This innovative history of the Okefenokee Swamp reveals it as a place where harsh realities clashed with optimism, shaping the borderland culture of southern Georgia and northern Florida for over two hundred years. From the formation of the Georgia colony in 1732 to the end of the Great Depression, the Okefenokee Swamp was a site of conflict between divergent local communities. Coining the term “ecolocalism” to describe how local cultures form out of ecosystems and in relation to other communities, Megan Kate Nelson offers a new view of the Okefenokee, its inhabitants, and its rich and telling record of thwarted ambitions, unintended consequences, and unresolved questions. The Okefenokee is simultaneously terrestrial and aquatic, beautiful and terrifying, fertile and barren. This peculiar ecology created discord as human groups attempted to overlay firm lines of race, gender, and class on an area of inherent ambiguity and blurred margins. Rice planters, slaves, fugitive slaves, Seminoles, surveyors, timber barons, Swampers, and scientists came to the swamp with dreams of wealth, freedom, and status that conflicted in varied and complex ways. Ecolocalism emerged out of these conflicts between communities within the Okefenokee and other borderland swamps. Nelson narrates the fluctuations, disconnections, and confrontations embedded in the muck of the swamp and the mire of its disorderly history, and she reminds us that it is out of such places of intermingling and uncertainty that cultures are forged.

The Charlton Hunt began in the 1670s and is the earliest documented pack of hounds to be entered to fox alone. It attained a popularity among the gentry which has never been equalled. From the reign of Charles II, almost every noble family in the land had a representative at Charlton, including almost half of the Knights of the Garter. Its first proprietor had been the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, but among other claims to uniqueness, it was the first hunt to establish a club, the members building themselves a dining hall.

Here is a county history that is extraordinarily rich in primary source materials, including abstracts of deeds from 1681 through the Revolutionary War period and, moreover, petitions, divisions of estates, wills, and marriages found in the records of Perquimans and adjacent North Carolina counties. Numbering in the tens of thousands, the records provide the names of all principal parties and related family members, places of residence and migration, descriptions of real and personal property, dates, boundary surveys, names of executors, witnesses, and appraisers, and dates of recording. Altogether, the index contains references to about 35,000 persons! Researchers should note that Perquimans was one of the original North Carolina precincts--with very close ties to the southeastern Virginia counties of Norfolk, Princess Anne, Nansemond, and Isle of Wight--and for many years had fluid boundaries with the North Carolina counties of Chowan, Gates, and Pasquotank.

In our present generation of mammoth discount chains, wholesale membership outlets, and internet buying, it has been increasingly difficult for the pioneer - older, more established retail chains - to continue to operate, the latest casualty being Montgomery Ward. What was once known as «America's Store», the venerable F.W. Woolworth Company, has disappeared from downtowns and shopping centers as shopping trends and merchandising have changed. This story of one of the five founders of the Woolworth Company, Earle Perry Charlton, chronicles his life (both personal and professional) and what it was like to establish a new type of business in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Starting with meager savings and little capital of his own, he established a chain of fifty-three E.P. Charlton five & ten cent stores that was based in Fall River, Massachusetts, and stretched across Canada and the west coast of the United States from Seattle to San Diego, before joining with four other friendly competitors in 1912 to form what was to become the F. W. Woolworth Company.