The Way We Lived in North Carolina (Published in Association with the Office of Archives and His)

by Elizabeth A. Fenn

"Natives and Newcomers" describes North Carolina's Indians and the dramatic changes that occurred when Europeans and Africans entered their land. North Carolinians of the nineteenth century dwelt in an agrarian world. It is the first volume in "The Way We Lived in North Carolina," a pioneering series that uses historic places as windows to the past. Even before Raleigh's "lost colony," Europeans had explored the coast and the mountains. the first permanent newcomers were English migrants from Virginia, followed after 1715 by planters and slaves from South Carolina. In the next half-century, thousands of German, Scotch-Irish, and Scottish settlers came by boat from Europe and by wagon from the North. Those who carved out farms in the piedmont had little in common with coastal planters or the backcountry elite of lawyers, judges, and merchants. By the late 1760s, western farmers organized as Regulators to protest unjust taxes, corrupt courts, and threats to private property -- issues that would soon reappear as part of the patriot rhetoric of the American Revolution. Locations used to illuminate this early period range from the Town Creek Indian Mound to Governor Tryon's Palace. Sites include not only colonial plantations, churches, and forts, but also frontier cabins, wilderness parks, historic trails, and Indian settlements.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

History by committee--updated and consolidated edition of a 30-year-old five-volume history of North Carolina focusing on physical culture (architecture and historic sites).

Not bad, just not great. Interesting to learn that North Carolina has had an inferiority complex for a long time, due to lagging in population, manufacturing, and culture even from the early days of colonization due to lack of transportation and ingrained conservatism. Ironically, that could have helped pave the way for the recent renaissance in tourism, high-tech jobs, and population explosion as people want to live and play in the relatively unspoiled state "of the state we call home", to quote the current tourism-office slogan.

The updating to cover the most recent years seems like a rushed and tacked on list of names and events from the last three decades, not an extension of the narrative history to truly bring the history up to now.