North Carolina Collection Research Articles

Thomas Wolfe: Chapel Hill Days and Death from Tuberculosis

Thomas Wolfe (Figure ​(Figure11), regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, died in 1938 at the age of 37 of tuberculosis (TB) of the brain. Other great literary figures afflicted with TB include John Keats, Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Anton Chekov, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. TB was called the “artist's disease” and was linked with creativity and the bohemian life. The TB sufferer was a wanderer in search of a healthy place, and the disease provided people with a reason to travel. Figure 1 Thomas Wolfe in his 30s. Photo: The Thomas Wolfe Collection, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, NC. In 1900, the year of Wolfe's birth, TB was the most dreaded disease throughout the world and was the leading cause of death in the United States. The “climatic theory” of treating lung disease, which originated in Germany and Switzerland, proposed that altitude, atmosphere, and the climate of cool mountain air would help cure the disease of TB, also called the White Plague. Wolfe's hometown of Asheville, North Carolina—which offered the best combination of altitude, atmosphere, and climate—had become a world center for the treatment of TB. Because of this, thousands of TB victims came to Asheville, including George Vanderbilt and E. W. Grove, who contributed to the building of the Biltmore House and the Grove Park Inn, respectively. At the end of the 19th century, it was reported that there were 25 TB specialists in Asheville; many came first as patients to be treated for TB. Between 1900 and 1930, over 25 TB sanitariums were established, but most patients stayed in boarding houses with lower rates of $5 to $15 per week. The houses, which had open air sleeping porches as a necessity, were operated solely for the care of TB patients. The number of boarding houses rose from 55 in 1900 to 137 in 1910. Thomas Wolfe's mother, Julia, had a keen business sense and in 1906 purchased a 29-room boarding house in downtown Asheville called the Old Kentucky Home located near the family home (Figure ​(Figure22). Young Tom eventually moved into the boarding house permanently for about 10 years. Thus, Tom was probably exposed to TB in his mother's boarding house while growing up. Figure 2 Thomas Wolfe in front of the Old Kentucky Home at 48 Spruce Street, Asheville, NC, about 1906. Photo: North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with permission of the Estate of Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe wrote much about diseases, especially TB, in his autobiographical masterpiece, Look Homeward Angel, and it is believed he had a fear of TB, which haunted him and affected his writing long before the discovery of the tubercular lesion in his right lung in 1938. In a letter to his mother in 1920, he wrote about his “heavy cold and the rattling cough” that brought pain to his right lung and a spot of blood on his handkerchief. Tom was only 15 when he enrolled at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He went there alone with no connections or close friends. Described as a “green freshman,” obscure and lonely, he would become a prominent and popular campus figure by his junior year. Outside the classroom, he pursued numerous activities and “joined everything.” He was editor of the college newspaper, The Tar Heel; wrote stories, plays, and poems for the university magazine; and was associate editor of the college annual, Yackety Yak. Active in formal debate, Wolfe later joined the Carolina Playmakers, and in 1919, his one-act play, “The Return of Buck Gavin,” was given its premier, with the author appearing as the mountain outlaw of the title. He was selected to the Golden Fleece honor society and was a member of Pi Kappa Phi social fraternity at the University of North Carolina (Figure ​(Figure33). At the end of his senior yearbook entry, the following quote appeared: “He can do more between 8:25 and 8:30 than the rest of us can do all day, and it is no wonder that he is classed as a ‘genius.’” Figure 3 Thomas Wolfe (center) and two other students at the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity house. Photo: North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduation, Tom enrolled at Harvard and eventually ended up teaching and writing in New York City. He made several trips to Europe. His first novel, Look Homeward Angel, was published in 1929. Of Time and the River followed in 1935 (Figure ​(Figure44). Figure 4 Working on the manuscript for Of Time and the River in his Brooklyn apartment in 1935. Photo: The Thomas Wolfe Collection, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, NC.

"She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies

"She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes"Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies Rebecca Sharpless (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution White women, mostly the wives of farm owners, and fewer African American women sought to enhance their family income through petty sales of everything from chickens to caramel cakes. The sales ranged from peddling foraged items such as blackberries to organized curb markets with firm rules of engagement and pricing. Curb market in Durham, North Carolina, 1948, courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library. [End Page 45] Buying local food is all the rage today. Serious students of food tout the advantages of produce from nearby regions both for flavor and environmental advantages. Long before the word locavore entered the national vocabulary, however, southern women developed their own regional food networks, both as producers and consumers. During the first third of the twentieth century, enterprising farm women produced and sold eggs, chickens, butter, fruit, and vegetables, and discerning urban housewives bought these products, sometimes from local stores and sometimes directly from the growers. That both groups tried to gain advantage in the exchange demonstrates the complexities created by people with disparate goals and by urbanization, which led to an increasing divide between town and farm people. Women showed their acumen in supplying food for the market and for their families, locally grown and purchased.1 The market relationships between rural and urban women were on the minds of many southerners in the 1920s and 1930s. Two fictional examples show the dual sides of the interplay. In William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, Cora Tull, a quintessential good wife, takes the advice of a Miss Lawington, probably a home demonstration agent, and scrapes and saves to buy some purebred chickens which produce superior eggs. Cora then contracts with a woman from town to buy her homemade cakes. After Cora has lavished her finest ingredients and enormous care in their production, the unnamed woman then decides not to have the party and declines to purchase the cakes. As Cora ministers to her dying neighbor, she ruminates over the rejected cakes: "So I baked yesterday, more careful than ever I baked in my life, and the cakes turned out right well. But when we got to town this morning Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not going to have the party after all." Cora's daughter Kate, who serves as something of a Cassandra figure in the novel, speaks bluntly: "She ought to have taken them . . . But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can't." The town woman is condemned by the country women (and perhaps by Faulkner) on several levels. First, she is frivolous, hosting parties which country people cannot afford. Second, she is capricious, changing her mind about the party at the last minute. Third, she is unscrupulous, refusing to buy the product for which she has contracted. For Cora, the producer, this unnamed woman is a consuming nightmare. Her perfidy casts a further note of gloom over the hot room where Addie Bundren lies on her deathbed.2 In the battle between town and country, the town dweller holds all the cards. In Dorothy Scarborough's 1929 novel Can't Get a Red Bird, a wealthy urban woman becomes the patron of a poor country woman. Honey Carr, whose family could not keep a milk cow on their sharecropper's farm, is determined to escape the life of a cotton sharecropper. She borrows cows and makes good butter, which her husband Johnny sells to a local grocer who is the vendor of choice for [End Page 46] Mrs. Blank, the wife of the mayor of Dallas. Mrs. Blank inquires of the product's source. When she expresses her delight with Honey's superior product, Johnny boldly asks the mayor's wife if she will buy directly from him, and she agrees, also requesting eggs and lamb. Mrs. Blank then arranges to sell the surplus to her neighbors and relatives. Johnny and Honey make enough money from this production to pay off their grocery debt. Through sheer luck, the young couple sells to...

Between the Lines: James Johnston Pettigrew as Connoisseur of Art: His Copy of Vasari's "Lives of the Artists"

James Johnston Pettigrew (1828-1863) of North Carolina was a well-traveled student of art and culture, and fluent in many European languages. During his sojourn in Europe, he purchased a number of books, including Giorgio Vasari's Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti, published by Le Monnier between 1846-1870. Significantly, Pettigrew's copy which is now in the North Carolina Collection of the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Pettigrew's alma mater—is not complete. General Pettigrew, a member of Lee's Tar Heels and a participant in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, died of wounds at the age of 35. This article discusses the significance of Pettigrew's copy of this important book.

History of North Carolina Libraries and Librarianship: A Bibliography, Part I

Following a suggestion by Robert G. Anthony, Jr., Curator of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I set about compiling this work, which is modeled on and incorporates materials gathered for earlier bibliographies published by Ray Carpenter, Bea Bruce, and Michele Oliver in 1971 and by Robert G. Anthony, Jr. in 1992.1

Retrospection: The First Hundred Years of North Carolina’s Libraries - 1905

This first in a series of articles will highlight events and statistics about North Carolina’s libraries in 1905, which were collected fromvarious publications in Joyner Library’s Verona Joyner Langford North Carolina Collection. The Biennial Report of the Superintendent ofPublic Instruction of North Carolina and the Biennial Report of the State Librarian provided information about school and public libraries. Information about college and private libraries was taken from the First Biennial Report of the North Carolina Library Commission and from books about the institutions of higher education.

O. N. Pruitt's Possum Town: The 'Modest Aspiration and Small Renown' of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915-1960

O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town:The ‘Modest Aspiration and Small Renown’ of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915–1960 Berkley Hudson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. O. N. Pruitt (right) with his son Lambuth ( far left) and probably Pruitt's brother Jim (center). Both Lambuth and Jim worked as photographers—Jim in nearby Starkville, and Lambuth in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1925. All photographs from the O. N. Pruitt Collection in Wilson Library's North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [End Page 52] Sometime in the 1930s, jack-of-all-trades photographer O. N. Pruitt focused his bulky, large format view camera beside a northeast Mississippi lake surrounded with swamp cypress. Draping the camera's black cloth over his head the better to see the upside down and backwards image that appeared on the ground glass, he clicked the shutter. Black-and-white, nitrate negative film would soon reveal two African American men standing in a wooden boat filled with huge spoonbill catfish. Close by, a white man stands in the water next to another boat laden with spoonbills. He holds the trophy fish by the gill, dangling it vertically to display its size—almost as long as he is tall. The two black men in the boat, one smiling, seem deferential. But their looks and body posture, and the gaze of another black man leaning against the tree, suggest that the white man may have caught that fish, but he did not catch them all. Shadows of the four men appear as murky reflections in the lake water. About the same time that he made this photograph Pruitt was called to take a very different picture. On Monday, July 15, 1935, the telephone rang in Pruitt's home in Columbus, Mississippi. Come quickly, he was told; there had been a lynching, a double lynching. With that, Pruitt, who always kept his camera equipment at the ready in his car trunk, sped south of town on paved and then gravel roads. There, in a backwoods churchyard, he found two men—described as young "Negro farmers" in Associated Press accounts published around the nation—lynched from a big oak tree. One Pruitt photograph depicts the bodies of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, hanging side-by-side from ropes tied to the tree. A white man, wearing a straw boater and kneeling with his back to the camera, grasps their pants' legs, apparently to steady the bodies for the picture.1 Moore and Morton—two among at least four thousand African Americans lynched between 1889 and 1946—had been accused of harassing a white woman. The day after the lynching, a Tuesday, the local newspaper reported this salient detail: hundreds of spectators came to look at the bodies of the lynched men before they were cut down, more than twelve hours after the lynching occurred. Although the images did not appear in the local newspaper, Pruitt, a commercial and studio photographer, was nonetheless contacted to document this horrific event. The subject of this image tells us everything about Pruitt's time and place, while his role in photographing it speaks volumes about the relationship of the small-town southern photographer and the community in the early twentieth-century South.2 From 1915 to 1960 Pruitt was the de-facto documentarian of his postage stamp of soil, Lowndes County, Mississippi, where race, class, and gender mattered greatly. Pruitt took pictures throughout northeast Mississippi, but he focused on the crossroads town of Columbus, the county seat situated along the Alabama border. Specializing in "portrait and commercial work," Pruitt's photography studio, [End Page 53] in the words of his advertising brochure, "pictured many phases of the life of Columbus and Columbians." Ranging from the mundane to the horrific, the photographs offer a record of family picnics, river baptisms, carnivals, parades, fires, tornadoes, funerals, and even two of the last public and legal executions by hanging in Mississippi, as well as the illegal lynching of the two African American farmers. By photographing the familial and the communal, the sacred and the profane, Pruitt shows us a broad range of community life filtered through his own perspective...

To the Benefit of Both: Academic Librarians Connect with Middle School Teachers through a Digitized History Resources Workshop

A workshop sponsored by the North Carolina Collection at East Carolina University to familiarize middle school teachers with the Eastern Carolina Digital History Exhibits and provide lesson plans for the site revealed (1) the need for teachers and librarians to work more closely together in the design and use of new digital history resources and (2) the benefits of cooperative efforts. Although the K–12 community generally welcomes digital resources, teachers face important challenges, such as redesigning the curriculum. What the teachers had to say, as well as a few other unexpected findings, proved beneficial to the librarians in creating sites. Small workshops were shown to be useful to both teachers and librarians.

Racial diversity with high nucleated cell counts and CD34 counts achieved in a national network of cord blood banks.

Banked, unrelated, partially HLA-matched, umbilical cord blood is an alternative stem cell source for patients in need of transplantation therapy who lack traditionally matched donors. A presumed advantage of cord blood is the ability to increase recruitment of donors of minority ethnic backgrounds. The American Red Cross Cord Blood Program was established in 1999 with 6 banks and 10 collection sites throughout the country. Cord blood donors self-report racial designations on questionnaires, and donor race was collected from each site. Postprocessing nucleated cell counts and CD34(+) counts were obtained on the cord blood units, and results from each racial group (white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American) were compared in the natural logarithmic scale by using analysis of variance. A total of 18878 donors consented: 64% white, 16% black, 12% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 1% Native American, and 3% other. The Detroit area consented the highest percentage of black donors (87%), San Diego consented the highest percentage of Hispanic donors (59%), and Oakland consented the highest percentage of Asian donors (15%). Seven thousand eight hundred sixty-six cord blood units have been banked for transplantation. The mean preprocessing nucleated cell count was 1220 x 10(6) (range, 327-7300 x 10(6)). There was no difference among racial groups when controlled for site (P =.395). The mean CD34(+) count was 3.28 x 10(6). Blacks had a significantly lower CD34(+) count than the other racial/ethnic groups in the Midwest, Northwest, and North Carolina collection sites. A racially diverse cord blood bank can be achieved. Nucleated cell counts were similar among the different racial/ethnic groups. CD34(+) counts were lower for blacks in some collection sites.

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten (review)

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten By Jerry w. Cotten University of North Carolina Press, 1998 253 pp. Cloth, $37.50 The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill owns over 97,000 negatives of photographs taken by the Wootten-Moulton Studio, a New Bern-Chapel Hill photographic business in operation from 1906 until 1954. It also owns 260 original exhibition prints taken by Bayard Wootten (1875-1959). This is a treasure trove of material. Jerry W. Cotten's Light and Air examines the career of Bayard Wootten within the broader history of twentieth-century photography and reproduces a selection of 136 photographs, mostly from the 1930s. These are images of the South: landscapes, wooden cabins, a plantation house, but mostly black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society. Have we seen their faces before? Some were published as illustrations for books, notably Muriel Earley Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel (1935), Charles Morrow Wilson's Backwoods America (1934), and Olive Tilford Dargan's From My Highest Hill: Carolina's Mountain Folks (1941). The photos collected by Cotten are both similar to and different from the better-known Depression-era photos: those, for example, of African Americans in Charleston and Appalachian mountaineers taken by Doris Ulmann, those of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, or those of Margaret Bourke-White in Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Each of these photographers is associated with the straight or realistic and documentary movement in photography. Wootten, a decade or two older, was a dedicated pictorialist, part of an earlier movement in which photographers aimed to create images that rivaled the form of painting, making use of mood, studied compositions (sometimes posed or contrived), a tendency to favor or sentimental subjects, and an emphasis on atmospheric effects (hence the Light and Air title). Cotten makes astute comparisons between the work of the and Wootten's slightly softer, gentler images. But the distinction between the two approaches is not always as sharp to the reader. The selection of subject matter is crucial, and the choices were often remarkably similar; those of the realists sometimes seemed to deliberately convey images of dire poverty. Born in New Bern, the daughter of a photographer (who died when she was five) and a mother with an artistic bent, Wootten became interested in photography around 1904. Driven by financial need, she set up her own business, a bold move for a woman of her generation. Her half-brother, George C. Moulton, soon joined her and handled much of the routine photography that kept them afloat financially. Early on, Wootten established a contact with the military at Fort Bragg, doing portraits and job work, and in 1928 she and Moulton moved to Chapel Hill to do similar work for the University of North Carolina. (Many of those 97,000 negatives at the North Carolina Collection represent the bread-and-butter business that sustained them.) As early as 1910 Wootten exhibited at a meeting of the Photographic Association of America. She remained a member of its Women's Federation and kept in touch with the Pictorial Photographers of America until that organization's demise around 1920. A few years later Wootten visited the Appalachian School (now Penland) in the mountains of western North Carolina, a school run by her cousin Lucy Morgan with the aim of reviving rural handicrafts as a basis for fireside industries. Wootten took pictures for the school's catalog and in turn grew to love the region and its people. Her first national recognition came in 1932 when she exhibited forty prints of landscapes and portraits at the Fine Arts Theatre in Boston. The Boston papers, as well as the Charlotte Observer, praised the natural and picturesque quality of her studies of mountain people. …

"We were the Snopeses": A Writer and Her Piedmont

ESSAY "We were the Snopeses" A Writer and Her Piedmont by Doris Betts he late C. Hugh Holman had been my undergraduate teacher at the University ofNorth Carolina, so when in 1966 I returned to the English department as a lowly part-time lecturer, I took his every word the way Moses accepted every graven one handed to him on Sinai. Still, it was a surprise when he said, "You and Flannery O'Connor are both Piedmont writers." I couldn't see it. Milledgeville, Georgia, was not Statesville, North Carolina. Catholic was not Associate Reformed Presbyterian. Rural was not milltown. The closest I ever owned to a peacock was a crippled chicken that even in the hungry thirties nobody had the heart to behead and fry, whereas even a pullet would walk backwards for Miss O'Connor. Later, reading his critical essays, I realized Holman was merely resisting the simplistic notion of a monolithic South: Thomas Wolfe's South was not Faulkner 's; Harriette Arnow's was unlike Truman Capote's, and Shelby Foote says even Mississippi has seven distinct areas. Holman had cut the Southeast into thirds and set O'Connor and me in the same slice geographically as well as temperamentally. Others have defined Piedmont {literally, the "foot of the mountains") as that biggergeographical region stretching from New York's Hudson River to central Alabama , the broad foothills of the Appalachians, averaging 1 25 miles wide up and down that rolling country with hurrying rivers that seem to have waited centuries for hydroelectric power to be invented. Holman restricted his region to the southern Piedmont alone, the "upcountry ," where this century's local Babbitts have lived out their particular capitalism producing cigarettes, furniture, and textiles-a territory smaller than the Confederacy but larger than the "Cotton Piedmont" sociologist Howard Odum managed to squeeze between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina . My own state, North Carolina, is often divided into mountain, Piedmont, and coastal plain, with forty-four of its one hundred counties in the more populous and prosperous Piedmont. Here, historical and political differences follow geographical lines, as do serious quarrels between barbecue eaters who prefer the sauce as it is prepared in Piedmont Lexington or coastal Wilson. The Piedmont region. But Holman's Piedmont was the right size and type to encompass the red-clay farms ofboth sets of my grandparents and also to suggest that such farms faced some ofthe same problems and were worked by some ofthe same "good country people" whom O'Connor saw in Georgia on her farm, Andalusia. When I was growing up there, my own Piedmontwas even smaller—no bigger than Iredell County's 591 square miles of rolling ridges and small creeks, though spurs of the Brushy Mountains do extend into its northwest corner and McHarcrue 's Mountain reaches an elevation of over fifteen hundred feet. Such names — "Brushy," "McHarcrue,"—were assigned by German and Ulster-Scot settlers who were earthy, pragmatic, and nonpoetic. By and large these backcountry yeoman farmers worked like slaves without owning any, on land that originally looked like grassy prairie and was considered a "new Mesopotamia" between the Yadkin and Catawba Rivers. The state's WPA guide claimed that in North Carolina plantations disappeared at the fall line, an overstatement, but true for most piedmonters. Several years ago when I was trying to capture their use-it-up, wear-it-out, make-it-do essence for Cathy Newman, an editor from National Geographic then writing an essay on the state's Piedmont population, I described myself and my kin as "scrub oak people," lacking the grandeur ofsequoias, perhaps, but capable of holding the world together. DORIS BETTS Thomas Wolfe, whose South was not Faulkner's, as a student at the University ofNorth Carolina. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina Library at ChapelHill. Old Statesville neighbors are still mad at me. I wish now I had compared us to that higher exemplar of the Piedmont, ThomasJefferson, who identified less with tidewater Virginia and its institutions and more with daily practical progress made among rising hills and by rushing rivers, who not only built domes but owned the first threshing machine in America and...

Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman (review)

Reviewed by: Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman Hollace Ava Weiner (bio) Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman, by Helen Jacobus Apte, edited and with essays by Marcus D. Rosenbaum. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1998, 222 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ticket buyers at the Mayland Fair. Spruce Pine, North Carolina, ca. 1934. Photo by Bayard Wootten. (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill). Although written for an audience of one, personal diaries are a literary genre of enduring fascination. Witness the popularity of the adolescent diary of Anne Frank (1942), the decoded diaries of Samuel Pepys (1606–1669), and the feminist diaries of Anaïs Nin (1931–1974 ). A diary’s candor is generally unquestioned. Its partiality intrigues. Its secretive intent awakens voyeuristic curiosity. Composed without plot, rigid form, or revisions, a diary often surprises with its compelling pace, historic detail, and insights into past and present. Its theme of self in relation to society often resounds with relevancy regardless of era. Helen Jacobus Apte (1886–1946), begins her diary as a blissful, 22-year-old bride. The year is 1909. Helen, an Atlanta woman raised in the Victorian age and maturing in modern times, has had little formal schooling. Self-educated, she often consumes a book a day and quotes from classical and popular sources as she confides her thoughts to paper. As the spouse of a white-collar worker who manages a Tampa cigar factory and later operates a Miami canning enterprise, Helen experiences the upheaval of labor-management conflicts, a “genteel poverty” when bankruptcy nears, and the optimism washed across America by Franklin Roosevelt’s election. On a more personal level, Helen modestly describes her sexual libido. She writes, “A woman is ashamed to show passion, . . . afraid she will fall in her husband’s estimation, or in her own. . . . I find it hard to give in and act as I feel.” She hints at flirtations with new and old beaus and discusses The Sexual Life by Dr. Charles Malchow, a proctologist who was the Kinsey of his day. She yearns for motherhood, alluding to “my little unborn dream children.” Sadly, her first pregnancy ends in miscarriage. Her second results in an only child, a daughter who disappoints for being practical rather than creative like her mother. Helen had expected to live through her children, an idealized notion she realizes through her first grandchild. [End Page 189] Helen’s ruminations and disappointments presage the feminist philosophies that flower in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) half a century later. Her unfulfilled dream is to become a professional writer. Indeed, her diary demonstrates the fluent pen and colorful language requisite to achieve that goal. Helen, however, puts herself down as “untrained,” asks “What am I fitted for?” and confesses that she is “ashamed to see my life slipping away by doing nothing.” When business reversals force Helen to move into her in-laws’ home, she has scant time for her diary and yearns for solitude and space, the room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf (1929) would turn into feminist cliché. Frail health, which forced Helen to drop out of school at age fourteen, follows her throughout adulthood, and descriptions of physical ailments filter the diary. Unspoken, but just as recurrent, is evidence of life-long depression—“Blues,” she calls it. “Always there is that vague unrest, that faint nostalgia—for what? I don’t even know.” Helen’s diary was discovered in 1995 by her grandson, Marcus Rosenbaum, a Washington, D.C., journalist who has lovingly edited and annotated the journal of the grandmother who died before his birth. In nine essays interlacing the text, Rosenbaum explains references to family and current events such as the 1910 cigar strike and the boxing defeat of the Great White Hope. He adds social context with enlightening research on infant and maternal mortality, as well as commentary about “Race and Responsibility” and being “Jewish in the South.” Appendices include Helen’s one published magazine article; a partial list of books she read and...

Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work (review)

Reviewed by: Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work Suzanne E. Tallichet (bio) Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work by Marat Moore. Twayne’s Oral History Series, no. 20. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, 337 pp., $32.95 hardcover. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Group in a window. Western North Carolina, 1930s. Photo by Bayard Wootten. (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill). Moore’s Women in the Mines is a monumental work featuring the life stories of 24 coal mining women whose multi-faceted lives and struggles come alive through Moore’s use of oral history tradition. Her introduction provides the novice and specialist alike with the necessary historical context for the more personal events in the women’s lives. The interviews are divided into three sections. The first section takes us back to those who experienced the bloody battles between miners and company guns, “girl” miners who hand loaded coal alongside fathers and brothers, and “bone picking” women who sorted coal at tipples during World War II. The following two sections echo these earlier voices of determination as women hired after the late-1970s encounter and cope with men’s hostility [End Page 202] and sexual harassment and then as they stand with the United Mine Workers of America and forge a solidarity of their own through the Coal Employment Project. While an earlier work on the topic, Women of Coal by writer Randall Norris and photographer Jean-Philippe Cypres, provides breadth, this work gives the subject depth. Norris’s work confronted stereotypes of Appalachian women while Moore recasts women miners facing challenges common to working women. Accompanied by photographs, each interview begins with a brief overview of the woman’s life and is peppered with summary statements at critical points in the narrative. This format allows the serious reader to compare the women’s stories and see the similarities among them despite their diversity in age, race, region, and sexual orientation. While social themes of poverty, capitalist exploitation, and the assertion of patriarchal rule at home and at work are revealed, the reader is also privy to the women’s efforts to reconcile the demands of their traditional roles with their nontraditional work. Ultimately, these women forge new identities, rooted in a working class heritage, that they are eager to pass along to the next generation. By using the autobiographical technique, Moore gives us an insider’s understanding of the strategies these women have employed for their survival and their families’ well-being. Each woman interprets her own life events relating to work and union, family and community, education and spirituality. This kind of “dirt under the nails” subjectivity is the very stuff of life itself. By making the connection between private life experiences and public historical events, Moore has accomplished a primary sociological task, exposing the rich interaction between individuals and their prescribed participation in social institutions. But her technique also subtly reveals her own sophisticated brand of feminism. Moore shies away from judgments and political analysis as her artistry and dedication to her subjects and subject matter shines through. Never victims, more than survivors, Moore’s subjects are depicted as victors in an interminable struggle to meet new challenges of social equality stemming from economic justice. As the women make clear, men in toto are not the enemy; but those who unfairly assert patriarchal privilege in the forms of domestic violence, company control, sexual harassment, and opposition within the union “family” are a threat to women’s economic independence and, ultimately, their dignity. Academics would do well to emulate this work and its resulting authenticity. Doing so would force us all to listen to the very people whose lives we study and purport to understand. Moore’s skillful use of life histories demonstrates the underestimated power behind a method often marginalized by mainstream social scientists who have told us little about women’s lived experiences in a man’s world of work. Moore, a coal mining woman, uses her own authority so that her sisters may speak. We listen to their voices because she listened first. The [End Page 203] women in...

Providing Subject Access to Images: A Study of User Queries

This paper describes a study of user queries conducted at two historical photographic collections—the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh. Patron requests were analyzed in order to determine which types of subject terms and attributes of images are used most often in requests for photographs. Basic categories of terms were created, and the number of requests utilizing each category of term was tallied. It was found that subject terms, both generic and specific, were used far more frequently than any other categories of terms in requests for photographs. Generic subject terms appeared most often in requests, indicating the importance of these terms for indexing. Time and place were the next most commonly used types of terms. In contrast, genre, visual terms, format, and creator/provenance were mentioned relatively infrequently.

Wie Geht's, Y'all?: German Influences in Southern Cooking

Beyond Grits & Gravy Wie Geht's,Y'all? German Influences in Southern Cooking BY FRED R. REENSTJERNA While a great deal has been made about Celtic and English influences in southern culture, less attention has been paid to other significant European influences. Most especially, German culinary traditions were established in several key regions of the South by the mid-1700s, and these traditions continue to this day. German settlement in the eighteenth-century South was the result of English colonial policy in the Carolinas and Virginia. South Carolina planters lived in Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina at ChapelHill. 106 fear of Native American and slave uprisings, and they wanted colonies of white militiamen available on theirCooklTlQ flîpS borders. They devised a Township Plan, recruiting colo- rii ,1 1 · , 1 nists from German Europe to settle in an arc rangingJ from along the Savannah River over through ColumbiaWith Cl hßddy, and down to Orangeburg, South Carolina., , ,¦vi + ca* + ufij· u .uherbal aroma. Most or the townships tailed, in part because they were put down in swampy landscapes bearing little resem- ........................ blance to the homelands of German settlers. One settlement that did take hold, however, was Saxe Gotha Township. The region between the Broad and Saluda Rivers is known as the Dutch Fork even today, reflecting its German origins. Comprising modern Lexington County and Saluda County (and the land now under Lake Murray), this setdement took root as a center of evangelical Lutherans—and their food. Take, for example, chicken and dumplings. This mainstay ofmountain culture, which is actually served throughout the non-German South, is a stew of chicken and vegetables covered with a thick flour paste that is cooked by the steam ofthe boiling broth. In the Saxe Gotha region, by contrast, "dumplings" are flour noodles about two inches square. The region has become so homogenized since 1970 that food stores no longer carry dumplings in that size, but they did in my youth. I know this because my mother, once assigned to bring the dumplings to a family dinner and too busy to make a batch by hand, bought a package of prepared dumplings and sprinkled some flour over them to make them look homemade. Nobody knew the difference. Today, however, the only "extra-wide" noodles in food stores are barely an inch across. These kinds of "dumplings" are only one German culinary tradition. Liver pudding, quite a distinct food from pork sausage, is another characteristic ofSaxe Gotha. Its distincdy South Carolinian feature is thatit combines rice with ground pork organ meats, mixed with red pepper and other seasonings, all stuffed into casing. Commercial liver pudding in food stores is pretty bland, but "real" pudding is available at Caughman's meat plant oudet ("The Meat'n Place") and Four Oaks Farm. Both of these places are within a mile of each other in Lexington County and are operated by old Saxe Gotha families (the Caughmans and the Mathiases). But the most distinctive German food to come out ofSaxe Gotha is liver nips. Clearly of Central-European heritage, liver nips are still cooked in central South Carolina. Basically, "nips" are a paste of ground beef liver, stew beef, eggs, and flour, spooned into boiling beef broth. Cutting into the paste with a spoon was referred to as "nipping" some of it off—hence liver nips. They are also called liver dumplings nowadays—an interesting reminder of the southern-style chicken and dumplings discussed above. As the nips cook, some of the material falls Beyond Grits & Gravy 107 off into the beef broth, producing a kind of thick sauce (or a really lumpy gravy, ifyou're disrespectful). Two critical elements in liver nips are the seasonings and the amount of flour. Nips are heavy on thyme and odier herbs; cooking nips fill the kitchen with a heady, herbal, almost sausage-like aroma. The amount of flour is critical in final consistency, and recipes vary from family to family. Some people prefer a "tight" nip, made with lots of flour, while others prefer a looser nip. The finest nips ever, at least according to our family tradition, were made by Mrs. Clara Harmon. Regrettably , her grandson does not like...

A Midwife Through the Dying Process: Stories of Healing and Hard Choices at the End of Life

Dr. Richard Whitehead with his first class in gross anatomy (1890), adjacent to the rock that marked the southern border of the campus. (Photograph courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.) From Legends and Legacies: A Look Inside: Four Decades of Surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1952-1993 , edited by Mary Jane Kagarise and Colin G. Thomas, Jr, 461 pp, with illus, $65, ISBN 0-9653036-0-8, Chapel Hill, NC, Department of Surgery, UNC School of Medicine, 1997. Reproduced by permission. Timothy Quill, MD, has established his reputation as a leading advocate of physician-assisted suicide, primarily by telling stories tenderly recounting the cases of his patients. His Diane story touched people and made it plausible to consider physician-assisted suicide as the compassionate thing to do for dying patients. In A Midwife Through the Dying Process , Quill offers nine additional stories of

Seasoned by Salt A Historical Album of the Outer Banks (review)

bates in the South and North about the future ofblacks newly freed following the Civil War. His book teases us as well to reflect on the struggles for racial equality in our own century. Seasoned by Salt A Historical Album of the Outer Banks By Rodney Barfield University of North Carolina Press, 1996 192 pp. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $18.95 Reviewed by Loyd Little, author of three novels and winner of the Pen-Hemingway award. He is presendy communications officer at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Around four in the afternoon on 1 2July 1996, the wind ofBertha reached a maximum of 105 miles per hour at our home on the mainland side ofBogue Sound across from Salter Path. The plywood was up; the boat and car had been moved to high ground; and water jugs were full. The wind was knotted with salt water, destructiveness, darkness, and its roar vibrated in every nail and board. Through the glass portion ofthe front door, I watched the water climb closer, and quickly. Normally, the sound was one hundred feet away and eight feet lower than our home. But at 4:00 p.m., the water was within a few feet of the porch. The waves on the sound were about five-feet high, and each time a wave roiled upward, the wind snatched the top two feet and threw it across the front of our home, like a giant slinging a van-sized bucket ofwater. Several hours earlier, our eighty-foot pier had broken apart and disappeared, and trees already lay uprooted around the house. We had lost our electricity early that morning, and only later did I find out that at the moment I was looking tiirough the door, the eye of Bertha was crossing onto the mainland thirty miles south at Snead's Ferry. Still, compared with the legendary San Ciriaco hurricane that forever changed Shackleford Banks, east ofBeaufort, Bertha was just a bad blow. In Seasonedby Salt, author Rodney Barfield speaks eloquendy and dioughtfully about the forces such as San Ciriaco that shaped the people and the landscape of North Carolina's Outer Banks during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Barfield, director of the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, says the notion of his book grew from listening to museum visitors as they looked at pictures and speculated on life and times a century ago. "There is something inherent in recorded images from the past that touches us at our very centers," he writes. Reviews 87 Women and boys mending nets at Manteo, ca. 1900. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina at ChapelHill. Seasoned by Salt, printed in an oversized format of eight-by-nine inches, focuses primarily on the period from the Civil War to the mid-1920s. The book is divided into four sections: "An Overview of the Outer Banks," "The Civil War," "Storms and Shipwrecks," and "Sharpies and Other Boats." The Outer Banks are considered those barrier islands from Currituck Banks at the Virginia—North Carolina border to Core Banks, whose southernmost point is Cape Lookout. However, Barfield includes Shackleford Banks, which darts westward from Cape Lookout, because Shackleford's story is as dramatic as that of any of the other islands. Barfield gathered his information from books, early records, and talks witii museum visitors and witii the oldest generation on the banks. Seasoned by Salt is not a history of the Outer Banks and it is not a definitive work. Its goal, Barfield writes, is to focus on the "collective memories and lore of the residents of die large forces that shaped their personalities and heritage." In this Barfield succeeds admirably. His prose is clear, clean, and careful, and his research is detailed. But more than the writing, the magnificent pictures and drawings—more than 1 50—will entice readers to return again and again to Seasoned by Salt. The photographs , many published for the first time, come from the archives ofthe Maritime Museum, the Cape Lookout National Seashore, the North Carolina State Division ofArchives and History, and the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at...

Southward, Ho!: Mapping the Archival South

Southward, Ho! David Moltke-Hansen Mapping the Archival South In 1901, Alabama created the first state archives in the United States, followed quickly by many other southern states. Despite the vision and commitment behind them, these initial efforts were too meagerly funded to go far toward solving a critical problem of southern studies: the scarcity of accessible original sources, print as well as manuscript. Thirty years later, after the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and Duke University had launched what would become three of the largest, sustained programs for collecting the private papers of southerners, this scarcity remained a major stumbling block to research on the South. Today, the problem is very different: source materials are abundant. Although there are still many gaps in the historical record, more than 2,000 repositories across the region have collected at least some documentation on aspects of the archival South. They hold perhaps 1.5 million shelf feet altogether—roughly 300 miles or 3 billion pages of documentation. In addition, they house more than 15 million photographs, more than 1.5 million audio recordings (including perhaps as many as 75,000 oral histories), and tens of thousands of reels and cores of film and videotape. If local government office, business, and organizational holdings and southern Americana in the District of Columbia, northern , and foreign institutions were included, these totals might more than triple. Libraries have also collected hundreds of thousands of fugitive pamphlets and books from and about the region, as well as millions of issues of newspapers and other periodicals. The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alone has nearly 200,000 books and pamphlets and 3,000 serials documenting the Tar Heel state and its citizens. Researchers still have to spend time looking for primary materials, but now they must spend much of their time sorting through the masses of documentation available to them as well. Although the archivists of these materials have been accelerating their automation of catalog records, it will be at least another decade before the majority of southern Americana will be cataloged in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), or other bibliographic utilities. In these circumstances, researchers more than ever need mechanisms to communicate, analyze, and address methodological problems related to research opportunities in the rapidly growing mountains of documentation about the South and its people. Many rich collections have scarcely been touched, often because they are unprocessed or uncataloged. In some institutions, more than half of the holdings are backlogged and thus more or less inaccessible. In other cases, the problem lies with older 134Southern Cultures research aids, abysmal by current standards. It is simply no longer possible for researchers to examine every archived document from the period and place of their interest. Indeed, students of the post-World War II South are faced with collections of the papers of individual politicians and organizations that bulk to proportions larger than the papers of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence put together. Clearly, we need more detailed help than we did before to identify and make use of those archived materials potentially most relevant to us. "Southward, Ho!" will offer a venue for communicating and analyzing these research opportunities and issues. Here authors will canvass newly available or little-used resources in particular repositories on particular topics, and consider broad methodological issues associated with investigating these topics. They will alert readers to kinds of work underway but not yet published, or report to a wider readership aspects or trends of current work in one specialty or another. From time to time, too, contributors to "Southward , Ho!" will reflect on how to access and assess the primary sources for the study of southern cultures. We hope that you will consider helping us put southern cultural research opportunities and issues in perspective for our readers. Please communicate your suggestions, comments, or offerings to: David Moltke-Hansen, Director Southern Historical and Folklife Collections UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3926 (919) 962-1345 (telephone) (919) 962-0484 (fax) DavidMH@UNCMVS.OIT.UNC.EDU (e-mail) In the meantime, consider the...

A New Graminicolous Species of Xylaria

A new species in the Hypoxylaceae found growing on culms of Spartina patens is described as Xylaria psamathos. Immature ascospores lack appendages and are binucleate. Mature ascospores are uninucleate due to degeneration of one nucleus. The anamorph is sympodioconidial in a compact palisade. At the sandy margin of a North Carolina salt marsh, a fungus was discovered whose black, stipitate stromata grew from the buried, dead culms of Spartina patens (Ait.) Muhl. (FIG. 9c). The stromata were teleomorphs possessing characters of the Hypoxylaceae. The one-celled, brown ascospores had germ slits and the ascospores were contained within asci whose apical rings blued in Meltzer's reagent (FIGS. 5, 6, 9a). Appendages were lacking on immature ascospores examined by fluorescence microscopy, using the technique of Rogers (1975) (FIG. 4). The mitotic sequence within the ascospores was observed by staining with haematoxylin (technique by Rogers and Malmgren, 1977). Newly delimited ascospores are uninucleate. Following mitosis, immature ascospores are binucleate (FIG. 8). As maturation progresses, indicated by the darkening of the ascospores, one nucleus degenerates (FIG. 7). This mitotic sequence is, apparently, widespread among the hypoxylaceous fungi (Rogers and Malmgren, 1977; Rogers and Stiers, 1974 and references cited therein). The black surface of some of the stromata in the North Carolina collection cracked open and exposed inner tissues. The entostroma of one stroma differentiated to produce an anamorph (FIG. 9d) with conidia produced holoblastically in sympodial fashion. The conidiophores formed a compact palisade on the surface of the stroma. This anamorph type is associated with the genus Xylaria.

Coniochaeta malacotricha: anomalous asci and the conidial state

Aberrant aspects of ascospore production in a North Carolina collection of Coniochaeta malacotricha are discussed. The conidial state of C. malacotricha is described.