Download or read book Black Rice written by Judith A. Carney and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world. Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World. In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.

Download or read book Carolina s Golden Fields written by Hayden R. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The basis for this book began twenty years ago when I enrolled in the College of Charleston's summer archaeological field school. After spending the first half of the semester honing our technique by digging five-foot by five-foot units, identifying soil stratigraphy, and collecting artifacts at the Charleston Museum's Stono Plantation, the archaeologists reoriented us students to a new site. For the remainder of the field school we investigated Willtown Bluff on the Edisto River, an early-eighteenth century township surrounded by plantations. My interest in inland rice cultivation grew from our work at the James Stobo site, a 1710 plantation located on the edge of the Willtown township and one mile from the tidal river. For three archaeological seasons between 1997 and 1999, I participated in excavations of the Stobo Plantation house foundation located on a hardwood knoll surrounded by a sea of low-lying Cypress wetlands. During this time, I had a unique opportunity to walk off the dry terra firma and explore miles of inland rice embankments sprawling to the east and to the south of the house site. Major embankments traverse the wetlands on a magnetic north/south and east/west axis, intersected by smaller check banks and drainage canals as far as the eye can see under the dense cypress and hardwood canopy"--

Download or read book Rice and Slaves written by Daniel C. Littlefield and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Littlefield's investigation of colonial South Carolinianss preference for some African ethnic groups over others as slaves reveals how the Africans' diversity and capabilities inhibited the development of racial stereotypes and influenced their masters' perceptions of slaves. It also highlights how South Carolina, perhaps more than anywhere else in North America, exemplifies the common effort of Africans and Europeans in molding American civilization.

Download or read book The Introduction of Rice Culture Into South Carolina written by Alexander Samuel Salley and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lowcountry Time and Tide written by James H. Tuten and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-11-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough account of rice culture's final decades and of its modern legacy. In mapping the slow decline of the rice kingdom across the half-century following the Civil War, James H. Tuten offers a provocative new vision of the forces—agricultural, environmental, economic, cultural, and climatic—stacked against planters, laborers, and millers struggling to perpetuate their once-lucrative industry through the challenging postbellum years and into the hardscrabble twentieth century. Concentrating his study on the vast rice plantations of the Heyward, Middleton, and Elliott families of South Carolina, Tuten narrates the ways in which rice producers—both the former grandees of the antebellum period and their newly freed slaves—sought to revive rice production. Both groups had much invested in the economic recovery of rice culture during Reconstruction and the beginning decades of the twentieth century. Despite all disadvantages, rice planting retained a perceived cultural mystique that led many to struggle with its farming long after the profits withered away. Planters tried a host of innovations, including labor contracts with former slaves, experiments in mechanization, consolidation of rice fields, and marketing cooperatives in their efforts to rekindle profits, but these attempts were thwarted by the insurmountable challenges of the postwar economy and a series of hurricanes that destroyed crops and the infrastructure necessary to sustain planting. Taken together, these obstacles ultimately sounded the death knell for the rice kingdom. The study opens with an overview of the history of rice culture in South Carolina through the Reconstruction era and then focuses on the industry's manifestations and decline from 1877 to 1930. Tuten offers a close study of changes in agricultural techniques and tools during the period and demonstrates how adaptive and progressive rice planters became despite their conservative reputations. He also explores the cultural history of rice both as a foodway and a symbol of wealth in the lowcountry, used on currency and bedposts. Tuten concludes with a thorough treatment of the lasting legacy of rice culture, especially in terms of the environment, the continuation of rice foodways and iconography, and the role of rice and rice plantations in the modern tourism industry.

Download or read book Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields written by Margaret Belser Hollis and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A firsthand account of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Old South rice kingdom from one of South Carolina's founding families The Civil War and Reconstruction eras decimated the rice-planting enterprise of the South, and no family experienced the effects of this economic upheaval quite as dramatically as the Heywards of South Carolina, a family synonymous with the wealth of the old rice kingdom in the Palmetto State. Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields collects the revealing wartime and postbellum letters and documents of Edward Barnwell "Barney" Heyward (1826–1871), a native of Beaufort District and grandson of Nathaniel Heyward, one of the most successful rice planters and largest slaveholders in the South. Barney Heyward was also the father of South Carolina governor Duncan Clinch Heyward, author of Seed from Madagascar, the definitive account of the rice kingdom's final stand a generation later. Edited by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes, the Heyward family correspondence from this transformational period reveals the challenges faced by a once-successful industry and a once-opulent society in the throes of monumental change. During the war Barney Heyward served as a lieutenant in the engineering division of the Confederate army but devoted much of his time to managing affairs at his plantations near Columbia and Beaufort. His letters chronicle the challenges of preserving his lands and maintaining control over the enslaved labor force essential to his livelihood and his family's fortune. The wartime letters also provide a penetrating view of the Confederate defense of coastal South Carolina against the Union forces who occupied Beaufort District. In the aftermath of the conflict, Heyward worked with only limited success to revive planting operations. In addition to what these documents reveal about rice cultivation during tumultuous times, they also convey the drama, affections, and turmoil of life in the Heyward family, from Barney's increasingly difficult relations with his father, Charles Heyward, to his heartfelt devotion to his wife, the former Catherine "Tat" Maria Clinch, and their children. Twilight of the South Carolina Rice Fields also features an introduction by noted economic historian Peter A. Coclanis that places these letters and the legacy of the Heyward family into a broader historical context.

Download or read book The Carolina Rice Kitchen written by Karen Hess and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering history of the Carolina rice kitchen and its African influences Where did rice originate? How did the name Hoppin' John evolve? Why was the famous rice called "Carolina Gold"? The rice kitchen of early Carolina was the result of a myriad of influences—Persian, Arab, French, English, African—but it was primarily the creation of enslaved African American cooks. And it evolved around the use of Carolina Gold. Although rice had not previously been a staple of the European plantation owners, it began to appear on the table every day. Rice became revered and was eaten at virtually every meal and in dishes that were part of every course: soups, entrées, side dishes, dessert, and breads. The ancient way of cooking rice, developed in India and Africa, became the Carolina way. Carolina Gold rice was so esteemed that its very name became a generic term in much of the world for the finest long-grain rice available. This engaging book is packed with fascinating historical details, including more than three hundred recipes and a facsimile of the Carolina Rice Cook Book from 1901. A new foreword by John Martin Taylor underscores Hess's legacy as a culinary historian and the successful revival of Carolina Gold rice.

Download or read book Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina written by S. Max Edelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation. The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.

Download or read book Deep Roots written by Edda L. Fields-Black and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

Download or read book African Americans at Mars Bluff South Carolina written by Amelia Wallace Vernon and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiring story of a community shaped by its African legacy.

Download or read book The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice written by Richard Dwight Porcher (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first full-length work to feature detailed illustrations and descriptions of the implements and machines used to prepare Carolina rice for overseas markets, Market preparation of Carolina rice includes 160 illustrations, most of them meticulously hand-drafted by Judd expressly for this edition. The text begins with the preindustrial implements and techniques used by slaves in the late 1600s and early 1700s and concludes with the water-powered and steam-powered machines that drove rice threshing and milling until the end of the industry in 1911. In great detail the authors reveal the immense, continually evolving technological innovations of an agricultural industry that spanned the industrial revolution, as well as the history of the colony and state"--Dust jacket.

Download or read book Slave Counterpoint written by Philip D. Morgan and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.

Download or read book Pawleys Island written by Steve Roberts and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, can be summed up in four words: rice, sea, golf, and hammocks. The rivers threading through coastal South Carolina created an ideal environment for cultivating rice, and by the mid-18th century, vast plantations were producing profitable crops and wealthy landowners. But those plantations also produced malaria-carrying mosquitoes, so the landowners sent their families to the seashore for the summer and built the first houses on Pawleys Island starting in 1822. The end of slavery doomed the rice culture, and the old plantations were sold to rich Northerners for hunting and fishing retreats. By the 1960s, many of the old plantations were turned into golf courses, reviving the economy. But the beating heart of Pawleys Island remains the rhythm of the sea and what one early visitor called "the only beach in the world."

Download or read book Slavery Disease and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry written by Peter McCandless and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the Revolution, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry argues that the two were intimately connected: both resulted largely from the dominance of rice cultivation on plantations using imported African slave labor. This development began in the coastal lands near Charleston, South Carolina, around the end of the seventeenth century. Rice plantations spread north to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to Georgia and northeast Florida in the late colonial period. The book examines perceptions and realities of the lowcountry disease environment; how the lowcountry became notorious for its 'tropical' fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever; how people combated, avoided or perversely denied the suffering they caused; and how diseases and human responses to them influenced not only the lowcountry and the South, but the United States, even helping to secure American independence.

Download or read book Rice written by Nikky Finney and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rice, her second volume of poetry, Nikky Finney explores the complexity of rice as central to the culture, economy, and mystique of the coastal South Carolina region where she was born and raised. The prized Carolina Gold rice paradoxically made South Carolina one of the most oppressive states for slaves and also created the remarkable Gullah culture on the coastal islands. The poems in Rice compose a profound and unflinching journey connecting family and the paradoxes of American history, from the tragic times when African slaves disembarked on the South Carolina coast to the triumphant day when Judge Ernest A. Finney Jr., Nikky’s father, was sworn in as South Carolina’s first African American chief justice. Images from the Finney family archive illustrate and punctuate this collection. Rice showcases Finney’s hungry intellect, her regional awareness and pride, and her sensitivity to how cultures are built and threatened.

Download or read book Rice written by Michael W. Twitty and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the staple foods most welcomed on southern tables—and on tables around the world—rice is without question the most versatile. As Michael W. Twitty observes, depending on regional tastes, rice may be enjoyed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; as main dish, side dish, and snack; in dishes savory and sweet. Filling and delicious, rice comes in numerous botanical varieties and offers a vast range of scents, tastes, and textures depending on how it is cooked. In some dishes, it is crunchingly crispy; in others, soothingly smooth; in still others, somewhere right in between. Commingled or paired with other foods, rice is indispensable to the foodways of the South. As Twitty's fifty-one recipes deliciously demonstrate, rice stars in Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast kitchens, as well as in the kitchens of cooks from around the world who are now at home in the South. Exploring rice's culinary history and African diasporic identity, Twitty shows how to make the southern classics as well as international dishes—everything from Savannah Rice Waffles to Ghanaian Crab Stew. As Twitty gratefully sums up, "Rice connects me to every other person, southern and global, who is nourished by rice's traditions and customs."

Download or read book Somerset Homecoming written by Dorothy Spruill Redford and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of one woman's unflagging efforts to recover the history of her ancestors, slaves who had lived and worked at Somerset Place plantation.