The Great Dismal

The Great Dismal PDF Author: Bland Simpson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807867063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Just below the Tidewater area of Virginia, straddling the North Carolina-Virginia line, lies the Great Dismal Swamp, one of America's most mysterious wilderness areas. The swamp has long drawn adventurers, runaways, and romantics, and while many have tried to conquer it, none has succeeded. In this engaging memoir, Bland Simpson, who grew up near the swamp in North Carolina, blends personal experience, travel narrative, oral history, and natural history to create an intriguing portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people. For this edition, he has added an epilogue discussing developments in the region since 1990.

The Great Dismal

The Great Dismal PDF Author: Bland Simpson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807867063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Just below the Tidewater area of Virginia, straddling the North Carolina-Virginia line, lies the Great Dismal Swamp, one of America's most mysterious wilderness areas. The swamp has long drawn adventurers, runaways, and romantics, and while many have tried to conquer it, none has succeeded. In this engaging memoir, Bland Simpson, who grew up near the swamp in North Carolina, blends personal experience, travel narrative, oral history, and natural history to create an intriguing portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people. For this edition, he has added an epilogue discussing developments in the region since 1990.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Marcus Peyton Nevius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356425
Category : Dismal Swamp (N.C. and Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Dismal Freedom

Dismal Freedom PDF Author: J. Brent Morris
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People PDF Author: Daniel Sayers
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area’s archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism.

Freewater

Freewater PDF Author: Amina Luqman-Dawson
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 031605674X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Winner of the John Newbery Medal Winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award Award-winning author Amina Luqman-Dawson pens a lyrical, accessible historical middle-grade novel about two enslaved children’s escape from a plantation and the many ways they find freedom. After an entire young life of enslavement, twelve-year-old Homer escapes Southerland Plantation with his little sister Ada, leaving his beloved mother behind. Much as he adores her and fears for her life, Homer knows there’s no turning back, not with the overseer on their trail. Through tangled vines, secret doorways, and over a sky bridge, the two find a secret community called Freewater, deep in the recesses of the swamp. In this new, free society made up of escaped slaves and some born-free children, Homer cautiously embraces a set of spirited friends, almost forgetting where he came from. But when he learns of a threat that could destroy Freewater, he hatches a plan to return to Southerland plantation, overcome his own cautious nature, and free his mother from enslavement. Loosely based on a little-mined but important piece of history, this is an inspiring and deeply empowering story of survival, love, and courage.

Dred

Dred PDF Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Written partly in response to the criticisms of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by both white Southerners and black abolitionists, Stowe's second novel, "Dred," attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective. Through the compelling stories of Nina Gordon, the mistress of a slave plantation, and Dred, a black revolutionary, Stowe brings to life conflicting beliefs about race, the institution of slavery, and the possibilities of violent resistance.

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company PDF Author: Charles Royster
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
In this absorbing narrative Charles Royster traces the rise and fall of the eighteenth-century transatlantic culture that was built on the insatiable demand in Europe for Virginia tobacco and the equally insatiable American demand for European manufactured goods. Moving from the plantations of Virginia and Antigua to the warehouses of London and Glasgow, from the Gold Coast of Africa to the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, from the iron furnaces of southern Wales to the subscribers' room of Lloyd's of London, Professor Royster gives us the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, a fantastically delusional enterprise that proposed draining and developing a vast morass along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Examining the interconnected lives of the company's partners, Royster reveals a colonial order built on a system of cronyism, conspicuous consumption, and debt that seems hauntingly familiar. He writes about the many schemers and dreamers (including George Washington, Robert "King" Carter, two William Byrds, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Morris) who failed to amass their desired fortunes, and a few realists (Samuel Gist, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Anthony Bacon) who succeeded, but at the dire expense of others. And we see the breakdown of this culture and the transition to a more democratic, though similar, system after the Revolution. Throughout Royster's narrative we seepossessors possessed by their possessions, slaveholders possessed by slavery, and heirs possessed by litigation. Connecting all their stories are their unceasing efforts to make something substantial out of the insubstantial--chief among them the almost unbelievable delusion that fortunes could bemade from the Dismal Swamp.

Into the Sound Country

Into the Sound Country PDF Author: Bland Simpson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807868191
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Into the Sound Country is a story of rediscovery--of two North Carolinians returning to seek their roots in the state's eastern provinces. It is an affectionate, impressionistic, and personal portrait of the coastal plain by two natives of the region, writer Bland Simpson and photographer Ann Cary Simpson. Here Bland Simpson tours his old waterfront haunts in Elizabeth City, explores scuppernong vineyards from Hertford to Southport, tramps through Pasquotank swamps and Croatan pine savannas, and visits Roanoke River oyster bars and Core Banks fishing shanties. Ann Simpson's original photographs capture both the broad vistas of the sounds and rivers and the quieter corners of mossy creeks and country churchyards. Her selection of archival illustrations ranges from the informative to the humorous, from a turpentine scraper at work in the 1850s to a pair of little girls playing with a horseshoe crab on a Beaufort porch at the turn of the century. A memorable journey into eastern Carolina's richly varied natural world, Into the Sound Country is for anyone who would spend a while in one of America's most intriguing and underexplored areas.

The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey PDF Author: Bland Simpson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
As compelling as fiction, The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey tells the dramatic story of the disappearance of nineteen-year-old Nell Cropsey from her riverside home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in November 1901. Bloodhounds, detectives, divers, and even a psychic were brought in to search for her, and the case immediately became a national sensation. Bland Simpson, who first heard the tale as an Elizabeth City schoolboy, weaves this true story into a colorful nonfiction account, told in three first-person voices: Nell's sister Ollie; famous newspaper editor W. O. Saunders, who covered the case as a young reporter; and Jim Wilcox, Nell's beau, who was implicated in the case. Nell and Jim's romance, her disappearance, the great search, the trials, and their aftermath are artfully reconstructed from interviews, court records, and newspaper accounts.

Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy

Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy PDF Author: Moses Grandy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
This book is a slave narrative, written by former slave, Moses Grandy.