A celebration of the remarkable poem vessels of Dave the PotterDavid Drake, who often signed his work simply as "Dave," was an enslaved potter who lived and worked in Edgefield District, South Carolina. Despite laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read or write, Drake was literate and signed some of his pots. His practice was not only to add his name and a date but also to embellish his work with commentary or verse—a powerful statement of resistance.

An in-depth, illustrated history of South Carolina's Lowcountry basketsCoiled grass baskets are icons of Gullah culture. From their roots in Africa, through their evolution on Lowcountry rice plantations, to their modern appreciation as art objects sought by collectors and tourists, these vessels are carriers of African American history and the African-inspired culture that took hold along the coast of South Carolina and neighboring states.Row Upon Row

Join author and historian Terry Ruscin as he reveals Henderson County's forgotten yet colorful history complete with its own cast of characters and historic landmarks. Who composed a blockbuster opera a few miles from downtown Hendersonville? Who were the record-setting McCrary twins, and why were they famous? These questions and many more are answered in this exciting volume of obscured history. From James Brown's 1950s performance on Hendersonville's Main Street to the rumors of illegal ...

Before 1910 the American chestnut was one of the most common trees in the eastern United States. Although historical evidence suggests the natural distribution of the American chestnut extended across more than four hundred thousand square miles of territory—an area stretching from eastern Maine to southeast Louisiana—stands of the trees could also be found in parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington State, and Oregon. An important natural resource, chestnut wood was preferred for woodwork...

In Great and Noble Jar, Cinda K. Baldwin offers the first authoritative study of South Carolina stoneware and traces the ways in which a rich regional tradition emerged from a unique cultural source.As Baldwin notes, South Carolina's old legislative district of Edgefield (an area now comprising Edgefield, Aiken, and Greenwood counties) has long been recognized as the place of origin for an alkaline-glazing process that came to characterize pottery produced throughout the l...

A Measure of the Earth provides an unparalleled window into an overlooked corner of recent American history: the traditional basketry revival of the past fifty years. Steve Cole and Martha Ware amassed a remarkable collection using the most stringent guidelines: baskets made from undyed domestic materials that have been harvested by the maker. An essay by Nicholas Bell details the long-standing use of traditional fibers such as black ash and white oak, willow and sweetgrass, and t...

Roots of a Region reveals the importance of folk traditions in shaping and expressing the American South. This overview covers the entire region and all forms of ex-pression-oral, musical, customary, and material.The author establishes how folklore pervades and reflects the region\'s economics, history (espe-cially the Civil War), race rela-tions, religion, and politics. He follows with a catalog of those folk-cultural traits-from food and crafts to music and story-that are distinc...

Folk art is one of the American South’s most significant areas of creative achievement, and this comprehensive yet accessible reference details that achievement from the sixteenth century through the present. This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the many forms of aesthetic expression that have characterized southern folk art, including the work of self-taught artists, as well as the South’s complex relationship to national patterns of folk art collectin...

The Catawba Indians are aboriginal to South Carolina, and their pottery tradition may be traced to 2,400 B.C. When Hernando de Soto visited the Catawba Nation (then Cofitachique) in 1540, he found a sophisticated Mississippian Culture. After the founding of Charleston in 1670, the Catawba population declined. Throughout subsequent demographic stress, the Catawba supported themselves by making and peddling pottery. They have the only surviving Native American pottery tradition east of the M...

New Philadelphia, Illinois, was founded in 1836 by Frank McWorter, a Kentucky slave who purchased his own freedom and then acquired land on the prairie for establishing a new—and integrated—community. McWorter sold property to other freed slaves and to whites, and used the proceeds to buy his family out of slavery. The town population reached 160, but declined when the railroad bypassed it. By 1940 New Philadelphia had virtually disappeared from the landscape. In this book, Paul A. Shackel...

Imprinted on license plates, plastered on billboards, stamped on the tail side of the state quarter, and inscribed on the state map, the peach is easily Georgia's most visible symbol. Yet Prunus persica itself is surprisingly rare in Georgia, and it has never been central to the southern agricultural economy. Why, then, have southerners - and Georgians in particular - clung to the fruit? The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South shows that the peach eme...

A fascinating study of American life and an explanation of how American life is studied through the everyday details of ordinary living, colorfully depicting a world hundreds of years in the past.History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. Objects such as doorways, gravestones, musical instruments, and even shards of pottery fill in the cracks between large histo...