North Carolina History, People, and Places
Along with the Press's focus on southern regional studies came a more specific commitment to the people of North Carolina. This has taken a number of forms, from publishing books for the school system, to scholarly works about the state, to general works satisfying North Carolinians' interest in their state's history, people, and places.
North Carolina HistoryIn 1943 the UNC Press published the first book by John Hope Franklin, 1995 winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, which began as his Harvard dissertation, Franklin traced the legal status, economic role, and social and religious life of North Carolina's free blacks from the first decennial census to the outbreak of the Civil War. Using county and state records, private letters, diaries and newspapers, Franklin told the story of a socially isolated group whose status became increasingly precarious as its population grew.
Intended for use by students and general readers, Hugh T. Lefler's and Albert Ray Newsome's North Carolina: The History of a Southern State (1954) was the standard, one-volume history of North Carolina for over thirty years. This balanced narrative, which includes developments in agriculture, industry, transportation, trade, education, religion, literature, and social life, as well as the state's political and military history, won the 1955 Mayflower Cup from the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of North Carolina, and the American Association for State and Local History Award of Merit.
North Carolina People
Press publications about North Carolinians have ranged from the
autobiography of Josephus Daniels, influential editor of the Raleigh
News & Observer, Secretary of the Navy during World War I, and
Ambassador to Mexico under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to an illustrated
study of the potters who have long been part of our state's cultural
heritage. Josephus Daniels' five-volume memoir recounts his rise from a
young and ambitious journalist in North Carolina to a national political
figure. The first volume, Tar Heel Editor (1939), is the most
"regional" of the three, covering the period up to 1893 and describing his
early political interests, schooling, and ventures into the field of
journalism.
Charles G. Zug III's Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina (1986) is a beautifully produced, large format book that appeals to scholars, collectors, and laypersons. Beginning with the colonial potters of North Carolina, Turners and Burners covers both the aesthetics and history of North Carolina pottery, paying particular attention to the largely ignored stoneware tradition. It combines numerous photographs with a text that gives a lively sense of the people who have made and used pots through North Carolina's history. The work won three awards, including the 1987 Mayflower Cup from the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of North Carolina.
North Carolina Places
Muriel Early Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel (1935) is a
wonderful example of the Press's early regionalism. A classic period study
of Appalachian life, it was originally valued for its record of folkways
in North Carolina's Toe River Valley. Now it is treasured for its
imaginative portraits of Sheppard's friends and neighbors and for Bayard
Wootten's photographs. Sheppard went to live in the Toe River Valley in
1928 and soon began collecting stories from the local inhabitants. Her
book records the hill people's way of life, which, by the 1930s, was fast
disappearing. In 1991 the University of North Carolina Press chose it as
the inaugural volume in its series of southern reprints, Chapel Hill
Books.
Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of the North Carolina Coast (1952) by David Stick. The Outer Banks, where the southern and northern currents of the Atlantic meet, form a particularly treacherous coastline that has earned the name, "graveyard of the Atlantic." Stick's factual yet dramatic retelling of the adventures, heroic rescues, and tragic losses that have taken place off North Carolina's coast is still in print and has sold over 90,000 copies.
William S. Powell's The North Carolina Gazetteer (1968) was the first gazetteer written for a single state. Its twenty thousand entries, including counties, towns, cities, rivers, creeks, lakes, mountains, gaps, ridges, bays, sounds, and inlets, make it a unique reference work for North Carolina and one of the most comprehensive state gazetteers ever published. It is an indispensable reference guide for students, geographers, journalists, genealogists, anybody needing complete and accurate information about the Tar Heel State.
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