Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape & Society

Kirby, Jack Temple

ISBN 10: 0807845272 / ISBN 13: 9780807845271

Published by Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.A.: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 1995

About this Item

Softcover, clean cover without folds or tears. 293 pages, no markings or writing. Binding square and tight, spine uncreased.

Seller Inventory # NA-3863

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape & Society
• Publisher: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.A.: Univ of North Carolina Pr
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807845272
• ISBN 13: 9780807845271
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • American Indian Collection

About this title

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 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.