Artisans in the North Carolina Backcountry

Artisans in the North Carolina Backcountry PDF Author: Johanna Miller Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813194202
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Artisans in the North Carolina Backcountry

Artisans in the North Carolina Backcountry PDF Author: Johanna Miller Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813194202
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
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.

North Carolina Women

North Carolina Women PDF Author: Michele Gillespie
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820339997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
"This first of two volumes on North Carolina women chronicles the influence and accomplishments of individual women from the pre-Revolutionary period through the early 20th century. They represent a range of social and economic backgrounds, political stances, areas of influence, and geographical regions within the state. Even though North Carolina remained mostly rural until well into the twentieth century and the lives of most women centered on farm, family, and church, Gillespie and McMillen note that the state's people "exhibited a progressive streak that positively influenced women." Public funds were set aside to advance statewide education, private efforts after the Civil War led to the founding of numerous black schools and colleges, and in 1891 the General Assembly chartered the State Normal and Industrial School (later UNC-G) as one of the first publicly funded colleges for white women. By the late 19th century, as several essays in this volume reveal, education played a pivotal role in the lives of many white and black women. It inspired their activism and involvement in a world beyond their traditional domestic sphere"--

Women and Freedom in Early America

Women and Freedom in Early America PDF Author: Larry Eldridge
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814721982
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
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.

Artisan Workers in the Upper South

Artisan Workers in the Upper South PDF Author: Diane Barnes
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807134191
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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.

Breaking Loose Together

Breaking Loose Together PDF Author: Marjoleine Kars
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
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.

Settling the South Carolina Backcountry

Settling the South Carolina Backcountry PDF Author: Nancy L. Pressly
Publisher: BookLogix
ISBN: 1610056914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
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.

Southern Outcast

Southern Outcast PDF Author: David Brown
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
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.

The True Image

The True Image PDF Author: Daniel Watkins Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Scots-Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry

Pious Pursuits

Pious Pursuits PDF Author: Michele Gillespie
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845453398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Essays re members of the Moravian Church; although many of these Protestant immigrants spoke German, they originated in various countries.

A Separate Canaan

A Separate Canaan PDF Author: Jon F. Sensbach
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God. Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.