Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Studies in Rural Culture) - Softcover

Kirby, Jack Temple

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807822140 ISBN 13: 9780807822142

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995

Synopsis

Jack Temple Kirby charts the history of the low country between the James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The Algonquian word for this country, which means 'swamp-on-a-hill,' was transliterated as 'poquosin' by seventeenth-century English settlers. Interweaving social, political, economic, and military history with the story of the landscape, Kirby shows how Native American, African, and European peoples have adapted to and modified this Tidewater area in the nearly four hundred years since the arrival of Europeans. Kirby argues that European settlement created a lasting division of the region into two distinct zones often in conflict with each other: the cosmopolitan coastal area, open to markets, wealth, and power because of its proximity to navigable rivers and sounds, and a more isolated hinterland, whose people and their way of life were gradually ― and grudgingly ― subjugated by railroads, canals, and war. Kirby’s wide-ranging analysis of the evolving interaction between humans and the landscape offers a unique perspective on familiar historical subjects, including slavery, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the Civil War, agricultural modernization, and urbanization.

About this title

About the Author

Jack Temple Kirby is W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University and editor of the series Studies in Rural Culture. His books include Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination and Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0807822140
• ISBN 13: 9780807822142
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320