Download or read book Artisans in the North Carolina Backcountry written by Johanna Miller Lewis and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the quarter of a century before the thirteen colonies became a nation, the northwest quadrant of North Carolina had just begun to attract permanent settlers. This seemingly primitive area may not appear to be a likely source for attractive pottery and ornate silverware and furniture, much less for an audience to appreciate these refinements. Yet such crafts were not confined to urban centers, and artisans, like other colonists, were striving to create better lives for themselves as well as to practice their trades. As Johanna Miller Lewis shows in this pivotal study of colonial history and material culture, the growing population of Rowan County required not only blacksmiths, saddlers, and tanners but also a great variety of skilled craftsmen to help raise the standard of living. Rowan County's rapid expansion was in part the result of the planned settlements of the Moravian Church. Because the Moravians maintained careful records, historians have previously credited church artisans with greater skill and more economic awareness than non-church craftsmen. Through meticulous attention to court and private records, deeds, wills, and other sources, Lewis reveals the Moravian failure to keep up with the pace of development occurring elsewhere in the county. Challenging the traditional belief that southern backcountry life was primitive, Lewis shows that many artisans held public office and wielded power in the public sphere. She also examines women weavers and spinsters as an integral part of the population. All artisans—Moravian and non-Moravian, male and female—helped the local market economy expand to include coastal and trans-Atlantic trade. Lewis's book contributes meaningfully to the debate over self-sufficiency and capitalism in rural America.
Download or read book Artisans in the Carolina Backcountry written by Johanna Miller Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Settling the South Carolina Backcountry written by Nancy L. Pressly and published by BookLogix. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In tracing three generations of a family in the South Carolina backcountry, Nancy Pressly explores how the communities along Hard Labor Creek, located at the crossroads of several major wagon routes, evolved from a newly settled frontier in the 1760s to a remarkable center of wealth and power in the decades before the Civil War. The author presents the compelling story of a close-knit, rural farming community of mainly Scotch-Irish settlers, where intermarriages over several generations created interconnected kinship groups. These alliances grew into a vital economic force as yeoman farmers became entrepreneurial planters and slave owners and their children remarkably successful lawyers, physicians, merchants, politicians, and clergy. The lives of the Presslys and other families, such as the Hearsts, who were ancestors of William Randolph Hearst, revolved around the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, which nourished a faith rooted in conservative, old-world Seceder beliefs and the singing of psalms. Over generations many Presslys became distinguished clergymen, educators, and theologians whose deeply pious connections to the church were linked to an intellectual understanding of the scriptures. The author of this generously illustrated text is an art historian and writer who lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Download or read book The Carolina Backcountry Venture written by Kenneth E. Lewis and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-04-15 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the transformative economic and social processes that changed a backcountry Southern outpost into a vital crossroads The Carolina Backcountry Venture is a historical, geographical, and archaeological investigation of the development of Camden, South Carolina, and the Wateree River Valley during the second half of the eighteenth century. The result of extensive field and archival work by author Kenneth E. Lewis, this publication examines the economic and social processes responsible for change and documents the importance of those individuals who played significant roles in determining the success of colonization and the form it took. Established to serve the frontier settlements, the store at Pine Tree Hill soon became an important crossroads in the economy of South Carolina's central backcountry and a focus of trade that linked colonists with one another and the region's native inhabitants. Renamed Camden in 1768, the town grew as the backcountry became enmeshed in the larger commercial economy. As pioneer merchants took advantage of improvements in agriculture and transportation and responded to larger global events such as the American Revolution, Camden evolved with the introduction of short staple cotton, which came to dominate its economy as slavery did its society. Camden's development as a small inland city made it an icon for progress and entrepreneurship. Camden was the focus of expansion in the Wateree Valley, and its early residents were instrumental in creating the backcountry economy. In the absence of effective, larger economic and political institutions, Joseph Kershaw and his associates created a regional economy by forging networks that linked the immigrant population and incorporated the native Catawba people. Their efforts formed the structure of a colonial society and economy in the interior and facilitated the backcountry's incorporation into the commercial Atlantic world. This transition laid the groundwork for the antebellum plantation economy. Lewis references an array of primary and secondary sources as well as archaeological evidence from four decades of research in Camden and surrounding locations. The Carolina Backcountry Venture examines the broad processes involved in settling the area and explores the relationship between the region's historical development and the landscape it created.
Download or read book The True Image written by Daniel Watkins Patterson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry
Download or read book North Carolina Women written by Michele Gillespie and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Carolina has had more than its share of accomplished, influential women—women who have expanded their sphere of influence or broken through barriers that had long defined and circumscribed their lives, women such as Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, the widow and tavern owner who supported the American Revolution; Harriet Jacobs, runaway slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds, elite women who promoted women's equality. This collection of essays examines the lives and times of pathbreaking North Carolina women from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, offering important new insights into the variety of North Carolina women's experiences across time, place, race, and class, and conveys how women were able to expand their considerable influence during periods of political challenge and economic hardship, particularly over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These essays highlight North Carolina's progressive streak and its positive impact on women's education—for white and black alike— beginning in the antebellum period on through new opportunities that opened up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They explore the ways industrialization drew large numbers of women into the paid labor force for the first time and what the implications of this tremendous transition were; they also examine the women who challenged traditional gender roles, as political leaders and labor organizers, as runaways, and as widows. The volume is especially attuned to differences in region within North Carolina, delineating women's experiences in the eastern third of the state, the piedmont, and the western mountains.
Download or read book Backcountry Makers written by Betsy K. White and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book brings to life the material-culture heritage of southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. In Backcountry Makers, Betsy K. White expands on her previous study of the region's rich decorative arts legacy, Great Road Style, to offer a closer look at the individual artisans responsible for the diverse works that constitute that legacy. Beautifully illustrated with some 230 photographs, most of them in color, this volume includes biographical sketches of seventy-five makers—potters, weavers, spinners, quilters, embroiderers, cabinetmakers, metalsmiths, clocksmiths, gunsmiths, and artists—who worked in the region from the earliest eighteenth-century settlement days to the late twentieth century. The entry for each artisan is accompanied by one or more images of a signed or marked work, or, in a number of instances, an unmarked work with certain provenance. These vignettes offer a fascinating glimpse of the people behind the various pieces, describing their background, family life, and where they learned their trade. Using census records and other documentary evidence, White has traced the earliest of these artisans from their origins in such places as Europe and Philadelphia down through the Great Valley of Virginia to their ultimate destinations in southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. Along with the photos displaying the products of their craftsmanship, the book also includes a number of evocative images of the artists and their homes and towns, thus giving the reader a fuller sense of the region where these gifted people lived and worked. One of the few studies to addresses handmade objects in this locale—and one of the even fewer works to focus on the artisans themselves— Backcountry Makers will be of great value not only to scholars of material culture and the arts in Appalachia but also to those who collect regional antiques and crafts and want to know more about the individuals who made them.
Download or read book Women and Freedom in Early America written by Larry Eldridge and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is virtually impossible to generalize about the degree to which women in early America were free. What, if anything, did enslaved black women in the South have in common with powerful female leaders in Iroquois society? Were female tavern keepers in the backcountry of North Carolina any more free than nuns and sisters in New France religious orders? Were the restrictions placed on widows and abandoned wives at all comparable to those experienced by autonomous women or spinsters? Bringing to light the enormous diversity of women's experience, Women and Freedom in Early America centers variously on European-American, African-American, and Native American women from 1400 to 1800. Spanning almost half a millenium, the book ranges the colonial terrain, from New France and the Iroquois Nations down through the mainland British-American colonies. By drawing on a wide array of sources, including church and court records, correspondence, journals, poetry, and newspapers, these essays examine Puritan political writings, white perceptions of Indian women, Quaker spinsterhood, and African and Iroquois mythology, among many other topics.
Download or read book Artisan Workers in the Upper South written by Diane Barnes and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though deeply entrenched in antebellum life, the artisans who lived and worked in Petersburg, Virginia, in the 1800s -- including carpenters, blacksmiths, coach makers, bakers, and other skilled craftsmen -- helped transform their planter-centered agricultural community into one of the most industrialized cities in the Upper South. These mechanics, as the artisans called themselves, successfully lobbied for new railroad lines and other amenities they needed to open their factories and shops, and turned a town whose livelihood once depended almost entirely on tobacco exports into a bustling modern city. In Artisan Workers in the Upper South, L. Diane Barnes closely examines the relationships between Petersburg's skilled white, free black, and slave mechanics and the roles they played in southern Virginia's emerging market economy. Barnes demonstrates that, despite studies that emphasize the backwardness of southern development, modern industry and the institution of slavery proved quite compatible in the Upper South. Petersburg joined the industrialized world in part because of the town's proximity to northern cities and resources, but it succeeded because its citizens capitalized on their uniquely southern resource: slaves. Petersburg artisans realized quickly that owning slaves could increase the profitability of their businesses, and these artisans -- including some free African Americans -- entered the master class when they could. Slave-owning mechanics, both white and black, gained wealth and status in society, and they soon joined an emerging middle class. Not all mechanics could afford slaves, however, and those who could not struggled to survive in the new economy. Forced to work as journeymen and face the unpleasant reality of permanent wage labor, the poorer mechanics often resented their inability to prosper like their fellow artisans. These differing levels of success, Barnes shows, created a sharp class divide that rivaled the racial divide in the artisan community. Unlike their northern counterparts, who united as a political force and organized strikes to effect change, artisans in the Upper South did not rise up in protest against the prevailing social order. Skilled white mechanics championed free manual labor -- a common refrain of northern artisans -- but they carefully limited the term "free" to whites and simultaneously sought alliances with slaveholding planters. Even those artisans who didn't own slaves, Barnes explains, rarely criticized the wealthy planters, who not only employed and traded with artisans, but also controlled both state and local politics. Planters, too, guarded against disparaging free labor too loudly, and their silence, together with that of the mechanics, helped maintain the precariously balanced social structure. Artisan Workers in the Upper South rejects the notion of the antebellum South as a semifeudal planter-centered political economy and provides abundant evidence that some areas of the South embraced industrial capitalism and economic modernity as readily as communities in the North.
Download or read book Breaking Loose Together written by Marjoleine Kars and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years before the start of the American Revolution, backcountry settlers in the North Carolina Piedmont launched their own defiant bid for economic independence and political liberty. The Regulator Rebellion of 1766-71 pitted thousands of farmers, many of them religious radicals inspired by the Great Awakening, against political and economic elites who opposed the Regulators' proposed reforms. The conflict culminated on May 16, 1771, when a colonial militia defeated more than 2,000 armed farmers in a pitched battle near Hillsborough. At least 6,000 Regulators and sympathizers were forced to swear their allegiance to the government as the victorious troops undertook a punitive march through Regulator settlements. Seven farmers were hanged. Using sources that include diaries, church minutes, legal papers, and the richly detailed accounts of the Regulators themselves, Marjoleine Kars delves deeply into the world and ideology of free rural colonists. She examines the rebellion's economic, religious, and political roots and explores its legacy in North Carolina and beyond. The compelling story of the Regulator Rebellion reveals just how sharply elite and popular notions of independence differed on the eve of the Revolution.
Download or read book Southern Outcast written by David Brown and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hinton Rowan Helper (1829--1909) gained notoriety in nineteenth-century America as the author of The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), an antislavery polemic that provoked national public controversy and increased sectional tensions. In his intellectual and cultural biography of Helper -- the first to appear in more than forty years -- David Brown provides a fresh and nuanced portrait of this self-styled reformer, exploring anew Helper's motivation for writing his inflammatory book. Brown places Helper in a perspective that shows how the society in which he lived influenced his thinking, beginning with Helper's upbringing in North Carolina, his move to California at the height of the Californian gold rush, his developing hostility toward nonwhites within the United States, and his publication of The Impending Crisis of the South. Helper's book paints a picture of a region dragged down by the institution of slavery and displays surprising concern for the fate of American slaves. It sold 140,000 copies, perhaps rivaled only by Uncle Tom's Cabin in its impact. The author argues that Helper never wavered in his commitment to the South, though his book's devastating critique made him an outcast there, playing a crucial role in the election of Lincoln and influencing the outbreak of war. As his career progressed after the war, Helper's racial attitudes grew increasingly intolerant. He became involved in various grand pursuits, including a plan to link North and South America by rail, continually seeking a success that would match his earlier fame. But after a series of disappointments, he finally committed suicide. Brown reconsiders the life and career of one of the antebellum South's most controversial and misunderstood figures. Helper was also one of the rare lower-class whites who recorded in detail his economic, political, and social views, thus affording a valuable window into the world of nonslaveholding white southerners on the eve of the Civil War. His critique of slavery provides an important challenge to dominant paradigms stressing consensus among southern whites, and his development into a racist illustrates the power and destructiveness of the prejudice that took hold of the South in the late nineteenth century, as well as the wider developments in American society at the time.
Download or read book World of Toil and Strife written by Peter N. Moore and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A case study in Upcountry community development in the colonial and early republic era
Download or read book The North Carolina Historical Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Country Storekeeper in Pennsylvania written by Diane E. Wenger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the role that country storekeeper Samuel Rex of Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, played in the society and economy of the mid-Atlantic region from 1790 to 1807. Studies consumption patterns of one typical Pennsylvania-German community"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Pious Pursuits written by Michele Gillespie and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays re members of the Moravian Church; although many of these Protestant immigrants spoke German, they originated in various countries.
Download or read book Unification of a Slave State written by Rachel N. Klein and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the turbulent transformation of South Carolina from a colony rent by sectional conflict into a state dominated by the South's most unified and politically powerful planter leadership. Rachel Klein unravels the sources of conflict and growing unity, showing how a deep commitment to slavery enabled leaders from both low- and backcountry to define the terms of political and ideological compromise. The spread of cotton into the backcountry, often invoked as the reason for South Carolina's political unification, actually concluded a complex struggle for power and legitimacy. Beginning with the Regulator Uprising of the 1760s, Klein demonstrates how backcountry leaders both gained authority among yeoman constituents and assumed a powerful role within state government. By defining slavery as the natural extension of familial inequality, backcountry ministers strengthened the planter class. At the same time, evangelical religion, like the backcountry's dominant political language, expressed yet contained the persisting tensions between planters and yeomen. Klein weaves social, political, and religious history into a formidable account of planter class formation and southern frontier development.
Download or read book Free Labor in an Unfree World written by Michele Gillespie and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individual case studies explore the artisans' worlds on a more personal level, introducing us to the lives and work of such individuals as William Price Talmage, a journeyman; Reuben King, an artisan who became a planter; and Jett Thomas, one of the first master builders to leave his mark on Georgia's architecture."--BOOK JACKET.
