In November 2018, Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the odds,
narrowly fending off a blue wave in the sprawling Ninth District of
North Carolina. But word soon got around that something fishy was
...going on in rural Bladen County. At the center of the mess was a
local political operative named McCrae Dowless. Dowless had learned
the ins and outs of the absentee ballot system from Democrats
before switching over to the Republican Party. Bladen County's
vote-collecting cottage industry made national headlines, led to
multiple election fraud indictments, toppled North Carolina GOP
leadership, and left hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians
without congressional representation for nearly a year. In The
Vote Collectors , Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner tell the story
of the political shenanigans in Bladen County, exposing the
shocking vulnerability of local elections and explaining why our
present systems are powerless to monitor and prevent fraud. In
their hands, this tale of rural corruption becomes a fascinating
narrative of the long clash of racism and electioneering-and a
larger story about the challenges to democracy in the rural South.
At a time rife with accusations of election fraud, The Vote
Collectors shows the reality of election stealing in one
southern county, where democracy was undermined the old-fashioned
way: one absentee ballot at a time.
Nursing practice changed dramatically in the mid-1960s as
experiments across the country demonstrated the effectiveness of
nurses' expanded diagnostic and decision-making authority. The
result was a ...new breed of nurse, the nurse practitioner. In A
New Order of Things , Freund takes readers through that
evolution. Beginning with a demonstration project at the University
of North Carolina, leading to the emergence of an innovative nurse
practitioner training program, the siting of rural clinics with
nurse practitioners as the primary providers of health services, a
consortium of nurse practitioner training programs spanning the
state, and ultimately to a movement: a new order of advanced
nursing practice and primary care service delivery. A New Order
of Things is unique in that it documents a history with
contemporary relevance, a case study illustrating how a major
innovation was strategically engineered toward adoption at the
organizational, health system, and state levels. Using multiple
sources of historical records and 36 hours of interviews with
leaders of the N.C. nurse practitioner movement, Freund illustrates
how change leaders formed alliances in a politically nuanced
process, thought ahead and of the present moment simultaneously,
were adept at recognizing subtle clues and nimble enough to take
advantage of opportune moments. This story is N.C.'s story, but it
is far more than that. It is a story for any health professional
striving to make change in health services and move an innovative
idea into widespread adoption.
Explores the life of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston. In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School; in 1947 the first ...African American woman to practice law in North Carolina; and in 1968 the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge.
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.
To understand the long march of events in North Carolina from secession to surrender is to understand the entire Civil War--a personal war waged by Confederates and Unionists, free blacks and the ...enslaved, farm women and plantation belles, Cherokees and mountaineers, conscripts and volunteers, gentleman officers and poor privates. In the state's complex loyalties, its sprawling and diverse geography, and its dual role as a home front and a battlefield, North Carolina embodies the essence of the whole epic struggle in all its terrible glory.
Philip Gerard presents this dramatic convergence of events through the stories of the individuals who endured them--reporting the war as if it were happening in the present rather than with settled hindsight--to capture the dreadful suspense of lives caught up in a conflict whose ending had not yet been written. As Gerard reveals, whatever the grand political causes for war, whatever great battles decided its outcome, and however abstract it might seem to readers a century and a half later, the war was always personal.
Louis Austin (1898-1971) came of age at the nadir of the Jim Crow era and became a transformative leader of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina. From 1927 to 1971, he published and ...edited theCarolina Times, the preeminent black newspaper in the state. He used the power of the press to voice the anger of black Carolinians, and to turn that anger into action in a forty-year crusade for freedom.In this biography, Jerry Gershenhorn chronicles Austin's career as a journalist and activist, highlighting his work during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar civil rights movement. Austin helped pioneer radical tactics during the Depression, including antisegregation lawsuits, boycotts of segregated movie theaters and white-owned stores that refused to hire black workers, and African American voting rights campaigns based on political participation in the Democratic Party. In examining Austin's life, Gershenhorn narrates the story of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a new vantage point, shedding new light on the vitality of black protest and the black press in the twentieth century.
White supremacists determined what African Americans could do and where they could go in the Jim Crow South, but they were less successful in deciding where black people could live because different ...groups of white supremacists did not agree on the question of residential segregation. InThreatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant investigates early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in North Carolina to show how the version of white supremacy supported by middle-class white people differed from that supported by the elites. Class divides prevented Jim Crow from expanding to the extent that it would require separate neighborhoods for black and white southerners as in apartheid South Africa. Herbin-Triant details the backlash against the economic successes of African Americans among middle-class whites, who claimed that they wished to protect property values and so campaigned for residential segregation laws both in the city and the countryside, where their actions were modeled on South Africa's Natives Land Act. White elites blocked these efforts, primarily because it was against their financial interest to remove the black workers that they employed in their homes, farms, and factories. Herbin-Triant explores what the split over residential segregation laws reveals about competing versions of white supremacy and about the position of middling whites in a region dominated by elite planters and businessmen. An illuminating work of social and political history,Threatening Propertyputs class front and center in explaining conflict over the expansion of segregation laws into private property.
Over the years, during a steady stream of intimate interviews, Glassie gathered the understanding that enabled him to compose this portrait of Daniel Johnston, a young artist who makes great pots in ...the eastern Piedmont of North Carolina.
This collection of essays profiles a diverse array of North Carolinians, all of whom had a hand in the founding of the state and the United States of America. It includes stories of how men who stood ...together to fight the British soon chose opposing sides in political debates over the ratification of the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. It also includes accounts of women, freedmen, and Native Americans, whose narratives shed light on the important roles of marginalized peoples in the Revolutionary South. Together, the essays reveal the philosophical views and ideology of North Carolina's revolutionaries. Contributors: Jeff Broadwater, Jennifer Davis-Doyle, Lloyd Johnson, Benjamin R. Justesen, Troy L. Kickler, Scott King-Owen, James MacDonald, Maggie Hartley Mitchell, Karl Rodabaugh, Kyle Scott, Jason Stroud, Michael Toomey, and Willis P. Whichard.
For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had ...long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike.
In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it.
Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment.
