No comments about Leonard Shoun and His Wife Barbara Slemp of Johnson County, Tennessee.

1 comments about Cry Havoc: A History of the 49th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, 1861-1865.

1. My great grandfather was Col. Atkins and is buried in Clarksville Tn. along with many of the men he served with, although a very short book the roster of men and limited story was well worth the price of admissiom.

2 comments about Throwed Away: Failures Progress Eastern North Carolina.

1. Nobody organizes tours to visit the old homes of Southern tenant farmers, unlike the mansions of the rich or even, these days, the shacks of the slaves. Not many outsiders even know the difference between sharecroppers and tenants, so Linda Flowers, daughter of tenant farmers in North Carolina, is at pains to distinguish between them.
   
   A sharecropper owns little more than his overalls and, maybe, a mule. His landlord supplies tools, a house, seeds, fertilizer and food. A tenant is an independent businessman. He owns his own mule or a truck, maybe some furnishings and enough credit to capitalize a crop.
   
   Materially, the difference in living standards may be small, but the difference in status is considerable. After the Civil War, tenants could make a living in North Carolina growing truck crops for expanding eastern cities. They were self-respecting people. After World War II, the terms of trade changed against eastern truck farmers on favor of latifundia in California.
   
   The North Carolinians had not expected much. They did not demand much. They tended, often, to contrast their precarious economic state unfavorably with with that of the harvest laborers they hired: the pickers, Flowers notes, were paid so much per box by the tenant, a clear gain; while the tenant sometimes lost money on each box. (In `Cross Creek,' Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings makes the same point about her orange grove, though she was a hobby farmer; it did not matter if the bottom dropped out of the fruit market.)
   
   About the time Flowers was ready to leave home, the tenants crossed over from barely making ends meet to a state of prolonged deficit. Again and again in `Throwed Away,' she regrets that farms of vegetables were turned over to grains (and, since this book was published in 1990, to hogs in confinement). Grain doesn't require a whole family's labor, so the tenants were displaced: th'owed away, as they would have said.
   
   Children of tenants sought work in industry, mills in eastern North Carolina, furniture factories in the Piedmont. Flowers is bitter about this.
   
   It is hard to see why. Her family cleared around $700 a year in the mid-1950s. Even accounting for housing and some homegrown food off the books, $15 a week was not much to brag about even in the poor South of that era. Certainly not enough to pay taxes to support universities, like UNC-Greensboro (Women's College, in those days), which Flowers was able to attend.
   
   And what about those harvesters that the Flowers family hired seasonally? They were black people, and they had no assets to become tenants. If they were not strong, they could not even hope to farm on shares.
   
   In the summer of 1966, U.S. Sen. Bill Spong of Virginia made a hunger tour of eastern North Carolina and found numerous black families (usually headed by a woman) whose sole opportunity for work was two months a year in a cannery.
   
   Growing up tenants may have been a satisfying family experience, but this was not an economic system that was worth preserving, even if somehow California and its migrant workers had not offered competition.
   
   `Throwed Away' is a heartfelt book, a well-written book, a valuable document from the inside; but the economic analysis is a travesty.
   
   Linda Flowers herself escaped into academia. Most of her peers eventually escaped into a more humdrum life. By the 1970s, northern union organizers were frustrated and angry because they could not make any headway in signing up Southern factory workers who were making, perhaps, $5 an hour, when Ohio auto workers were making $17 or more.
   
   They couldn't understand why these crackers were so loyal to their exploitative employers. Why wouldn't they be? $200 cash money a week was a long way up from $700 a year.



2. I bought this book because my family is from East Carolina and the stories in this book are very likely my stories and countless others over the decades upon decades.
   
   Whether you are from East Carolina or not this book is worth the initial culture shock and slowness of (plot?). That is because the author whom I've never met (and has passed away unfortunately)is determined to tell the awful truth about a people and region that will likely never be on the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."
   
   In the process she touches on vital and agonizingly current issues such as American economics of exploitaton, subtle to overt racisim, nobility and independence amid depression and an inept and unaccountable educational system which ensures the repitition of a "throwed away" people.
   
   Yes this is the book that you "should" read. But I think truth is where you find it and this book tells it like it is.

No comments about Genealogical Abstracts from Tennessee Newspapers, Volume 1, 1791-1808.

No comments about Sequatchie: A Story of the Southern Cumberlands.

2 comments about Annals of Tennessee: To the End of the Eighteenth Century (The First American Frontier).

1. I've found it very useful in my genealogy research for Tennessee.



2. This is a dated but useful volume that would be great for research but is not what you'd want to just pick up and read. Prose is stilted, not all that authoritative.

1 comments about The Wataugans.

1. Not the most scholarly book ever, but since so little is in print about Watauga, this is surely the best of the lot.

2 comments about The Gemstone File.

1. IT IS NOT FAR FROM THE TRUTH and keith wants people to know about what is going on out there..I think that is good since there is so much lies and deceitfulness..I am glad he takes a stand for it..that is why I am also glad to be a Christian to..I know first hand about secret societies..I was in the black dragon for years.



2. Late author Jim Keith dedicated his book "The Gemstone File" to the the Queen of Conspiracy Mae Brussell. Mae pre-deceased Jim by about ten years.
   
   Bruce Roberts conveyed his letters to Mae Brussell in 1972. At the time Mae placed them in a file she labeled "Gemstone File", giving the letters the name that made the collection a staple in the conpiracy world. In the spring of 1974 Mae Brussell opened up her home to a writer named Stephanie Caruana and allowed Caruana access to her volumnious files, including, but not limited to, the Gemstone File.
   
   Caruana's interaction with her host Mae Brussell is well publicized as is her distain for Brussell, a researcher far ahead of her time so well respected by her followers that they labeled themselves Brusselsprouts. Caruana wrote a 23-page synopsis of Roberts' letters that came to be called "The Skelton Key". There are many versions of her work but in almost all cases the "Key" concludes by emphasizing that the only way to spread the secrets of the key is for each reader to take an active part, copy it and pass it on. An urgency to do so quickly is stressed by saying something like "The game is nearly up. Either the Mafia goes -- or America goes." The very shared secret and the need to join this closed club fighting for America's survival lent credibility to Roberts' letters that they would not have possessed had they been published unedited and in their entirety. His complete, unedited works have never seen the light of day and therefore, the Gemstone legend lives on unchallanged until Jim Keith wrote the Gemstone File in 1992, six years before his strange death.
   
   Keith accomplishes in this 213-page book what others have been unable or unwilling to do. He allows many people of various beliefs and widely diverse intellect to write their own opinions of Bruce Roberts' work. The opinions are as diverse as the subjects they critics find interesting. The common demoninator is the fact that, with a single exception, they do question the validity of Roberts' assumptions and his conclusions.
   
   The sole exception - the only person who accepts Bruce Roberts' words as gospel - is author Stephanie Caruana. Caruana states on page 43 that her intent at the time she wrote the Skelton Key was not to "describe Bruce Roberts" but to "outline events". Then Caruana says that if her intention had been to describe Bruce Roberts, she would have said that he, as far as she knew, was brave, tough, real, a player and not a sideline sitter; sometimes scared, very angry.....Caruana concludes this statement by saying he wasn't "trying to enter the world of James Bond" - he WAS James Bond, or his own version of it.
   
   Jim Keith's chapter from pages 110 to 132 is an excellent example of one writer's attempt to objectively examine the Gemstone File - a legend that took on a life of its own with Caruana's Skeleton Key.
   
   Unfortunately Jim Keith's valiant effort to shed light on the darkness that was Bruce Roberts only succeeds in surrounding The Gemstone File in more fog then San Francisco on a summer day.
   
   virginia mccullough
   Curator of the Mae Brussell Collection
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

5 comments about The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family's Journey to Freedom.

1. John Baker Jr. spent over three decades researching his family's history in America. Baker's book is a comprehensive study about many who lived on Wessyngton Plantation, the descendents of the slaves and the slave owners. He even collected and used DNA data during his study. Researching your family and tracing your ancestry can be a difficult and time-consuming task. Fortunately, the inhabitants of Wessyngton Plantation and their descendants are lively crafted characters in this book, not just names and statistics, a testimony to Baker's talent as a storyteller. Visit a book store or a library and browse in the biography and non-fiction sections for books by and about Black people. Most folks write books after they are famous or infamous. On the other hand, Black people who live in these United States, write because we want to leave evidence: that we existed; that we are important because we existed; that we survived the Middle Passage. We proudly want the world to know that we were not destroyed. The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation provides a model to assist and encourage any of us who would like to begin to write our own family's tales before they are forgotten.



2. When John Baker was in junior high school, he found himself particularly drawn to a textbook photograph of two elderly slaves. Then he learned, when the photograph was reproduced in a newspaper somewhere and pointed out by other relatives, that this couple were his ancestors. This launched him on to an interesting and exciting search to find out more about his family.
   
   Baker has done an amazing job of research, and he started at an inspiringly young age. I appreciate the work of love he has performed, the story he is telling, the family he represents, and his gift with words. He was able to interview family members who were at or near a century old, and to uncover incredible details. He collected data from interviews, pictures, and letters from family members, from researching the meticulously kept plantation records, speaking with the descendants of the Wessington family themselves, looking at old newspaper records, journals, accounts of the time, and more. He was even able to utilize DNA research, so the wealth of information here is rich and varied.
   
   It was interesting to read of a slave-owning family who, atypically, only ever sold two slaves, assigned work by task, allowed mothers to stay with their children, did not put children and women to work in the fields, and who tried, by their lights, to be honorable.
   It was baffling to read that at the same time, they refused to allow their slaves to attend worship services.
   
   It was inspiring, and not at all surprising, to read how, even under these, for the times, 'benevolent' conditions, those enslaved still yearned for freedom, valued it, and maintained their own internal moral compass. It was was heartwarming to read of generations of families who, in spite of slavery, remained as intact as possible, husbands and fathers supporting their wives and children, working together to raise their children- not until decades after slavery ended did this begin to change.
   
   It was helpful to read of other plantations, other conditions, and other families in the South at the same time, and compare and contrast the difference. The Wessingtons, and those they owned, were fortunate in that in one generation there was only a single surviving heir, so the families were not separated by the death of the head of household resulting in slaves being divided amongst multiple progeny, and the Wessington's were careful enough with their money that they never had to sell slaves off to recoup debts.
   
   It was informative to read the Wessington family's complain during the Civil War of having their rights to transport their 'property' into the territories being the chief reason for secession (that 'property' was the humans they held in bondage).
   
   There is, however, a little too much detail at times, lists of occupations, family names (difficult to follow or make sense of), crops, exports, imports, and so forth. At times, it reads like a novel, sometimes a scholarly work, and at other times it reads like a business inventory or an account book.
   
   This book is perfect as it is for the following groups:
   Those with any interest in genealogical research
   Members of the Washington family
   Those living in the area of Wessington Plantation
   Those interested in every detail of the story
   
   For most others, it's still an interesting story, but it could have benefited from some tighter editing, putting the lists in tables and charts in the back of the book, for instance, and putting lists of names in a family tree, or leaving out a few details, tightening up others.



3. Having enjoyed Baker's wonderful story, I am so pleased that it is available as a trade paperback. Now reading groups and students of all ages can delve into this compelling history.



4. Incredibly researched and beautifully written. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject and period.



5. This book should be in the classroom ,as part of the history of the state of Tennessee. Mr Bakers relentless digging into the past was a great effort ,into getting this story told.Great work.

1 comments about Americas First Western Frontier: East Tennessee: A Story of the Early Settlers and Indians of East Tennessee.

1. This is a breezy, basic story without much of what we would call scholarship these days.