “British Field March” from Henry Reed. According to folklore, this tune was played as British soldiers retreated from the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Attuned to the Scottish Lowland heritage of the Scots-Irish, Tim plays Border pipes, with Pete Sutherland on clawhammer banjo and Caleb Elder on fiddle to present the sound of old-time piping.
“The Parting Glass” (instrumental version)
by Al Petteway
(Traditional arranged by Al Petteway)
from Mountain Guitar (Fairewood Studios)
“The Parting Glass” belongs to a family of songs that can be traced back to the early 1600s in Scotland, originally as “Good Night And Joy Be Wi’ You A’”. Most of the text of the modern “Parting Glass” came from these Scottish versions, sung to a different tune that was popular for over 300 years. Eventually an Irish melody of unknown origin became the preferred one, settling with the song in a farewell anthem for emigrants leaving for a new life in America. North Carolina’s Grammy-winning instrumentalist Al Petteway is known for his sensitive arrangements of traditional and original tunes on guitar and other stringed instruments. His version of the melody captures the emotion of the bittersweet farewell.
“The Parting Glass”
by Hozier
(Traditional arranged by Hozier)
from The Parting Glass (Live from the Late, Late Show)
Still widely sung on both sides of the Atlantic, “The Parting Glass” was well known in Scotland and Ireland long before Robert Burns’s universal song of farewell, “Auld Lang Syne” came into the popular repertoire. As an eighteenth-century broadside, it would likely have been distributed among the inns and taverns close to the quays where the immigrant sailing ships were docked. It has been sung innumerable times since then, from Scotland to Ulster and Appalachia. The 1959 recording by The Clancy Bothers and Tommy Makem has been most influential and Bob Dylan used this as a model for his own song “Restless Farewell.” In more recent times, “The Parting Glass” has become a song of tribute to lost comrades or loved ones and many people have been drawn to it to during the Covid-19 pandemic. Irish singer Hozier performed this version on Irish television’s Late, Late Show as dedication to everyone who lost their lives to Covid-19.
“A Mountaineer is Always Free”
by Tim O’Brien
(Tim O’Brien and Pierce Pettis)
from The Crossing (Fairewood Studios)
Grammy-winner Tim O’Brien is a native of West Virginia. The seal of his home state bears the inscription “Montani Semper Liberi” – “Mountaineers Are Always Free”. Like this song, the motto captures the sense of pride immigrants must have felt, building their lives in the wilderness of the Appalachian frontier and demonstrating their legendary resilience in the face of many a challenge. Multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter O’Brien co-wrote the song with Alabama singer songwriter Pierce Pettis. He recorded it as part of “The Crossing”, a collection in which O’Brien explored the Irish and Scottish roots of American Bluegrass and Country music. It serves as a tribute to the indomitable spirit of the Scots-Irish and to all immigrants across time.. Each has their own migration story worthy of a song.
Doug Orr and Fiona Ritchie
[The Wayfaring Strangers Spotify Playlist is curated by Fiona Ritchie for the second edition of “Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia”, foreword by Dolly Parton with a new Afterword by the authors.]
Fiona Ritchie MBE is the founder, producer, and host of National Public Radio’s The Thistle & Shamrock and an inductee into the Folk DJ Hall of Fame. Her books include The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Celtic Music and Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia.
Doug Orr is president emeritus of Warren Wilson College, where he founded the Swannanoa Gathering music workshops. His books include The North Carolina Atlas: Portrait for a New Century and Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia.
The following is a guest blog post by Caroline E. Janney, author of Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. In this dramatic new history of the weeks and months after Appomattox, Caroline E. Janney reveals that Lee’s surrender was less an ending than the start of an interregnum marked by military and political uncertainty, legal and logistical confusion, and continued outbursts of violence. Janney takes readers from the deliberations of government and military authorities to the ground-level experiences of common soldiers.
Happy belated Book Birthday to Ends of War, officially on sale now!
One hundred and fifty-nine years ago, on September 22, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary emancipation proclamation. The final proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, freeing enslaved people in the portions of the Confederacy not controlled by United States troops. But as Black men and women as well as historians have long understood, the Emancipation Proclamation was but one piece of the process of emancipation – a process that would extend well beyond the surrender of Lee’s Confederate army at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.
Emancipation had not been one of the terms of surrender and had not yet been secured by the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification. While most slave owners bitterly conceded they were no longer entitled to control the flesh of other humans, at least some Confederate soldiers remained intent on protecting their property. Only days after the surrender, cavalry adjutant Robert Hubard of Buckingham County, Virginia, attempted to hide both horses and “3 or 4 Negroes” from occupying Union troops. Maj. Henry Kyd Douglas, still fuming that his “boy, Buck,” had absconded from Appomattox with his horse and personal baggage, later wrote that his first purpose upon leaving the surrender field was “to go in search of my man and my properties.” Even in defeat, these men failed to acknowledge the Emancipation Proclamation. For them it had been a moot point.
While Confederate soldiers sought to protect their human property, the presence of United States Colored Troops served as a stark reminder of both slavery’s demise and the rise of a new social order for white southerners. The greatest nightmare of white southerners, slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, had long been that of a slave uprising. For many Confederates, the USCT represented just this: armed Black men sent into the South with northern sanction to kill white men, a fear that had escalated after Confederates surrendered their weapons. Paroled Confederates clearly felt the reversal of antebellum power. Upon reaching Petersburg on April 17, chaplain William Wiatt asserted he had been “grossly insulted by a Negro soldier.” The next day at City Point, he was again “insulted again by a Negro soldier.” Such was not the deference white men expected from African Americans.
While some of Lee’s men complained about Black soldiers, others later claimed to have responded with deadly force. When Pvt. Hartwell Koon of Finegan’s Florida Brigade accused a USCT sentinel of kicking him while the parolees awaited an ocean transport at City Point, tensions quickly escalated. Another Floridian struck the Black soldier in retaliation before an officer, who had been allowed to retain his sidearms per the surrender terms, ran his sword clear through the Black guard. Such actions might have been overlooked by Confederate authorities, but the paroled soldiers realized that in a post-Appomattox world, they could be charged with war crimes by the U.S. government. They hurried back to a nearby ship to avoid getting caught, but escaping without penalty must have emboldened the band of Floridians. Still waiting for their ship to depart City Point on April 17, they ventured ashore, where they learned of Lincoln’s assassination. Seeing the rebels amid the mourning services, several African Americans minced no words, cursing the parolees “in a very vile language.” Again, the Floridians claimed to respond with deadly violence, David L. Geer of the 5th Florida recalling years later that “some of the boys strung up those coons on the pickets that made the fence around the park.” Evading punishment once more, they climbed aboard the U.S. transport Wilmington on April 22, bound for Savannah.
On its face, Geer’s account seems improbable. Even if the Confederate soldiers were armed, the enlisted men would not have been, whereas the Black soldier would have had a gun. Moreover, it is unlikely that such brutalities would not have been noticed by white Union soldiers. If Geer fabricated the account decades later, that is significant in itself.
But evidence does exist of Confederate soldiers murdering Union soldiers. From Richmond in late April, Thomas Morris Chester reported that “rebel officers continue to strut about in the uniform in which they delighted to murder Union soldiers, in a spirit which is almost beyond the degree of loyal forbearance.” There were likewise several cases of white southerners tried by military commissions in the spring of 1865 for assaulting and murdering Black soldiers.
Given the centrality of violence to slavery, it is little wonder that defeated white southern men resorted to deadly force in response to what they perceived as the slightest provocation from Black men who now held positions of authority—and guns. Yet these violent encounters also underscored the degree to which wartime atrocities by Confederates against the USCT continued after April 9, 1865.
Caroline E. Janney is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia.
The following is a guest blog post by William A. Blair, author of The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction. Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen’s Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction, which are surprisingly resonant with the present day: How do you prove something happened in a highly partisan atmosphere where the credibility of information is constantly challenged? And what form should that information take to be considered as fact?
A century after the destruction of the African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ordinary Americans have learned how easily shameful chapters in our history can be forgotten. Historians of the early twentieth-century U.S. knew that racial tension and violence marked the era, with Tulsa a stark example of a larger problem. The horror of that action reemerged in public consciousness through the persistent efforts by scholars and the retelling of this important story in books, articles, documentaries, commemorations, and podcasts.
Americans, however, still have a limited knowledge of the shocking scale of racial violence in the post-Civil War South. Suppression of Black voting fueled the terrorism in 1868. The Ku Klux Klan represented only a portion of the brutality perpetrated by white southerners determined to maintain white supremacy as they faced both defeat and the emancipation of formerly enslaved people.
This history can be reclaimed because of information in federal archives grouped under the provocative title of “The Records Relating to Murders and Outrages.” Military officers and agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau stationed in the South carefully gathered the voluminous evidence of atrocities committed against African Americans. Black witnesses who reported these stories often risked their lives in an attempt to seek justice. The material offers a glimpse into the racial violence occurring in rural, isolated regions that otherwise could have gone unnoticed.
One such massacre came in the fall of 1868 in Bossier and Caddo parishes, both located in an isolated corner of northwest Louisiana. A Union military officer supervising the region speculated that white Southerners had killed perhaps 100 Black people. The report mentioned that nine freedmen “were taken to [the] bank of Red River and told to swim for their lives, at which they plunged in and were shot as they rose to the surface.” Assailants also gunned down three freedmen making a coffin for a murdered friend. The officer believed perhaps another 70 freedpeople had been killed in other parts of Bossier Parrish. Gaining information remained difficult since terrorists threatened to kill investigators.
The slayings had begun around October 1 as a white trader named Gibson stopped for corn at Shady Grove Plantation in Bossier Parish. Gibson saw a Black man sitting nearby and yelled, “You was all damned radicals.” Once he discerned the freedman would vote Republican in the presidential election, he leveled a weapon and fired, but missed. Black men captured and bound him but left him unharmed. News spread, as well as unsubstantiated rumors that two white men had been killed. By the next morning, white people seeking vengeance escalated the violence to unimaginable proportions.
White vigilantes streamed into Shady Grove to fire indiscriminately on freedpeople. They immediately shot down eight men and two women—both killed for pleading for the lives of their husbands. Raiders took seven men to a neighboring place, killing six. When they learned one survived, they went back to finish the job. White assailants came upon a Black man who refused to doff his hat. They put a chain around his neck, cut his throat, and hanged him on a tree where he stayed for three days.
Mass executions were common. Terrorists seized thirty Black people from around Shreveport on October 1, tied them with ropes, and killed them from behind. On October 12, murderers burned down a building in which they had chained seven Black people. In a different instance, five Black men were taken from their work at a brickyard, marched to the Red River with hands tied, and then shot down.
Known primarily to local historians and scholars of the state’s reconstruction—but absent from much of the general scholarship of the period—the violence in Bossier and Caddo parishes in Louisiana constituted perhaps the worst death toll for Black people during early Reconstruction. One historian has documented 185 deaths in these two parishes, with government records estimating perhaps 200 slain.
Newspapers carried some accounts, but nineteenth-century Americans lived in a world of partisan journalism that effectively created news bubbles that allowed the opposition to dismiss what they did not want to believe. A toxic partisan and racial atmosphere contributed to the tendency among whites to overlook the atrocities. Like the Tulsa massacre, this tragic episode might have been lost were it not for the Freedmen’s Bureau officers and the freedpeople who risked their lives to bear witness to these atrocities.
William A. Blair is the Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor Emeritus of Middle American History at Penn State University.
The New York Times called Wayfaring Strangers upon its publication in 2014 “essential . . . a gorgeous gift book.”
Watch for a follow up blog post focused on the accompanying Spotify Wayfaring Strangers playlist that will feature music notes on tracks curated by Fiona Ritchie for this new edition.
Reflecting in 2021 on the passage of time since Wayfaring Strangers was first published in 2014, it helps to reach once again for the words of the late Scottish poet, songwriter, and collector Hamish Henderson. His metaphor of the carrying stream, the unknowable source of tradition and creativity, ever flowing and always replenished, is reassuring when performing arts have been stilled by a global pandemic. Whenever the carrying stream appears quiet on the surface, we take comfort in the knowledge that it is, in fact, never still. Onward it flows, meandering along a never-ending course. Henderson also wrote about injustice, dignity, equality, international solidarity, and harmony with the natural world. At this particular time, his poetry and activism speak to us, perhaps more than ever, and remind us of the power of words and music.
Much has changed since 2014. Against a backdrop of dramatic social and political reorganization, cultural dialogues across the Atlantic World have gained new momentum. The Transatlantic Sessions television series produced for BBC Scotland and RTÉ Ireland, featuring performances by Scottish, Irish, English, and North American folk roots and country artists, is now critically acclaimed on all shores. Bluegrass and Americana music fuel the popularity of the growing I-Grass/Celtigrass genre (Irish-influenced bluegrass). In 2019, Carnegie Hall’s landmark festival, Migrations, the Making of America, held performances and events all across New York City. The celebration showed how American culture has always evolved through the movement of people who are often forced together by their circumstances. The musical legacies of transatlantic crossings from Scotland and Ireland provided a focal point for this ambitious festival.
Since we started our work on Wayfaring Strangers, a particular thread in the musical tapestry continues to galvanize conversation, as a generation of young Black artists retells the story of the banjo. It had originated in Black communities but was locked down as a white instrument by a fledgling recording industry only too keen to obscure its African origins. The members of Our Native Daughters and other artists continue to correct the banjo’s narrative. This work calls on us to honor all facets of the musical journey chronicled in this book and to recognize the diversity that created, and continues to enrich, American music. Today this quest encompasses the Black Banjo Reclamation Project and extends through storytelling and literature. Multidisciplinary Kentucky artist Frank X. Walker introduced the term “Affrilachia” in his writing on African American and Appalachian identity, and he is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets. When all hues and textures are equally visible, Appalachia’s interwoven culture is at its most enthralling
Our journey since publication has made wayfarers of us, too. We exchanged amazed glances in August 2015 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the world’s largest public celebration of the written word, where Wayfaring Strangers opened the evening program. In 2019 we visited New York City, signing books at Carnegie Hall as part of Migrations: The Making of America, amazed again that the book had paved our way to such a storied location. We collaborated on a concert with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Berklee College of Music at Glasgow’s City Halls, as part of Celtic Connections, and with Peggy Seeger and Alan Reid at the Birnam Book Festival.
Our book tours and presentations included stops in Portobello, Belfast, the Ulster-American Folk Park, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Along the trail, people shared their stories with us, and the warmth, and sometimes the tears, of audience members who were moved to offer their own family histories and musical experiences has stayed with us. It reminds us that we might all try to carry on the important work of tradition-bearers, interviewing senior family members, friends, or companions so that their life experiences are captured and preserved. Among the more than three million recordings and radio broadcasts in the sound archives at the Library of Congress are many rare gems captured in family homes on wax cylinder, digital file, and every sound technology in between. It is precious stuff indeed. A favorite sign in a Big Stone Gap, Virginia, bookstore that reads “a good book has no ending” reminds us that new Voices of Tradition will continue the story. We will be forever grateful to our original voices, the forty-three tradition-bearers who shaped the book’s narrative, sharing their wisdom and anecdotes from locations across the map. Eight of these voices are now silent, a sad marker of the passing years, but their voices speak clearly from these pages, and their musical legacies will live on.
The three mainstay locations on our tour map—Scotland, Ulster, and Appalachia—have been cultural overachievers. The philosophers of the eighteenth- century Scottish Enlightenment greatly influenced America’s founding fathers, and their enlightenment culture reverberated globally through intellectual and scientific discovery. Major literary figures such as Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, and James Macpherson emerged during this era, and their works traveled across the Atlantic as part of the Scottish diaspora. From North to South, the island of Ireland nourished poets, writers, and troubadours honing their crafts by the hearths of their cottages and inns, among them Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, and Joe Holmes. Amid the coves and hollows of Appalachia, despite relentless economic impoverishment, the “way back yonder” ballads and tunes became a wellspring for Jean Ritchie, Doc Watson, David Holt, the Seegers, and so many others, a songbook legacy that music historian Ron Pen calls “the music that America comes home to.”
Charting the musical voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia, one of history’s great migration sagas, and sharing stories at book presentations, we remain mindful of this: while some of these people traveled of their own volition in the hope of freedom from poverty and persecution, others did not travel of their own free will. Deportees from debtors prisons and indentured servants all faced ongoing restrictions and harsh conditions. Through the generations, their traits of resilience and tenacity drove these settlers to establish new communities in the New World. This was, of course, a landscape already long inhabited by Indigenous tribal nations who in turn became dis- placed in their own country.
We are all immigrants within some branch of our ancestral family tree, and the forces that compel human movement are unstoppable. A multicultural pluralistic society, for all its advantages, is still too often beleaguered by the suspicion of “otherness” that plagued earlier waves of migrants, and walls are raised, both literally and figuratively. Gathering together through music offers a space for compassion and understanding, a bridge across the barbed wire, transcend- ing the barriers of language and custom, as it did for Ulster fiddler Joe Holmes and the inclusive musical community he described in our book: “This sort of ceilidh with song, story and dance was common to many houses in County Antrim and other parts of Ulster irrespective of religious affiliation and background . . . fireside philosophers, rustic bards, storytellers, balladeers, traditional musicians and dancers . . . ordinary people with extraordinary skills and imaginations.”
The COVID-19 global pandemic created a void—no ceilidhs or concerts—and musicians, venues, and arts organizations suffered greatly, their incomes disappearing overnight. From the Mount Airy Old-Time Fiddlers Convention in North Carolina to the Niel Gow Festival in Perthshire, music festivals were canceled, and many moved to online platforms for remote performance and teaching. As musical life migrated to the internet, prospects for international collaboration expanded, and some artists voyaged far and wide to connect, exchange, and explore. Nowadays, rare vintage vinyl collections are uploaded, and the riches of field recordings, once tied to geographical locations, are accessible worldwide to researchers and sleuth- ing musicians. And so a generation of young Black woman artists discovers that the banjo really does be- long to them, for example, and young ballad singers everywhere access song and sound archives to learn from tradition-bearers now long gone. These online resources became a creative lifeline when the pandemic compelled most musicians to take indefinite down time. Online life also brought far-flung communities even closer together, including a Sister Cities/Twin Towns partnership between Asheville, North Carolina, and the villages of Dunkeld and Birnam in Scotland, formally established on location in 2017. With the advent of travel restrictions and the suspension of in-person gatherings during the pandemic, participants in celebrations, musical exchanges, and church services linked hands across the water to their twinned communities using streaming technologies to unite a fractured world. For all the enjoyment of online musical projects, however, providing performances free or by donation is not sustainable for most artists. The brightest creative sparks ignite when people are sitting shoulder to shoulder and sharing together. The community of music that flourished by the Ulster hearth of Joe Holmes, and thrives today in settings like the Swannanoa Gathering music camp at Warren Wilson College, will take its place once more at the heart of the traditional music scene.
Finally, as we add another chapter to this journey, we offer a wayfarers’ toast to our esteemed publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, always a source of undying and masterly support. UNC Press is one of the oldest and most highly respected university presses in the United States, a status richly earned, as we can attest, from our earliest book conversations to the publication of this new edition.
In 2022, our friends and colleagues at UNC Press mark their centennial. In celebration, we offer these lines from a poem by Jackie Kay, Scotland’s Makar (national poet laureate) from 2016 to 2021, commissioned by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay to mark the end of 2020. We dedicate it to UNC Press at 100 and to all of you who venture along the wayfaring path of discovery.
But the lone piper fills the pipes with air; our individual breaths blow oot in prayer, wee church or secular, over these rooftops; to travel endlessly and not to stop . . .
Till the hands wring the minutes out of the clock and the new year turns its key in the old year’s lock.
It’s the first weekend of the National Women’s Studies Association virtual annual meeting. We hope you’ll visit our NWSA 2021 virtual booth to browse our new and recent titles, to connect with editor Mark Simpson-Vos, and to learn more about our Gender and American Culture series.
New Titles in Women and Gender History from UNC Press
To browse these titles and more, please be sure to visit our National Women’s Studies Association virtual booth. Use promo code 01DAH40 at checkout to receive a 40% discount. And if your order totals over $75, domestic U.S. shipping is FREE.
The following is a guest blog post by Lorien Foote, author of Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. Blending military and cultural history, Lorien Foote’s rich and insightful book sheds light on how Americans fought over what it meant to be civilized and who should be extended the protections of a civilized world.
Today is National POW/MIA Recognition Day, a time when the United States remembers and honors those who are missing in action or who are being held as prisoners of war. Currently, there are more than 81,600 Americans who are still missing: https://www.dpaa.mil/Our-Missing/Past-Conflicts/.
This day is an appropriate time to tell the unknown story of three Black servicemen from the United States Navy who were prisoners during the American Civil War. Their determination to be remembered and accounted for changed the fate of other Black captives held by the Confederate States of America.
Orin H. Brown, a barber by trade, William H. Johnson, an unskilled laborer, and William Wilson, a waiter, were born free in New York. At different times, each enlisted in the United States Navy, and all three shipped from New York on September 26, 1862 on the gunboat Isaac Smith. The vessel sailed to Charleston Harbor, where it was part of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The Isaac Smith often patrolled the Stono River.
On January 30, 1863, Confederates set a trap for the Isaac Smith and her crew. They camouflaged artillery and sharpshooters behind bushes and trees, and when the vessel anchored opposite a plantation, opened fire. The Federals were caught in tremendous crossfire and a bend in the river. A shot through the engine stopped the vessel, and its commander surrendered the entire crew. Confederates captured 11 officers, and 108 enlisted men, including Brown, Johnson, and Wilson. They took the prisoners to the Charleston Jail.
Confederates immediately paroled all of the white captives from the Isaac Smith. U.S. naval authorities had no idea what happened to Brown, Johnson, and Wilson. Confederate commanders in South Carolina refused inquiries on the subject.
Confederates considered all Black men in Federal uniform, even if they had been born free in northern states, to be slaves engaged in insurrection rather than legitimate combatants entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war. On May 1, 1863, the Confederate Congress passed resolutions that required captured Black men who were citizens of northern states to be handed over to state authorities to be tried as felons.
Brown, Johnson, and Wilson were confined in a small cell in the Charleston Jail. They were fed nothing but a little cornbread and water. They had sympathizers in the jail and in the city, however, who smuggled them paper and pencil, smuggled out the letter they wrote, and delivered it to the United States Consul in Nassau, the Bahamas.
“Our sufferings are unspeakable,” the American prisoners wrote. “In the name of God, are we to be protected and aided or are we to be left here to die? We belong to the United States Navy and we ask for aid and protection.”
The consul forwarded the letter to Gideon Welles, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, who gave it to Edwin Stanton, the U.S. Secretary of War, on August 3, 1863. “From the walls of their prison they make themselves heard,” Welles said. The U.S. War Department acted immediately. Only four days earlier, the United States had demanded that the Confederacy treat Black men as prisoners of war and had issued an order announcing the intention to retaliate if the Confederacy tried and executed Black men who were born in northern states.
Stanton placed three Confederate prisoners from South Carolina in a cell and informed the Confederate Secretary of War that the men were held as hostages to secure the safety of Brown, Johnson and Wilson. If the Confederate government executed the Black New Yorkers, the United States would execute the white South Carolinians.
Internal correspondence within the Confederate War Department revealed that its officials believed the United States would retaliate in this case. Additionally, they were deeply divided over the legality of trying and executing Black United States servicemen who were born free in northern states.
Confederate authorities decided to treat Black men who were citizens of northern states as prisoners of war. In the aftermath of subsequent battles, they put captured Black soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts and the 8th U.S. Colored Troops (recruited in Philadelphia) in military prisons with white soldiers.
Although Brown, Johnson, and Wilson endured fifteen more months of agonizing confinement, on October 18, 1864, Confederate officials released them. All three men returned to New York and lived there for the rest of their lives. They demanded that the United States account for every one of its prisoners, and on this day let us honor their memory by doing the same.
Lorien Foote is Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor of History at Texas A&M University, and author of The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy.
Throughout the rest of September, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History is hosting their annual meeting virtually. We hope you’ll visit our ASALH 2021 virtual booth to browse our new and recent titles in African American history.
Acquisitions editors Brandon Proia and Andrew Winters would love to connect with you if you have a project that you are working on.
Be sure to visit our virtual booth to browse our new titles in African American History. We wanted to be sure to highlight our new in paperback titles that are perfect for course adoption!
To browse these titles and more, please be sure to visit our Association for the Study of African American Life and History virtual booth. Use promo code 01DAH40 at checkout to receive a 40% discount. And if your order totals over $75, domestic U.S. shipping is FREE.
The following is a guest blog post by Rebecca L. Davis, author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Public Confessions reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public.
We have reached the season of repentance, for Jews, as the celebration of the Jewish new year on Rosh Hashanah leads ten days later to Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement.” The period in between these two days is considered for seeking forgiveness, a sort of last chance to make amends with God and with fellow human beings, before God seals the “Book of Life” until next year’s reckoning. As I approach that season, I am struck both by how important repentance was to the people I write about in Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and by how often fears of false belief motivated their religious transformations. And in the case of Chambers and some of the other figures in my book, I can’t help but note how important sex was to their narrative of spiritual redemption.
Whittaker Chambers reached middle age convinced that he needed to atone for his sins. As a younger man, in the 1920s, he had joined the Communist Party member, and he worked as a Soviet agent in the mid-1930s. He became the middle-man of an espionage network, ferrying classified documents from moles within federal agencies to the “handlers” who shuttled back and forth to the Soviet Union.
News of the Soviet purges and rumors of the disappearances of disillusioned party members led Chambers to reconsider his loyalties. Sometime between 1937 and 1938 he deserted his post. He hid with his family in nondescript hotels and slept with a gun by his side, fearful that Soviet thugs would assault him at any moment. He had been led astray by the promises of a Communist utopia, he decided. He had betrayed his country, and in doing so, had abandoned the promise of democratic freedom.
The goon squad never showed up, and Chambers eventually settled on a farm in Maryland, traveling by train to New York City for appointments with his new bosses, the editors at Time magazine. He wrote about foreign affairs, but his submissions returned to the moral necessity of preserving democracy in a world tending toward authoritarianism. Everything hung in the balance, he warned his readers. And God was watching.
By the time Chambers sat before camera crews in a packed Congressional chamber in 1948, the humid August air leaving sweat stains on the back of his rumpled suit, he wanted to come clean in part because he had experienced a religious conversion. As he subsequently wrote in his memoir, Witness (1952), it was not only fear of Soviet agents but a revelation of God’s role in creation that inspired him to abandon the materialist philosophy of Communism. In the book, Chambers explained how awareness of God’s presence in human creation led him to see the lie of materialism. (He was baptized in the Episcopal Church but soon joined a meeting of the Society of Friends.)
Yet much like so many other former Soviet spies who went on to testify before Congress, Chambers laid most of the blame at the feet of other people. While Chambers testified to his own involvement in an “apparatus” that pilfered documents from federal agencies, he more consequentially said that Alger Hiss, a highly regarded State Department official, had belonged to that Washington, DC spy ring. When Hiss categorically denied even knowing who Chambers was, Hiss was charged with perjury. The “Hiss-Chambers” trials helped launch the home front of the American Cold War, in which the fear of Communist infiltration in every branch of government and private industry spurred furious attempts to root them out and expose anyone associated with Communism.
It turns out that when Chambers confessed his sins in Witness—confessed what he believed to be his sins—he left out the sex. The details of those sins came to light years later when historians got their hands on a confidential statement that Chambers gave to his FBI handler in the late 1940s. While working in that Soviet apparatus, he explained, he had engaged in numerous sexual affairs with men in Washington, DC and along the highways that led him back and forth to his comrades in New York City. His new awareness of God—his religious conversion—meant for Chambers a rejection of homosexuality and infidelity. He renounced his sexual sins and committed himself to being the sort of devoted family man that he and others considered foundational to the preservation of American democracy.
For Chambers as for the many other ex-Communists who embraced God, converted, and became FBI informants, the sin was false belief. He had allowed his mind to be led off course by wrong thoughts. Having sex with men was not an indication of submerged desires or an expression of an innate identity but rather another fruit of that poisoned tree. By becoming a vocal anti-Communist, he believed he had paid his debt. Fellow anti-Communist conservatives agreed. They celebrated Chambers as a heroic defender of American freedoms.
Religious conversions often originate in deeply personal reckonings with past actions and painful experiences. But they can also provide the impression of moral seriousness, particularly for individuals marking dramatic political shifts. Chambers helped popularize the idea that a religious conversion could prove the authenticity of a dramatic political transformation, even as his own confession played with the truth.
Rebecca L. Davis is Miller Family Early Career Professor of History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss.
In June, Michael Twitty, author ofRice: a Savor the South cookbook, had a virtual conversation with award-winning scholar Jessica B. Harris and James Beard Award-winning chef JJ Johnson. The conversation was for New York Botanical Garden’s “The Food Dialogues”, a series of rich conversations with prominent authors, chefs, and food historians that re-examines and redefines our notions of heritage and identity through food. In this conversation, Twitty, Harris and Johnson cover the history of rice, the food traditions of Juneteenth passed down through the years and even the present-day importance of rice.
Michael Twitty is a culinary historian and author of the James Beard Award-winning The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South.
There was a period of over 100 years between the Roanoke Voyages and settlement of the Roanoke Island area, which led to some confusion regarding the names and locations of these inlets. Each inlet reference has a separate entry in The Outer Banks Gazetteer. Port Ferdinando, about two miles north of Oregon Inlet was open from before 1585 to 1798, and from about 1700 to 1798 was known as Gunt Inlet because Port Ferdinando was rarely used and there was a hiatus of about 100 years. Port Lane was two or three miles north of Port Ferdinando and open before 1585 to around 1660 and became Roanoke Inlet or closed. Port Lane’s closed site was also what a few cartographers labeled as Old Roanoke Inlet. Port Lane then probably migrated north and became Roanoke Inlet, or a new inlet opened shortly after Port Lane closed. Trinety Harbor was open pre-1585 to around 1660. This summarizes the situation with inlet names in the Roanoke Island area from 1585 to approximately 1730. The first Roanoke voyage (Amadas and Barlowe 1584) includes no mention of inlet names, referring only to Hatrask an indigenous reference vaguely near what would be Port Ferdinando (Gunt Inlet) by 1585, and was likely just a reference to the area around the unnamed inlet. White published the first map of the Outer Banks (1585), on which no inlets are named. Port Ferdinando and Port Lane are shown correctly but not named. Hatrask is labeled at what is now Pea Island and not near enough to Port Ferdinando to indicate a named inlet. Trinety Harbor is not shown or named. A later version of White’s map (year unknown) appears with Port Ferdinando mysteriously labeled and added at that inlet, and Trinety Harbor added at the appropriate location, though the inlet itself is not shown. DeBry’s 1590 map, based on White’s 1585 map, shows the location of Port Ferdinando but with no name, which seems strange because the inlet had been named since at least 1585. The name Hatrask now appears opposite the inlet named Port Ferdinando, leading some authors to indicate the inlet as Hatrask. Hondius and Mercator (collaborated 1606, 1607, 1610, and 1630) show the locations of Port Ferdinando and Port Lane correctly but unnamed. However, Blaeu late as 1640 uses Hantaraske (sic) for the area south of Port Ferdinando (no longer an island). DeBry, Mercator, and Hondius all show and name Trinety Harbor. Blaeu’s 1640 map is one of the few that depicts and labels each of the inlets correctly. Blaeu’s map also offers a clue as to the probable relationship between closing Port Lane and newly developing Roanoke Inlet. Port Lane is shown at almost the future location of what would become Roanoke Inlet. Ogilby (1672) labels Roanoke Inlet at former Port Lane migrating or newly opened. Gascoyne’s 1682 map indicates Port Ferdinando (Gunt Inlet) is beginning to close, and labels the inlet Old Inlet, while what was once Port Lane had closed or migrated north. The latter is then labeled New Inlet, perhaps indicating a new inlet that would later be named Roanoke Inlet. Trinety Harbor is no longer shown, having closed in 1660. By 1685, Fisher et al, with Moll 1708, show Old Inlet incorrectly (corroborated by map expert Cumming 1969, page 23) at a location opposite Colington Island, prompting others to believe an inlet was here. There is no hard evidence to support that notion. Furthermore, New Inlet is labeled at the approximate location of former Trinety Harbor, which had closed 1660, or at Caffeys Inlet, which did not open until 1770. Occasionally, maps late as 1718 (DeLisle 1718) portray this incorrect information. So, inlets in the Roanoke Island area were Port Ferdinando, open from before 1585 until 1798 and rarely labeled on maps, before becoming Gunt Inlet by around 1700 and closing 1798. Gunt Inlet or Gun Inlet, first appeared on Bowen’s 1747 map, based on 1745 data, itself based on 1733 data, and Roanoke Inlet is depicted correctly. A smaller companion inlet to Port Ferdinando was Port Lane, open from before 1585, and this name was used sparingly until the mid-1600s, when the inlet migrated and became larger (Fisher 1962) or closed, while a new inlet opened slightly north of Port Lane’s location and became known as Roanoke Inlet.
Roger L. Payne is executive secretary emeritus of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
We are saddened to learn that Julian Pleasants, a key historian of 20th century North Carolina and two-time UNC Press author, has died.
Pleasants was the acclaimed author of Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina(1990; “One of the great tales of postwar American politics, now told for the first time at book length”—Washington Post), and Buncombe Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Rice Reynolds (2000; “What Pleasants has delivered is a meticulously researched, carefully delivered and thoughtfully crafted assessment of Richard Rice Reynolds and his place in North Carolina history”—Charlotte Observer).
He also published books with the University Press of Florida, the University of Kentucky Press, and the University of Georgia Press.
Julian taught for many years at the University of Florida, where he was director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (one of the pioneering oral history programs in the country), and read manuscripts for UNC Press occasionally in that capacity.
We send our deepest condolences to his family and colleagues.
In light of the 20th anniversary of the dramatic, world changing events that took place on September 11th, 2001, Executive Editor Debbie Gershenowitz interviewed John Bodnar, the author of Divided By Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11. Americans responded to the deadly terrorist attacks on 9/11 with an outpouring of patriotism, though all were not united in their expression. Bodnar’s compelling history shifts the focus on America’s War on Terror from the battlefield to the arena of political and cultural conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the war are inseparable from debates about the meaning of patriotism itself. Bodnar probes how honor, brutality, trauma, and suffering have become highly contested in commemorations, congressional correspondence, films, soldier memoirs, and works of art. Read below as Debbie and John discuss Bodnar’s approach to the research behind Divided By Terror, the riot at the Capitol, our recent presidential administrations’ stance on patriotism and how living in a college town can impact different experiences during times like 9/11.
Debbie: John, you’ve written extensively about war, patriotism, culture, and memory in the modern era, but Divided By Terror published while US troops were actively on the ground in Afghanistan in a seemingly “forever war,” which has just taken a drastic turn with their removal a couple of weeks ago. How did researching and writing this book differ from your work on World War II, a “good war,” with a definitive beginning and end, where the US emerged unambiguously victorious?
John: Although World War II had a clear beginning and end point for Americans, it shared many similarities with the Global War on Terror. The public celebration of the world war and the “greatest generation” that fought it should not obscure the fact that both conflicts produced fierce debates over meaning, memory and the painful realities of trauma. Soldier memoirs from both wars contained a heavy dose of regret over the loss of brothers-in-arms and a critique of all the violence. I would say there was a slightly stronger effort on the part of vets from the War on Terror to recall their war in traditional patriotic terms which meant downplaying the trauma. Yet, the best novels from these wars written by men who fought–Norman Mailer’s, The Naked and the Dead, and Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (on Iraq) were essentially meditations on the brutal and painful realities they experienced. The popular account of Iraq by Chris Kyle, American Sniper, is a highly patriotic view of Iraq and downplays its brutality and any culpability on our part for the carnage as does Audie Murphy’s, To Hell and Back for World War II. Interestingly, Hollywood made popular films based on our heroism and not our culpability from the last two titles but the not the first two.
Both World War II and the War on Terror were born in a climate of anger and revenge–Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Americans criticized the messy departure from Afghanistan more than they did the final stages of World War II in Japan. Yet, the world war ended in a much bloodier fashion with atomic bombings of Japan that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It’s ironic we welcomed an end that was so brutal and grew upset over the chaos in Kabul. Perhaps we are simply more politicized now than we were in 1945. I thought the news coverage over Kabul was not only critical of Biden’s mistakes but –less recognized–unwilling to scan back over the all the damage we did in Afghanistan. It was as if the real problem was Biden’s planning and not the 150,000 Afghans who died from our invasions. Trauma is a something Americans have a difficult time confronting in any war.
Debbie: Your book was already in production when the attacks on the Capitol occurred on 1/6/21. Had you still been writing, how would this be incorporated into the history, memory, culture, and politics of 9/11?
John: I thought the attackers who broke through police lines on January 6th to assault the U.S. Capitol were, in part, products of the far-right political stream that was rejuvenated after 9/11. The terror attacks unleashed brutal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a wave of violence in the homeland that led to round ups of people who looked like the men who flew the planes on 9/11, unlawful detentions, and physical violence. I suspect as the foreign wars dragged on with no end in sight, belligerent patriots turned even more attention to other forms of violence and intolerance by joining political campaigns against immigrants and even racial minorities. This far-right/ anti-democratic agenda was also furthered by a rhetoric of false claims. For instance: Obama was not born in the United States, Trump’s inaugural crowd was larger than we saw in photos, the Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, we have nothing to fear from the pandemic and it will disappear, and–the key one for January 6th–the 2020 election was rigged and by implication only Democrats can do the rigging.
Donald Trump both benefited and help shape this political movement. At its core it was anti-democratic and contemptuous of democracy itself with its insistence of equality before the law and the dignity of all humans. This is implied in the wars we started after 9/11 and the right we reserved for ourselves to determine who might die due to our anger. Like World War II we were also embarrassed by the fact that we were successfully attacked by people we considered to be inferior to us. That was certainly the feeling of many about the Japanese after 1941 and about Islamic terrorists in 2001. This assault on non-white people continued in the politics of the Trump era not only against immigrants but against Black Lives Matter protestors and really anyone seen as a political opponent. Democracy and tolerance did not die with 9/11. People pushed back to protest racism, the harsh treatment of newcomers at border and voted Trump out of office. I think the growing disregard for others, however, resulted not only in the deaths of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq but in the indifference to human suffering during the pandemic and the resistance to vaccines and masks.
Debbie: Divided By Terror incorporates 3 presidential administrations’ reactions to both the 9/11 attacks and public opinions of those events. If you were to write an epilogue today about the Biden Administration’s stance on war-based and emphatic patriotism, what might some of your quick-take observations be?
John: I believe Biden seems torn between the tenets of a belligerent patriotism dependent upon an insensitivity to the violence we wage and a more empathic patriotism rooted in a concern for the fate and needs of others. He did support the authorization to allow Bush to go to Iraq and then disavowed his decision when ran for the presidency. In 2002 he felt we needed to have a tough foreign policy. I don’t believe he withdrew from Afghanistan over all the carnage–not that he wasn’t affected by it. He left because it was no longer a foreign policy priority. But still the empathy he does display for the needs of others is not another false tale for a politician. His liberalism and his life experience does depend on a capacity to see in others what he sees in himself. He’s not beyond reproach (as Trump thinks he is) but I think he would agree with Lincoln at Gettysburg. When the sixteenth president thought about the reality of human carnage that had just taken place on the field of his speech, he insisted that the only justification for all the death and suffering was that we recommit to the project to see that a government of the people should not perish from the earth. Trump might say there was not as much death as you think. I can’t believe he would recommit to saving a government by the people.
Debbie: You live in a college town where the “town and gown” divide can be pronounced – I witnessed this myself while living in Bloomington during the First Gulf War, where demonstrations of and debates over empathic and war-based patriotism were on full display. What was that experience like on 9/11?
John: Unfortunately, I was in California on 9/11–spending a year at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford. I know there was some violence toward people thought to be Muslim, p. 218 in my book, in Bloomington but I was not there. In the Palo Alto area I was struck by the fact that people would light candles and gather on corners in the days after 9/11. Their response was mournful but not warlike.
Debbie Gershenowitz is an Executive Editor at UNC Press.
John Bodnar is the Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University.
Carolyn Eastman is associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of the prizewinning A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution.
We are pleased to announce the availability of the following UNC Press titles in audiobook format (sample audio excerpts are available via the links below):
“Prince meticulously recovers the history of Robert Charles, whose rebellion against police brutality, white terror, and the retreat from Reconstruction inspired a ‘song too dangerous to sing’ in the wake of the New Orleans Riot of 1900. The Ballad of Robert Charles is an engaging, accessible, must-read book that offers insights for our present national reckoning over race and policing.”—Hilary Green, University of Alabama
“A detailed saga of Florida development, county by county, year by year. While some parts read like a satire of capitalistic greed, it is an honest examination of history that evolves into a cautionary tale of the human capacity for self-interest and acquisitiveness. The author’s research is unassailable. The Swamp Peddlers is an exceptional account of legal loopholes, egotistical hubris, environmental annihilation, and the mindless development of land at any cost.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A trailblazing new volume that catalogues the contributions of Black men and women to American barbecue . . . rigorous scholarship . . . Miller is creating a lexicon to ensure that these Black contributions to American culture can’t be written out of history.”—Washington Post
The following excerpt is from “The Persistence of the Vocabulary of the Slavers” in Jean Casimir’s bookThe Haitians: A Decolonial History. In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. Casimir’s book was also featured on our recent “Understanding Haiti’s Past” reading list.
There is no analytical justification in seeking to explain the history of Haitians on the basis of the concepts brought to the island by the slave traders. The categories white, emancipated, mulatto, black, and slave were key tools of the slave trade and the slave system. From the beginning they signaled what the captives—the future Haitians—were not. But they also pointed to what their enemies wanted to make sure they would never be. They were names for the very things the captives courageously resisted being. They were the product of a process of sociogenesis that our research must unapologetically seek to overturn. I take it as truth that the tools of thought inherited from the slave system can only perpetuate slavery.
In defining the nature of the state in Haiti, my goal is not to point out the evolution or transformation of the French colonial state into a state that was—in principle—national,
modern, and independent, like all the similar entities of the period. That would mean basing my reflections on something that I in fact have to prove first. I also don’t want to simply offer a description of the transformation of a colonial state built on slavery into an administrative structure whose vocation was to protect the interests of a nation that did not necessarily exist. For if I did that, I would exit the terrain of empirical observation and turn myself into the spokesperson for those oligarchs who wish to impose their nation building on reality.
The plantation economy disappeared from Saint-Domingue nearly a century before it did from the other islands of the region. In observing the behavior of the workers reduced to slavery and of the cultivateurs or inhabitants that succeeded them, I show that life in Haiti was built on an economic model that is less celebrated but just as real as that of the commodity-producing plantation (Casimir 1981). Indeed, it is historically more resilient. Nevertheless, the leaders of the country have persistently reproduced the modes of perception that were so useful to the slave traders, the very authors of the invisibility that has made it so difficult to see the contributions of the captives to their own survival. These leaders have always claimed that they knew what was good for the unfortunate people, better than the population knew themselves. In their opinion, the rural population’s pursuit of a society centered on itself, and governed by itself, has been the cause of their poverty. They have held on to this opinion despite all the proof to the contrary offered by the comparison between this new Haitian life and the life experienced in colonial times, or that of the enslaved in neighboring colonies. This consistent contradiction between the orientation of the near totality of the population and the ideology of the governing authorities produces the impression of a disjointed political system, incapable of mastering the national situation or of orienting it in any particular direction.
In Europe, the modern state was organized during the same period when the world economy was being constructed. In the colony, in contrast, a power structure that was already established and structured in Europe created the local society and built its economy. The state as it existed in France was introduced through the intermediary of the colonial administration. It was as an already constituted entity whose irruption into the new context needed to be managed. It did not conceive of itself as a creation or an arrangement of local political forces working to accommodate one another in an international environment. The modern Eurocentric state that existed in Haiti after 1804 continued this pattern, and saw itself as penetrating into milieu it considered vulnerable and archaic. The modern state had to implant itself in Haiti, a place that was dependent on Europe and had to remain subject to it, because it was backwards and traditional. The splendors of Versailles and the ports of France were never seen as being linked directly to the crucifixion of their Pearl of the Antilles. Instead, they were held up as destinations to travel toward on the path to the production of material wealth and well-being.
The inhabitants of this third of an island had the knowledge and ability necessary to oppose this continuation of colonialism. They refused the reimplantation of the very mercantilist capitalism that had subjected them during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The key, then, is not to study how a modern colonial state might implant itself in an archaic milieu, but rather to ask how these captives developed their alternative to colonial power. Given that the modern state put them in chains with the goal of consuming every last bit of their laboring energy, it makes little sense to assume that they based their struggle to liberate themselves and break their chains on the deceptive promises of the very institutions they were fighting. To carry out their struggle within imperial political structures would have been a last resort, a last plank of wood floating in the water that they might reach for only after admitting their project had shipwrecked. What seems clear is that, instead, their immediate objective was to create their own modern state, and not to reproduce the colonial and imperial, Eurocentric, and racist state that had existed before.
Jean Casimir, who served as Haitian ambassador to the United States and as a United Nations official, is professor of humanities at the University of Haiti; his most recent book is Haïti et ses élites.
For many African Americans, getting a public sector job has historically been one of the few paths to the financial stability of the middle class, and in New York City, few such jobs were as sought-after as positions in the fire department (FDNY). For over a century, generations of Black New Yorkers have fought to gain access to and equal opportunity within the FDNY. Tracing this struggle for jobs and justice from 1898 to the present, David Goldberg details the ways each generation of firefighters confronted overt and institutionalized racism. An important chapter in the histories of both Black social movements and independent workplace organizing, this book demonstrates how Black firefighters in New York helped to create affirmative action from the “bottom up,” while simultaneously revealing how white resistance to these efforts shaped white working-class conservatism and myths of American meritocracy.
Over twenty years after its initial publication, Annelise Orleck’s Common Sense and a Little Fire continues to resonate with its harrowing story of activism, labor, and women’s history. Orleck traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely made more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women’s movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York’s Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Orleck paints a compelling picture of housewives’ food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage.
Timothy Minchin is one of the most prolific and insightful historians researching U.S. labor in the era since World War II. His books have helped illuminate the darker corners of labor’s story neglected by his contemporaries in the field. In Labor Under Fire, Minchin does it again, bringing shrewd judgment to bear as he frames organized labor’s recent history as a tale of struggle, resiliency, and hope.
Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral histories of gay, transsexual, and minority truck drivers allow award-winning author Anne Balay to shed new light on the harsh realities of truckers’ lives behind the wheel. A licensed commercial truck driver herself, Balay discovers that, for people routinely subjected to prejudice, hatred, and violence in their hometowns and in the job market, trucking can provide an opportunity for safety, welcome isolation, and a chance to be themselves–even as the low-wage work is fraught with tightening regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation. The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one’s safety, dignity, and selfhood.
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone’s throw from Hamlet’s city hall burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry.
Anyone who cares about work and workers in today’s America should read this book. Overturning myths that are widely believed, Windham arouses both hope and outrage as she makes fresh sense of the staggering rise of inequality since the 1970s.
Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Workdetails entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers’ creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what’s wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.
In the late twentieth century, nothing united union members, progressive students, Black and Chicano activists, Native Americans, feminists, and members of the LGBTQ+ community quite as well as Coors beer. They came together not in praise of the ice cold beverage but rather to fight a common enemy: the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company. Wielding the consumer boycott as their weapon of choice, activists targeted Coors for allegations of antiunionism, discrimination, and conservative political ties. Over decades of organizing and coalition-building from the 1950s to the 1990s, anti-Coors activists molded the boycott into a powerful means of political protest.
The following inlets, from south to north, were reportedly open and depicted with mixed applications on later maps (see entries in The Outer Banks Gazetteer). There were other inlets opening and closing in the area from Ocracoke to Roanoke Island, but were not open during the Roanoke Voyages.
Wokokon Inlet – No real evidence exists indicating this inlet existed other than shown on small scale or partially contrived maps in the early 1600s, with Wokokon variously placed and presumed since the area vaguely marked the southern limit of Wokokon, which defined vaguely most of now Ocracoke Island and northern Portsmouth Island. Some authors speculate that this might be the initial passage used by Grenville (1585 2nd Vayage), but not likely since if there was an inlet here it was small, shallow, and probably just awash. Grenville used Ocracoke Inlet. Could have been in the breach prone zone where High Hills Inlet was located 10 miles southwest of Ocracoke (village) (last closed 1961).
Ocracoke Inlet – opened prior to 1585 and is still open, having been open continuously since before 1585, though at that time one to two miles or so northeast in 1585 of its present location. This inlet was not mentioned by Amadas and Barlowe (1st Voyage – see First Voyage Part 2) but was noted specifically by Grenville (2nd Voyage) as the location where a blunder by the pilot Fernándes caused the ship Tyger to wreck and spoil supplies. Also, during the second voyage about two weeks were spent in this area before proceeding toward Roanoke Island. No doubt, subsequent voyages might have stopped at or at least noted this inlet as they passed.
Chacandepeco Inlet – opened before 1585 and closed in 1672 (Cape Hatteras area just east of Buxton). The inlet is not mentioned in any of the voyages until indirectly by White in 1590 in his rescue (Fift [sic] Voyage – Hakluyt 1590). This is probably the inlet “at the northeast point of the barrier island Croatoan” which White noted at 35 degrees and one-half (off slightly) while sailing for Roanoke. The actual location of the inlet being described might have been about 15 miles north at southern Salvo.
Keneckid Inlet – Sporadic references and probably three miles south of Salvo in No Ache Bay area. Perhaps a temporary inlet, in early references and a few early deeds, but location uncertain. Though specific open and close dates are unknown, it might be the “fret” (breach) to which John White refers as where the ship anchored when searching for Lost Colonists (Fifth Voyage 1590) though not likely it was open until early 1600s. White refers to anchoring at extreme northeast point of Croatoan, which could have extended farther north than the later cartographic application. White specifically states the breach or water passage was “35 degr. & a half,” which is in the No Ache area just south of Salvo. However, if his calculations were off by about 15 minutes of latitude, he would have been anchored at former Chacandepeco Inlet (near Buxton) open 1590 when White arrived.
Port Ferdinando(Hatarask, Gunt, Gun, or Gant) Inlet – opened before 1585 and closed in 1798. This inlet was known to be open and located due east from the southern tip of Roanoke Island. The inlet was just north of the barrier island known as Hatarask by the indigenous peoples and as recorded and applied by White in 1585 and DeBry (based on White) in 1590. Some authors have applied Hatarask as the name of the inlet, but it was named, Port Ferdinando, in 1585 (most concur) for Simon Fernándes, expedition Pilot on the first two voyages and the Lost Colony Voyage (Voyage 4). Also, the term Hatarask was probably more aptly applied to the island than the inlet; for example, in 1590 White indicates “we came to an anker at Hatarask,” and while possibly referring to the inlet, he was most likely using indigenous peoples’ reference to the area. On a later version (date unknown) of White’s 1585 map, the name Port Ferdinando had been added as well as Trinety Harbor.
Port Lane (possibly later Roanoke Inlet) – open before 1585 and closed 1660s or is most likely what later was named or renamed Roanoke Inlet after migration (late 1600s or early 1700s) or closing just before Roanoke Inlet opened just to the north. This inlet was most likely used only incidentally because the much better Port Ferdinando was just south, and this inlet was shallow and unreliable. This inlet most likely became Roanoke Inlet, and was the companion channel just north of Port Ferdinando (Hatarask, Gunt Inlet). Old Roanoke Inlet was the former Port Lane used on some maps and charts in the early to mid-1800s.
Trinety Harbor (Trinitie) – opened prior to 1585 and closed by 1660. There are some who do not believe this inlet existed, and that it was even a cartographic invention based upon hearsay. While not labeled on White’s original 1585 map (added to a later version), it was labeled on DeBry’s 1590 map, and so it clearly existed. The inlet was named on numerous later maps though most likely had simply been copied from DeBry’s 1590 map. Its location has been placed by various authors and researchers from Kitty Hawk Bay north to Beasley Bay, (almost 20 miles), but was really just north of Duck. It is likely the inlet through which Amadas and Barlowe passed on the First Voyage. Curiously, most occurrences are without the English spelling, Harbour – only Keulen (1690) and Hondius (1606) use that spelling.
Roger L. Payne is executive secretary emeritus of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
In May, Dr. Jane Hong, author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion, held a lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary’s 2021 Asian American Theology Conference. During her lecture, she discussed the Asian American movement in the late 1960’s and 70’s, followers of Christianity’s role in that movement and its influence on the U.S. church.
The following recommended reading list provides deep analysis and historical insight regarding the Texas abortion law ruling (and the ongoing challenges to Roe v. Wade) that has gone into effect as of September 1, 2021.
Take 40% off when purchasing these titles direct from uncpress.org using discount promo code 01DAH40 at checkout.
“Schoen fills an important gap in historical scholarship that until now has focused on the pre-Roe era. . . . Skillfully incorporates the legal, political, and social history of abortion care in the United States since the 1970s.”—Journal of the History of Medicine
“Show[s] how evangelicals’ contemporary embrace of right-wing politics is rooted in its centuries-long problem with race. This scathing takedown of evangelicalism’s ‘racism problem’ will challenge evangelicals to confront and reject racism within church communities.”—Publishers Weekly
“It would be hard to find a more timely book about Texas political history than this dive into the coalition-building that brought together African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Anglo progressives and labor activists.”—Austin American-Statesman
“Offers a sophisticated understanding of the narrow outlook of the Court on issues of sexual rights. . . . An important contribution to the history of law, sexuality, immigration, and citizenship. . . . In addition to his brilliant interpretation of these cases, Stein also presents a beautiful discussion of his approach and methodology as well as a remarkable transparency in his use of potentially difficult sources.”—H-Net Reviews
“A rich collection that will be well received by legal historians, professors who teach in the area of women and law, and undergraduate students and general readers who are interested in the history of abortion rights.”—Law and Politics Book Review
“Provides a rich collection that will be well received by legal historians, professors who teach in the area of women and law, and undergraduate students and general readers who are interested in the history of abortion rights.”—Law and Politics Book Review
“Absorbing and well-written . . . encourages social scientists who are interested in the legal process to construct their own examinations of legal change beyond the authors’ focus on the Supreme Court and into other contentious areas beyond their comparative case studies of abortion and capital punishment. . . . Epstein and Kobylka provide an equally perceptive treatment of Roe and its progeny.”—Legal Studies Forum
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