David Cecelski chronicles one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement--the 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County, North Carolina. For an entire year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. Parents and students held nonviolent protests daily for five months, marched twice on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a massive gunfight. The threatened closing of Hyde County's black schools collided with a rich and vibrant educational heritage that had helped to sustain the black community since Reconstruction. As other southern school boards routinely closed black schools and displaced their educational leaders, Hyde County blacks began to fear that school desegregation was undermining--rather than enhancing--this legacy. This book, then, is the story of one county's extraordinary struggle for civil rights, but at the same time it explores the fight for civil rights in all of eastern North Carolina and the dismantling of black education throughout the South.

This quaint, picturesque community has an interesting history. For years it was a rural hamlet with a nearby pond, simply called Log Pond. It later became Apex, and the pond was eventually drained in the name of progress. Apex appeared on the map because of the coalfields in Chatham/Lee County. The coal companies needed to get their coal to Raleigh, and around 1870, the Chatham Railroad was chugging along, right by Log Pond. It officially became Apex with the establishment of a post office. Apex put the railroad to use immediately and shipped lumber, tar, turpentine, and pitch. Early on, Apex passed a few ordinances that some might find in the Wild West, including those dealing with whiskey, gambling, and prostitution. The town suffered two fires in the early 1900s, but its residents persevered, and Apexs small-town charm is still enjoyed today.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 Hearing southern women in the pauses of history Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture. A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

In their comprehensive and authoritative history of boat and shipbuilding in North Carolina through the early twentieth century, William Still and Richard Stephenson document for the first time a bygone era when maritime industries dotted the Tar Heel coast. The work of shipbuilding craftsmen and entrepreneurs contributed to the colony's and the state's economy from the era of exploration through the age of naval stores to World War I. The study includes an inventory of 3,300 ships and 270 shipwrights.

The region along Deep River in central North Carolina once boasted a small but significant coal mining industry that from the early 1800s to the end of the 20th century provided fuel for manufacturing and domestic use. Confronted by natural obstacles and other challenges--including a devastating explosion in 1925 that killed 53 men and boys--entrepreneurs made numerous attempts (some successful, some not) to harness the power of coal in a state still defining itself in a modernizing nation. Iron forges and hearths required ample supplies of coal to meet local demand, and the Deep River deposits provided them when no others existed.

This sweeping history of Durham County, North Carolina, extends from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth.