"A significant contribution to the current understanding of southern Appalachia's place within the South and the nation." — The Journal of American HistoryAmong the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the socia...

In the mountains of western North Carolina, the Civil War was fought on different terms than those found throughout most of the South. Though relatively minor strategically, incursions by both Confederate and Union troops disrupted life and threatened the social stability of many communities. Even more disruptive were the internal divisions among western Carolinians themselves. Differing ideologies turned into opposing loyalties, and the resulting strife proved as traumatic as anything imp...

While Hollywood deserves its reputation for much-maligned portrayals of southern highlanders on screen, the film industry also deserves credit for a long-standing tradition of more serious and meaningful depictions of Appalachia’s people. Surveying some two dozen films and the literary and historical sources from which they were adapted, John C. Inscoe argues that in the American imagination Appalachia has long represented far more than deprived and depraved hillbillies. Rather, the films ...

In The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1970) and The Confederate Nation (1979), Emory Thomas redefined the field of Civil War history and reconceptualized the Confederacy as a unique entity fighting a war for survival. Inside the Confederate Nation honors his enormous contributions to the field with fresh interpretations of all aspects of Confederate life -- nationalism and identity, family and gender, battlefront and home front, race, and postwar legacies and memories. Many of ...

Films possess virtually unlimited power for crafting broad interpretations of American history. Nineteenth-century America has proven especially conducive to Hollywood imaginations, producing indelible images like the plight of Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo, Pickett’s doomed charge at Gettysburg, the proliferation and destruction of plantation slavery in the American South, Custer’s fateful decision to divide his forces at Little Big Horn, and the onset of immigration and in...

Drawing on two decades of teaching a college-level course on southern history as viewed through autobiography and memoir, John C. Inscoe has crafted a series of essays exploring the southern experience as reflected in the life stories of those who lived it. Constantly attuned to the pedagogical value of these narratives, Inscoe argues that they offer exceptional means of teaching young people because the authors focus so fully on their confrontations—as children, adolescents, and young adu...

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 promot...

Georgians, like all Americans, experienced the Civil War in a variety of ways. Through selected articles drawn from the New Georgia Encyclopedia (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org), this collection chronicles the diversity of Georgia’s Civil War experience and reflects the most current scholarship in terms of how the Civil War has come to be studied, documented, and analyzed.The Atlanta campaign and Sherman’s March to the Sea changed the course of the war in 1864, in terms both of the up...

The importance of the South in the development of the United States has always been clear, but in recent decades the rise of the sunbelt-politically, economically, and culturally-has made the significance of the region's history all the more apparent. In The Human Tradition in the Old South, Professor James C. Klotter has gathered twelve insightful essays that explore the region's past and ponder its place in the broader story of the nation. This highly readable volume presents the South's...

The Blue, the Gray, and the Green is one of only a handful of books to apply an environmental history approach to the Civil War. This book explores how nature—disease, climate, flora and fauna, and other factors—affected the war and also how the war shaped Americans’ perceptions, understanding, and use of nature. The contributors use a wide range of approaches that serve as a valuable template for future environmental histories of the conflict.In his introduction, Brian Al...

Women were leading actors in twentieth-century developments in Georgia, yet most histories minimize their contributions. The essays in the second volume of Georgia Women, edited by Ann Short Chirhart and Kathleen Ann Clark, vividly portray a wide array of Georgia women who played an important role in the state’s history, from little-known Progressive Era activists to famous present-day figures such as Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter...

At the greatest moments and in the cruelest times, black women have been a crucial part of America's history. Now, the inspiring history of black women in America is explored in vivid detail by two leaders in the fields of African American and women's history.A Shining Thread of Hope chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South...