BOOKS

A new look at the Old North State

Essays reinterpret North Carolina history

Ben Steelman StarNews Staff
"New Voyages to Carolina: Reinterpreting North Carolina History" edited by Larry E. Tise and Jeffrey J. Crow. The cover shows a 1710 map of coastal North Carolina (including the Cape Fear River) sketched by Christoph von Graffenreid, the founder of New Bern.

History doesn't change, but how we interpret it does.

That's the core thesis of "New Voyages to Carolina," a volume of essays edited by Larry E. Tise and Jeffrey J. Crow. The editors, both former directors of the N.C. Division of Archives and History, surveyed the recent crop of papers submitted at symposia around the state and presented some of the most provocative.

The title echoes "A New Voyage to Carolina," a 1709 guidebook to the region by John Lawson, surveyor-general for North and South Carolina. A lot has changed since then.

And a lot has changed since 1989 when William S. Powell published his classic survey "North Carolina Through Four Centuries."

The writers reflect changes in historical scholarship, including an emphasis on social history (how ordinary people lived, as opposed to accounts of generals and politicians), environmental impacts and greater attention to women and African Americans.

For example, Stanley Riggs and Dorothy Ames of East Carolina University view coastal North Carolina as a "Land of Water." Its network of marshlands and barrier islands made development slow and unsteady; the closing of inlets, for example, stunted the early trading centers of Bath and Edenton.

The lack of a true deepwater bay, as at Charleston, Savannah or Norfolk, meant that trade would flow north and south out of the state, rather than from east to west. Generations of politicians, and billions in railroad and highway building, would try to correct that fact of life.

North Carolinians have long been, as Noeleen McIlvenna's 2009 history noted, "A Very Mutinous People." Most of the settlers were what the English called "Dissenters," with large numbers of Quakers at first, followed by a predominance of Baptists and Methodists, who disliked paying taxes to support the Church of England (Episcopal) and resisted strong authority, ecclesiastical or otherwise.

Patrick Huber's "Linthead Stomp" demonstrates that the roots of American country music lay not in Nashville or Memphis, but in Charlotte, where WBT was playing "hillbilly" music by the mid-1920s and a modest recording industry flourished. And the "hillbillies" making that music were not quaint mountaineers but textile workers who'd migrated to the Piedmont in search of jobs and brought that mountain music with them.

Tourism has a long tradition, as Richard D. Starnes of Western Carolina University proves. Even before the Civil War, planters like Wade Hampton were migrating to the North Carolina mountains, to showplaces like Asheville and Flat Rock, to escape the feverish heat of a Low Country summer. The Lower Cape Fear was not far behind, as Hugh MacRae built his "beach car" line and the great pavilion Lumina to draw visitors to Wrightsville Beach in the summers of the early 1900s.

In the 20th century, the state's leaders promoted the state's low-wage economy (and resistance to labor unions) to draw textile and furniture plants from Northeastern states. It worked, for awhile -- until the plants began to migrate to Mexico, Central America and East Asia.

The result, argue James A. Cobb and Peter Coclanis, is a two-tiered economy, with the Research Triangle and the Piedmont I-40 Corridor prospering in the high-tech, digital economy, while old textile and furniture centers are turning into rust belts. North Carolina, they suggest, is paying a high price now for failing to put more money into its educational system.

Wilmingtonians might be a little offput that their hometown seems rather marginal to this account. Aside from the uprsing/coup of 1898 -- rightly identified as a turning point that ended two-party politics in North Carolina for nearly 70 years -- references to Southeastern North Carolina are few. We can console ourselves with the beach and the tourists.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.

"New Voyages to Carolina"

Reinterpreting North Carolina History

Edited by Larry E. Tise and Jeffrey Crow

University of North Carolina Press, $29.95 paperback