David S Cohen
DAVID STEVEN COHEN holds a B.A. in History from Rutgers University, a M.A. in American History from Claremont Graduate School, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught History and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark for nine years, prior to coming to the New Jersey Historical Commission, where he worked as Senior Research Associate and Director of the Ethnic History Program prior to his retirement in 2007.
Dr. Cohen is the author of six books, including "Folk Legacies Revisited" (Rutgers University Press, 1995), "The Dutch-American Farm" (New York University Press, 1992), "America, The Dream of My Life: Selections from the Federal Writers' Project's New Jersey Ethnic Survey" (Rutgers University Press, 1990)," Pinelands Folklife" along with Rita Moonsammy and Lorraine Williams (Rutgers University Press, 1987), "The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey" (Rutgers University Press, 1983), and "The Ramapo Mountain People" (Rutgers University Press, 1974).
He also has co-curated museum exhibitions, including "New Jersey Pinelands: Tradition and Environment" at the New Jersey State Museum in 1987, and he has produced radio and television documentaries. Among his radio credits are: "America, the Dream of My Life" (1992) narrated by Eli Wallach; "Seabrook at War" (1995) narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; "Coming From India" (1998), narrated by Chitra Ragavan; "The Life and Times of Frank Hague" (2001) narrated by Malachy McCourt; and "Passaic on Strike" (2007) featuring Philip Bosco.
Among his television credits are a series of programs about New Jersey folklife, including: "In the Barnegat Bay Tradition" (1983); "Schooners on the Bay" with Rita Moonsammy (1984); "Pineland Sketches" (1987); and two television history series: "New Jersey Legacy," narrated by Celeste Holm and John T. Cunningham (for high-school students and a general audience)and "Around and About New Jersey" (for elementary-school students). He has won two Emmy Awards, one in l984 for “In the Barnegat Bay Tradition" and the other in l992 for "Around and About New Jersey."
He also was the content producer on two interactive educational websites: "New Jersey History Partnership Project," a collaboration between the Montville Township School District, Kean University, and the New Jersey Historical Commission, with $ 1 million grant from the U. S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History Project, and "New Jersey History Kids," a multi-media, interactive website for students in grades K through 4, including units on the Howell Farm Living History Museum, the Thomas A. Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, the Morristown National Historic Park, the Great Falls Historic District in Paterson, Roosevelt, NJ (formerly known as Jersey Homesteads), the Still Family Reunion (an African-American family involved in the Underground Railroad), decoy carving along Barnegat Bay, oyster schooners on Delaware Bay, and Pinelands Foxhunting,
Since his retirement, Dr. Cohen has posted two online books on academic.edu: "Dubious Descent" about mixed-race groups seeking Federal recognition as Indian tribes and "Listening to the Better Angels of Our Nature: Ethnicity, Self-Determination, and the American Empire."
Dr. Cohen is the author of six books, including "Folk Legacies Revisited" (Rutgers University Press, 1995), "The Dutch-American Farm" (New York University Press, 1992), "America, The Dream of My Life: Selections from the Federal Writers' Project's New Jersey Ethnic Survey" (Rutgers University Press, 1990)," Pinelands Folklife" along with Rita Moonsammy and Lorraine Williams (Rutgers University Press, 1987), "The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey" (Rutgers University Press, 1983), and "The Ramapo Mountain People" (Rutgers University Press, 1974).
He also has co-curated museum exhibitions, including "New Jersey Pinelands: Tradition and Environment" at the New Jersey State Museum in 1987, and he has produced radio and television documentaries. Among his radio credits are: "America, the Dream of My Life" (1992) narrated by Eli Wallach; "Seabrook at War" (1995) narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; "Coming From India" (1998), narrated by Chitra Ragavan; "The Life and Times of Frank Hague" (2001) narrated by Malachy McCourt; and "Passaic on Strike" (2007) featuring Philip Bosco.
Among his television credits are a series of programs about New Jersey folklife, including: "In the Barnegat Bay Tradition" (1983); "Schooners on the Bay" with Rita Moonsammy (1984); "Pineland Sketches" (1987); and two television history series: "New Jersey Legacy," narrated by Celeste Holm and John T. Cunningham (for high-school students and a general audience)and "Around and About New Jersey" (for elementary-school students). He has won two Emmy Awards, one in l984 for “In the Barnegat Bay Tradition" and the other in l992 for "Around and About New Jersey."
He also was the content producer on two interactive educational websites: "New Jersey History Partnership Project," a collaboration between the Montville Township School District, Kean University, and the New Jersey Historical Commission, with $ 1 million grant from the U. S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History Project, and "New Jersey History Kids," a multi-media, interactive website for students in grades K through 4, including units on the Howell Farm Living History Museum, the Thomas A. Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, the Morristown National Historic Park, the Great Falls Historic District in Paterson, Roosevelt, NJ (formerly known as Jersey Homesteads), the Still Family Reunion (an African-American family involved in the Underground Railroad), decoy carving along Barnegat Bay, oyster schooners on Delaware Bay, and Pinelands Foxhunting,
Since his retirement, Dr. Cohen has posted two online books on academic.edu: "Dubious Descent" about mixed-race groups seeking Federal recognition as Indian tribes and "Listening to the Better Angels of Our Nature: Ethnicity, Self-Determination, and the American Empire."
less
InterestsView All (15)
Uploads
Papers by David S Cohen
After the French and Indian War, several states claim territory in the Trans-Appalachian West. Virginia claimed most of what had been called the Ohio and Illinois Country, except for a narrow strip south of the Great Lakes that was claimed by Connecticut and a wider strip in western New York and what is today the present states of central Michigan and Wisconsin. States like Maryland refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation as long as these states with western claims could continue to grow. As a concession to obtain ratification, Virginia ceded it claim to the federal government in 1784 and Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1785. Connecticut gave up its claim in exchange for the central government assuming its war debt. However, Virginia and Connecticut reserved two areas to be used as compensation to military veterans that became known as the Virginia military district, the Connecticut Western Reserve, and a small section reserved for the Ohio Company.
One square mile (Section 16) of each township was to be used for public education. Four other lots were used for public purposes. Each territory would appoint a governor, a secretary, and three judges. When there were 5,000 male residents in the territory, they could elect a territorial legislature and send a delegate to Congress. When there at least 6,000 free inhabitants (not counting slaves), the territorial delegated could vote in Congress and the territory could apply for admission to the Union. Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in all states carved out from the territory, but any slaves escaping into the territory of its newly formed states had to be returned to his or her owner.
In 1784 the Continental Congress appointed Jefferson as the chairman of a committee to create a plan for temporary government in the western territories acquired from Great Britain. This resulted in the Ordinance of 1784 under which when a territory reached a population 20,000, it could hold a constitutional convention to establish a permanent government and apply for admission to the United States. The plan was never fully realized, and it was superseded by the Ordinance of 1787 by a committee also chaired by Jefferson under which at least three nor more than five states could be created from the Northwest Territory. The land was to be divided in rectangular townships, each six miles square, with each township having 36 sections, each one square mile in size.
Among the topics covered include sociological/anthropological studies of caste and class in the Deep South; the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi; the Montgomery bus boycott; the integration of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and New Orleans, Louisiana ; the Freedom Rides; burning of the 16th Street Baptist church and the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama; Governor George Wallace's attempt to block the integration of the University of Alabama; the killing of the Voting Rights activists in Mississippi; and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
This paper traces the development of Southern folk and popular music from the blues and gospel music to the published music of W. C. Handy, to the ragtime of Scott Joplin; the early jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton; the blues legend Robert Johnson; the spiritual chorus of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; the gospel singing Blind Boys of Alabama; the yodeling and blues singer Jimmy Rodgers; the Grand Ole Opry radio program radio stars the banjo playing Uncle Dave Macon and Roy Acuff; the country and western pioneer Hank Williams; Mississippi Delta former disc jockey and blues singers B. B. King and Ike Turner; Sam Phillips and Sun Records musicians Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash; Stax records musicians Rufus Thomas Otis Redding and Booker T. and the M.G.s; and FAME studios in Muscle Shoals with their session band the Swampers and artists Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and the Rolling Stones. The paper ends with an account how the song "Sweet Home, Alabama" was recorded not at FAME but in Georgia, by the Southern Rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd from Jacksonville, Florida, and the controversy surrounding the song.
Historian C. Vann Woodward coined the term "the New South" to refer to the South in the period after Reconstruction. It was a period of lynchings of both Whites and Blacks who sought to continue the reforms made during Reconstruction. At the same time there were former Southern Democrats like L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, who promoted railroads, banks, and industry. The development of the the iron industry in Birmingham, Alabama. was accomplished by an alliance with the railroads.
Southern farmers began to revolt against the power of banks and railroads in the movement that resulted in the formation of the Populist Party, which included a "fusion" of Black sharecroppers with White farmers. But in 1896, the Populist agenda was usurped by the Democratic Party, and the Southern States began to pass laws creating segregation in public transportation and voter disfranchisement of African-Americans. Ida B. Wells of Tennessee launched her anti-lynching campaign.
Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute proposed the so-called "Atlanta Compromise" under which African-Americans should focus on job training rather than full political and social rights. This resulted in the rise of Southern demagogues, including Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi , Huey Long of Louisiana, and E. H. Crump of Tennessee.
Mark Twain described his life on the Mississippi River as a pilot and depicts the river as a place of freedom for the fictional escaped slave Jim and Huck Finn. Solomon Northrup describes a Louisiana sugar plantation, and Henry Bibb tells about his repeated attempts to cross the Ohio River to free himself and his family.
After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy under Mississippi native Jefferson Davis. Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union as slave-owning border states. Two major battles in the so-called Western theater were the Union victories at Shiloh, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. General Nathan Bedford Forrest commanded Confederate troops who massacred freed slaves who fought at Fort Pillow and already had surrendered. After the war Forrest became the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and an equestrian statue of him was erected in 1901 in Memphis, Tennessee, which has recently been removed.
Daniel Boone from North Carolina founded the Wilderness Road from the Great Valley through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. While there were some slaves and free Blacks in the mountains, there were no large plantations as in the Piedmont and Low Land South. Thus, the secession crisis resulted in West Virginia seceding from Virginia and Kentucky becoming a border state. The Southern general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson from West Virginia conducted a successful campaign against the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley.
The famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys after the war was the result that the Hatfields lived on the West Virginia side and the McCoys on the Kentucky side of the border. After Lincoln's assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson from eastern Tennessee became President. He followed a lenient policy towards former Confederates states, but vetoed legislation that guaranteed rights to the freedmen. The so-called "Radical Republicans" impeached Johnson and removed him from office.
In the late nineteenth century, improved railroad connections resulted in the development of the coal industry by investors from outside the region. They established company towns with company stores that left the miners in debt. When the miners tried to join the United Mine Workers union, they were fired from their jobs and evicted from their company-owned homes. This resulted in the so-called Labor Wars in the region.
In the twentieth century, the creation of the Great Smoky National Park, the Shenandoah National Park, and the Blue Ridge Parkway displaced many mountain people. The creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority by the federal government also displaced people, but created hydro-electric power to the region along the Tennessee River. The War on Poverty in the 1960s created the region identity as Appalachia. A negative stereotype of inbred "hillbillies" was created by cartoons, novels, Hollywood movies, and television programs. The tradition of making moonshine that dated back to colonial days became more noted during Prohibition, and the drivers who tried to evade federal agents became the NASCAR stock racing sport.
But the Appalachian Mountains also became a retreat for wealthy families like the Vanderbilts who built a huge estate outside Asheville, North Carolina, named Biltmore. Summer tourists stayed in boarding houses in Asheville, such as the one owned by the mother of Thomas Wolfe depicted in his novel Look Homeward Angel. And county music stars such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton celebrated their rural roots in their songs. Parton even created a theme park name Dollywood, and more recently an Australian creationist organization built a full replicate of Noah's Ark.
Thus, the Southern Appalachian Mountains continues to be a place of origin for Roots American music and dance, traditional folklore and folksong, traditional material culture, a fractured Civil War history, family feuds, abject poverty, coal mines and company towns, violent labor wars, moonshine and stock car races, negative stereotypes, and scenic views and national parks, and tourist destinations and theme parks.
Thus, the Southern Appalachian Mountains continues to be a place of origin for Roots American music and dance, traditional folklore and folksong, traditional material culture, a fractured Civil War history, family feuds, abject poverty, coal mines and company towns, violent labor wars, moonshine and stock car races, negative stereotypes, and scenic views and national parks, and tourist destinations and theme parks.
After the Revolution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was founded. with slaves from the nearby plantation at Meadowmont. On another plantation outside of Chapel Hill, an interracial union between son of the owner with one of the slaves resulted in a family line of the ancestors of the Black female lawyer, civil rights advocate, and feminist Pauli Murray. The largest plantation in the South was Stagville outside Durham. The largest surrender of Confederate armies took place at the Bennett Farm near Durham.
After the Civil War, Confederate veteran Washington Duke returned to his tobacco farm and began producing cigarettes. He moved the factory to the railroad station in Durham. His son, James Buchanan Duke, expanded the business into the American Tobacco Company that was later broken up as a monopoly. Inside the tobacco warehouses auctioneers developed a distinctive autioneering sound, while outside the warehouses African-Americans developed the Piedmont blues style.
Another Civil War veteran named was the industrialist Julian Carr, who owned a textile mill in the town of Carrboro. He was a white supremacist who dedicated the statue of Silent Sam on the UNC campus. Thomas Dixon of Shelby wrote a pro-Ku Klux Klan novel titled The Clansman that was the basis for D.W. Griffith's silent film The Birth of a Nation. Shelby was also the birthplace of blue-grass banjo musician Earl Scruggs.
In 1929 there was a Communist-led strike in the textile factory in Gastonia. In 1963 the North Carolina legislature passed a Speakers Ban of any Communist at the UNC campus, and in 1979 the Klan broke up a rally of a Communist-led group in Greensboro.
The right-wing Republican Jesse Helms became a reporter and columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer and then a commentator on WRAL television and in the 1951 primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate used racist tropes to defeat UNC president Frank Porter Graham.
In 1951 the UNC School of Law was integrated by four Black students, including Floyd McKissick, Sr., who in 1957 defended the students who tried to integrate the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in Durham. McKissick later became the president of the Congress of Racial Equality. After the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the town of Chapel Hill began to slowly integrate its schools beginning in the lowest grades. It was not not until 1966 that its schools were fully integrated.
Four students from the All-Black North Carolina Agriculture and Technical School (ATT) started a sit-in at the Woolworth's drug store in Greensboro that got national attention. Harry Golden, a Jewish newspaper man and humorist from New York City who relocated to Charlotte, facetiously
proposed the solution of "vertical" integration, i.e., no seats to be provided at the public schools. Following the Greensboro Sit-In activist Ella Baker om April organized the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the All-Black Shaw University in Raleigh. In November1960 the liberal Democrat Terry Sanford was elected governor. He later became the President of Duke University.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, the main industries of tobacco, furniture making, and textiles went into decline. In the twenty-first century a new stadium was built for the minor league Durham Bull's baseball park and the abandoned tobacco factories in Durham were renovated into the American Tobacco Campus with restaurants, the UNC public radio station, and the Durham Performing Arts Center. And a Research Triangle Park was created between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The population of North Carolina increased as people from the Northeast, the Midwest, the West, and Florida, including many senior citizens relocated in North Carolina. But the rural areas retained political control through Republican gerrymandering.
"Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, who during Reconstruction was a leader of a "rifle club" that intimidated Blacks who tried to vote, killed Black political figures, and skirmished with the Black-dominated state militia., before becoming a United States Senator from South Carolina. In Georgia, Tom Watson became a Populist who initially supported both Black and White small farmers, but after 1900 became a racist, anti-Semite, and anti-Catholic. He supported the lynching of a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was accused of murdering a young factory girl. This led to the founding of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta.
In the twentieth century Strom Thurmond, a supporter of segregation, formed the Dixiecrat third party in the presidential election of 1948, and switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in the election of 1964. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta became a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the twenty-first century, the Hispanic population of South Carolina increased as Mexicans and Latin America. The Republican Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from India, became governor of South Carolina. She had the Confederate flag removed from the state capitol building, and she appointed Republican Tim Scott as the first African-American from South Carolina to the U.S. Senate. But both Haley and Scott became supporters of President Donald Trump's restrictive immigration policies.
In 1779 Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia, and the state capital was moved from Williamsburg to Richmond. Jefferson served as ambassador to France during the French Revolution, Secretary of State under George Washington, Vice President under John Adams, and President of the United States. While he wrote that the "earth belongs to the living" and that all institutions should be abolished after a generation, Madison maintained the importance of protecting property rights. Jefferson considered his most important accomplishment to be the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founding of the University of Virginia.
It was at Richmond's Episcopal Church that Patrick Henry gave his "Give Me Liberty of Give Me Death Speech." In the early nineteenth century Richmond became a center of the iron industry in the South, and the Southern attitude toward slavery change. There were two slave revolts the Gabriel Rebellion in Richmond in 1800 and the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 in Southampton County. George Fitzhugh, a contributing editor of the "Richmond Examiner" wrote that slavery in the South was preferable to "wage slavery" in the factory economy of the North.
Atter the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Virginia ceded from the Union. Robert E. Lee, a native-son of Virginia and a West Point graduate who was offered the command the North Army, but he signed his commission and accept the command of the Virginia forces. Several key battles took place in the Virginia piedmont, including the first and second battle at Bull Run, the battles of Fredericksburg and Chambersburg, the siege of Petersburg and the final surrender by Lee at Appomattox.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of the so--called "Lost Cause" monuments were constructed to Confederate military heroes from Virginia, including Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and Robert E. Lee. But in recent years there were protests against these memorial to "the Lost Cause" in which these statues was torn down. In the
protest over the Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, the United the Right white supremacists clashed with the protestors resulting in the death of a young woman. President Donald J. Trump famously said that "there were good people on both sides."
On the Outer Banks, which were relatively isolated until bridges and ferries made the region a tourist attraction, a distinct dialect survived with survivals of regional features from England. The Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk is memorialized in the North Carolina license plate motto "First in Flight." Today, the Piney Woods of eastern North Carolina is a region that has large hog farms, its own style of barbeque, and was the birthplace of Pepsi Cola. Like the rest of the South, and even the United States as a whole, it is a place of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
After the Civil War, Boston annexed the neighboring towns Dorchester, Roxbury, Charleston, and Brighton, linked initially by the horse-drawn railways then the electric trolley, and finally the subway or (MTA). In the process the upper and middle classes moved out of the old Back Bay to be replaced by African-Americans and immigrants, including the Irish and Germans and later Italians and Jews.
The paper then contrasts the upper-class Brahmins (the Adams, Cabots, and Lowells) and the "Lace-Curtain Irish" (the Fitzgeralds and Kennedys). It ends with an account of the Boston School Busing Crisis in the 1970s and a brief description of the Boston Dialect.
After the French and Indian War, several states claim territory in the Trans-Appalachian West. Virginia claimed most of what had been called the Ohio and Illinois Country, except for a narrow strip south of the Great Lakes that was claimed by Connecticut and a wider strip in western New York and what is today the present states of central Michigan and Wisconsin. States like Maryland refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation as long as these states with western claims could continue to grow. As a concession to obtain ratification, Virginia ceded it claim to the federal government in 1784 and Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1785. Connecticut gave up its claim in exchange for the central government assuming its war debt. However, Virginia and Connecticut reserved two areas to be used as compensation to military veterans that became known as the Virginia military district, the Connecticut Western Reserve, and a small section reserved for the Ohio Company.
One square mile (Section 16) of each township was to be used for public education. Four other lots were used for public purposes. Each territory would appoint a governor, a secretary, and three judges. When there were 5,000 male residents in the territory, they could elect a territorial legislature and send a delegate to Congress. When there at least 6,000 free inhabitants (not counting slaves), the territorial delegated could vote in Congress and the territory could apply for admission to the Union. Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in all states carved out from the territory, but any slaves escaping into the territory of its newly formed states had to be returned to his or her owner.
In 1784 the Continental Congress appointed Jefferson as the chairman of a committee to create a plan for temporary government in the western territories acquired from Great Britain. This resulted in the Ordinance of 1784 under which when a territory reached a population 20,000, it could hold a constitutional convention to establish a permanent government and apply for admission to the United States. The plan was never fully realized, and it was superseded by the Ordinance of 1787 by a committee also chaired by Jefferson under which at least three nor more than five states could be created from the Northwest Territory. The land was to be divided in rectangular townships, each six miles square, with each township having 36 sections, each one square mile in size.
Among the topics covered include sociological/anthropological studies of caste and class in the Deep South; the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi; the Montgomery bus boycott; the integration of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and New Orleans, Louisiana ; the Freedom Rides; burning of the 16th Street Baptist church and the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama; Governor George Wallace's attempt to block the integration of the University of Alabama; the killing of the Voting Rights activists in Mississippi; and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
This paper traces the development of Southern folk and popular music from the blues and gospel music to the published music of W. C. Handy, to the ragtime of Scott Joplin; the early jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton; the blues legend Robert Johnson; the spiritual chorus of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; the gospel singing Blind Boys of Alabama; the yodeling and blues singer Jimmy Rodgers; the Grand Ole Opry radio program radio stars the banjo playing Uncle Dave Macon and Roy Acuff; the country and western pioneer Hank Williams; Mississippi Delta former disc jockey and blues singers B. B. King and Ike Turner; Sam Phillips and Sun Records musicians Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash; Stax records musicians Rufus Thomas Otis Redding and Booker T. and the M.G.s; and FAME studios in Muscle Shoals with their session band the Swampers and artists Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and the Rolling Stones. The paper ends with an account how the song "Sweet Home, Alabama" was recorded not at FAME but in Georgia, by the Southern Rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd from Jacksonville, Florida, and the controversy surrounding the song.
Historian C. Vann Woodward coined the term "the New South" to refer to the South in the period after Reconstruction. It was a period of lynchings of both Whites and Blacks who sought to continue the reforms made during Reconstruction. At the same time there were former Southern Democrats like L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, who promoted railroads, banks, and industry. The development of the the iron industry in Birmingham, Alabama. was accomplished by an alliance with the railroads.
Southern farmers began to revolt against the power of banks and railroads in the movement that resulted in the formation of the Populist Party, which included a "fusion" of Black sharecroppers with White farmers. But in 1896, the Populist agenda was usurped by the Democratic Party, and the Southern States began to pass laws creating segregation in public transportation and voter disfranchisement of African-Americans. Ida B. Wells of Tennessee launched her anti-lynching campaign.
Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute proposed the so-called "Atlanta Compromise" under which African-Americans should focus on job training rather than full political and social rights. This resulted in the rise of Southern demagogues, including Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi , Huey Long of Louisiana, and E. H. Crump of Tennessee.
Mark Twain described his life on the Mississippi River as a pilot and depicts the river as a place of freedom for the fictional escaped slave Jim and Huck Finn. Solomon Northrup describes a Louisiana sugar plantation, and Henry Bibb tells about his repeated attempts to cross the Ohio River to free himself and his family.
After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy under Mississippi native Jefferson Davis. Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union as slave-owning border states. Two major battles in the so-called Western theater were the Union victories at Shiloh, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. General Nathan Bedford Forrest commanded Confederate troops who massacred freed slaves who fought at Fort Pillow and already had surrendered. After the war Forrest became the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and an equestrian statue of him was erected in 1901 in Memphis, Tennessee, which has recently been removed.
Daniel Boone from North Carolina founded the Wilderness Road from the Great Valley through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. While there were some slaves and free Blacks in the mountains, there were no large plantations as in the Piedmont and Low Land South. Thus, the secession crisis resulted in West Virginia seceding from Virginia and Kentucky becoming a border state. The Southern general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson from West Virginia conducted a successful campaign against the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley.
The famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys after the war was the result that the Hatfields lived on the West Virginia side and the McCoys on the Kentucky side of the border. After Lincoln's assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson from eastern Tennessee became President. He followed a lenient policy towards former Confederates states, but vetoed legislation that guaranteed rights to the freedmen. The so-called "Radical Republicans" impeached Johnson and removed him from office.
In the late nineteenth century, improved railroad connections resulted in the development of the coal industry by investors from outside the region. They established company towns with company stores that left the miners in debt. When the miners tried to join the United Mine Workers union, they were fired from their jobs and evicted from their company-owned homes. This resulted in the so-called Labor Wars in the region.
In the twentieth century, the creation of the Great Smoky National Park, the Shenandoah National Park, and the Blue Ridge Parkway displaced many mountain people. The creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority by the federal government also displaced people, but created hydro-electric power to the region along the Tennessee River. The War on Poverty in the 1960s created the region identity as Appalachia. A negative stereotype of inbred "hillbillies" was created by cartoons, novels, Hollywood movies, and television programs. The tradition of making moonshine that dated back to colonial days became more noted during Prohibition, and the drivers who tried to evade federal agents became the NASCAR stock racing sport.
But the Appalachian Mountains also became a retreat for wealthy families like the Vanderbilts who built a huge estate outside Asheville, North Carolina, named Biltmore. Summer tourists stayed in boarding houses in Asheville, such as the one owned by the mother of Thomas Wolfe depicted in his novel Look Homeward Angel. And county music stars such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton celebrated their rural roots in their songs. Parton even created a theme park name Dollywood, and more recently an Australian creationist organization built a full replicate of Noah's Ark.
Thus, the Southern Appalachian Mountains continues to be a place of origin for Roots American music and dance, traditional folklore and folksong, traditional material culture, a fractured Civil War history, family feuds, abject poverty, coal mines and company towns, violent labor wars, moonshine and stock car races, negative stereotypes, and scenic views and national parks, and tourist destinations and theme parks.
Thus, the Southern Appalachian Mountains continues to be a place of origin for Roots American music and dance, traditional folklore and folksong, traditional material culture, a fractured Civil War history, family feuds, abject poverty, coal mines and company towns, violent labor wars, moonshine and stock car races, negative stereotypes, and scenic views and national parks, and tourist destinations and theme parks.
After the Revolution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was founded. with slaves from the nearby plantation at Meadowmont. On another plantation outside of Chapel Hill, an interracial union between son of the owner with one of the slaves resulted in a family line of the ancestors of the Black female lawyer, civil rights advocate, and feminist Pauli Murray. The largest plantation in the South was Stagville outside Durham. The largest surrender of Confederate armies took place at the Bennett Farm near Durham.
After the Civil War, Confederate veteran Washington Duke returned to his tobacco farm and began producing cigarettes. He moved the factory to the railroad station in Durham. His son, James Buchanan Duke, expanded the business into the American Tobacco Company that was later broken up as a monopoly. Inside the tobacco warehouses auctioneers developed a distinctive autioneering sound, while outside the warehouses African-Americans developed the Piedmont blues style.
Another Civil War veteran named was the industrialist Julian Carr, who owned a textile mill in the town of Carrboro. He was a white supremacist who dedicated the statue of Silent Sam on the UNC campus. Thomas Dixon of Shelby wrote a pro-Ku Klux Klan novel titled The Clansman that was the basis for D.W. Griffith's silent film The Birth of a Nation. Shelby was also the birthplace of blue-grass banjo musician Earl Scruggs.
In 1929 there was a Communist-led strike in the textile factory in Gastonia. In 1963 the North Carolina legislature passed a Speakers Ban of any Communist at the UNC campus, and in 1979 the Klan broke up a rally of a Communist-led group in Greensboro.
The right-wing Republican Jesse Helms became a reporter and columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer and then a commentator on WRAL television and in the 1951 primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate used racist tropes to defeat UNC president Frank Porter Graham.
In 1951 the UNC School of Law was integrated by four Black students, including Floyd McKissick, Sr., who in 1957 defended the students who tried to integrate the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in Durham. McKissick later became the president of the Congress of Racial Equality. After the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the town of Chapel Hill began to slowly integrate its schools beginning in the lowest grades. It was not not until 1966 that its schools were fully integrated.
Four students from the All-Black North Carolina Agriculture and Technical School (ATT) started a sit-in at the Woolworth's drug store in Greensboro that got national attention. Harry Golden, a Jewish newspaper man and humorist from New York City who relocated to Charlotte, facetiously
proposed the solution of "vertical" integration, i.e., no seats to be provided at the public schools. Following the Greensboro Sit-In activist Ella Baker om April organized the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the All-Black Shaw University in Raleigh. In November1960 the liberal Democrat Terry Sanford was elected governor. He later became the President of Duke University.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, the main industries of tobacco, furniture making, and textiles went into decline. In the twenty-first century a new stadium was built for the minor league Durham Bull's baseball park and the abandoned tobacco factories in Durham were renovated into the American Tobacco Campus with restaurants, the UNC public radio station, and the Durham Performing Arts Center. And a Research Triangle Park was created between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The population of North Carolina increased as people from the Northeast, the Midwest, the West, and Florida, including many senior citizens relocated in North Carolina. But the rural areas retained political control through Republican gerrymandering.
"Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, who during Reconstruction was a leader of a "rifle club" that intimidated Blacks who tried to vote, killed Black political figures, and skirmished with the Black-dominated state militia., before becoming a United States Senator from South Carolina. In Georgia, Tom Watson became a Populist who initially supported both Black and White small farmers, but after 1900 became a racist, anti-Semite, and anti-Catholic. He supported the lynching of a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was accused of murdering a young factory girl. This led to the founding of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta.
In the twentieth century Strom Thurmond, a supporter of segregation, formed the Dixiecrat third party in the presidential election of 1948, and switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in the election of 1964. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta became a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the twenty-first century, the Hispanic population of South Carolina increased as Mexicans and Latin America. The Republican Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from India, became governor of South Carolina. She had the Confederate flag removed from the state capitol building, and she appointed Republican Tim Scott as the first African-American from South Carolina to the U.S. Senate. But both Haley and Scott became supporters of President Donald Trump's restrictive immigration policies.
In 1779 Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia, and the state capital was moved from Williamsburg to Richmond. Jefferson served as ambassador to France during the French Revolution, Secretary of State under George Washington, Vice President under John Adams, and President of the United States. While he wrote that the "earth belongs to the living" and that all institutions should be abolished after a generation, Madison maintained the importance of protecting property rights. Jefferson considered his most important accomplishment to be the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founding of the University of Virginia.
It was at Richmond's Episcopal Church that Patrick Henry gave his "Give Me Liberty of Give Me Death Speech." In the early nineteenth century Richmond became a center of the iron industry in the South, and the Southern attitude toward slavery change. There were two slave revolts the Gabriel Rebellion in Richmond in 1800 and the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 in Southampton County. George Fitzhugh, a contributing editor of the "Richmond Examiner" wrote that slavery in the South was preferable to "wage slavery" in the factory economy of the North.
Atter the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Virginia ceded from the Union. Robert E. Lee, a native-son of Virginia and a West Point graduate who was offered the command the North Army, but he signed his commission and accept the command of the Virginia forces. Several key battles took place in the Virginia piedmont, including the first and second battle at Bull Run, the battles of Fredericksburg and Chambersburg, the siege of Petersburg and the final surrender by Lee at Appomattox.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of the so--called "Lost Cause" monuments were constructed to Confederate military heroes from Virginia, including Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and Robert E. Lee. But in recent years there were protests against these memorial to "the Lost Cause" in which these statues was torn down. In the
protest over the Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, the United the Right white supremacists clashed with the protestors resulting in the death of a young woman. President Donald J. Trump famously said that "there were good people on both sides."
On the Outer Banks, which were relatively isolated until bridges and ferries made the region a tourist attraction, a distinct dialect survived with survivals of regional features from England. The Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk is memorialized in the North Carolina license plate motto "First in Flight." Today, the Piney Woods of eastern North Carolina is a region that has large hog farms, its own style of barbeque, and was the birthplace of Pepsi Cola. Like the rest of the South, and even the United States as a whole, it is a place of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
After the Civil War, Boston annexed the neighboring towns Dorchester, Roxbury, Charleston, and Brighton, linked initially by the horse-drawn railways then the electric trolley, and finally the subway or (MTA). In the process the upper and middle classes moved out of the old Back Bay to be replaced by African-Americans and immigrants, including the Irish and Germans and later Italians and Jews.
The paper then contrasts the upper-class Brahmins (the Adams, Cabots, and Lowells) and the "Lace-Curtain Irish" (the Fitzgeralds and Kennedys). It ends with an account of the Boston School Busing Crisis in the 1970s and a brief description of the Boston Dialect.
She begins her latest book with what she calls “A Genealogy” presented in the form of an epic poem spoken by an African griot. The genealogy lists the names and Greek-like epithets of the “forefathers” down to the present-day and herself. In her dissertation Lowery writes that “[e]vidence indicates that some of these men were members of the Cheraw and Waccamaw [Native American] groups who lived in and around Robeson County in the second half of the seventeenth century, but it would seem that all of them married Indian women and their children founded the community that coalesced in Robeson County.” But her so-called “evidence” are not primary sources, but rather a report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in March 1912 and two reports commissioned by the Lumbee Regional Redevelopment Authority in 1976 and 1987. It is of note that in her current book, Lowery no longer claims Lumbee descent from a single historical tribe. She writes: “One tribal name or a single cultural origin is insufficient to explain Lumbee history, because Lumbee ancestors belong to many of the dozens of nations that lived in the 44,000-Square-Mile territory.”
In his “Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820” (2001), Paul Heinegg compiled relatively complete genealogies of African American families including the Chavis, Locklear, Lowry, and Oxendine families. He concluded that: “Most of the ‘Lumbee Indian’ families listed in the 1790 and 1800 Robeson County census as ‘other free’ are traced in this history back to persons referred to as ‘Negroes’ in Virginia.” Lowery lists Heinegg’s book in the bibliographies of her dissertation and two books, but she dismisses his conclusions as lacking in “context.” She asserts that non-Indians tended to refer to Native Americans as “mulatto,”
“mixt,” and “free colored.”
The issue of the Lumbee Indians is larger than whether a particular group that adopts an American Indian identity should be granted the semi-sovereignty afforded Native American groups who can trace their ancestry as a group to a historic Native American tribe. It is a matter of how to assess historical evidence. As John Adams once said: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
The documentary film was released in 2015 under the title “American Native.” While it has not been televised, it has been shown locally in New York and New Jersey and has been entered in several national and international film festivals. The website for “Native American” describes the film as follows: “Through expert interviews and unbridled access to the tribe . . . provides an in-depth look at the complex past, volatile present and endangered future of the Ramapough Lenape nation.” (http://americannative-themovie.com/) When I finally viewed “American Native” courtesy of it director, Steve Oritt, I was dismayed to find out that they omitted major parts of my interview, especially those parts that refute the points made by my critics. Yet they included ad hominem attacks against me and my integrity.
They also included extensive interviews with an anthropologist named Christine Gabrowski with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, a tribal lawyer named Arlinda Locklear, and an archaeologist named Ed Lenik. But the film fails to note that Gabrowski is the principal anthropologist at Grabowski and Associates, a business that contracts with non-recognized tribes to help them gain recognition, in other words, a play-for-pay advocate. It also fails to note that Locklear is a Lumbee Indian, a so-called tribe that has partial recognition by an act of Congress and is attempting to gain full federal recognition again through Congress rather than by the BIA.
They also fail to note that Lenik has only a masters degree in anthropology from NYU. Lenik accuses me of not considering archaeological information, but if he had bothered to look at the bibliography of The Ramapo Mountain People would see that I cited archaeologist Max Schrabisch’s study of rock shelters in northern New Jersey to show that Indians lived in the mountains. But they left the region well before the ancestors of the Ramapo Mountain People moved there. Lenik relies on secondary written sources, not archaeological evidence, to make his case that Indians continued to live in the region after 1750.
Not only did Bobker and Oritt fail to provide important information about the credentials and possible conflicts of interests of their so-called “experts,” Bobker and Oritt did not include interviews I suggested that they conduct with two independent- minded scholars: Dr. David Oestreicher, a Rutgers Ph.D. in anthropology who taught the Ramapoughs Delaware Indian words, dances, crafts, and traditions; nor Dr. Robert S. Grumet, another Rutgers Ph.D. in ethnohistory who is an expert on Lenape leadership based on signers of Indian land deeds. I have asked Steven Oritt to post my entire interview on the “American Native” website, which is what reputable documentaries such as Frontline have done. When dealing with a topic as controversial as federal recognition of Indian tribes, documentary film makers should give equal time to both sides of an issue. It is not enough to say that they were trying to present the point of view of the Ramapoughs.
The protestors called for the removal of the statue citing the speech given at the dedication of the statue in June 2, 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the Civil War by Julian Carr, an industrialist and veteran of the war, in which he bragged about horse-whipping an African-American woman for disrespecting a white woman.
But Julian Carr was not typical. Princeton Civil War historian James McPherson in his book What They Fought For (1995) concluded based 25,000 letters and hundreds of diaries that the average Confederate soldier fought for his home, his family, and for his state. As has been the case in other wars, soldiers who fought on both sides of the conflict often were the first to reconcile with each other. In the same year that Silent Sam was dedicated Union and Confederate soldiers gathered at Gettysburg as a sign of reconciliation.
In the same spirit of reconciliation Silent Sam should be relocated in a new context by moving it to the North Carolina Historic Site of Bennett Place, the farmhouse outside of Durham, where on April 26,1865, seventeen days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and twelve days after John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in Fords Theater, the Union General William Tecumseh Sherman accepted the surrender of the Army of Tennessee and all Confederate forces still active in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida under General Joseph E. Johnston. It was the largest troop surrender of the war. The same Sherman who led a scorched-earth march across Georgia the previous year, offered Johnston more lenient terms of surrender than had Grant offered Lee at Appomattox