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978-0-89587-189-3
0-89587-189-0
$16.95 paperback
8" x 9"
184 pages black-and-white photographs
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Illuminating,
entertaining, and essential! David Cecelski's work is a historical
aid-to-navigation, a collection of literary beacons from Knotts Island
to Navassa. Cecelski presents us with the last daughter of Davis Ridge,
the rapacious turpentiners of the Rich Lands, and the intrepid boatman
in his paper canoe, and lights our way through the trickiest
currents and riptides of North Carolina's coastal past. --Bland
Simpson, author of Into the Sound Country and The Great
Dismal
David Cecelski was in a
library halfway across the country when he discovered what may be the
only existing copy of the memoir of Allen Parker, who grew up a slave in
tidewater North Carolina. "I do not know if I can put into words
the excitement, almost the sheer joy, that a historian feels at
discovering a document like Parker's Reflections," Cecelski
writes. "A whole new world opens up before you."
And so it was when he
happened upon the journal of a sea traveler stranded at Hatteras Island
in 1873, and when his longtime barber unexpectedly gave him a copy of a
relative's unpublished reminiscence about growing up in the Great
Alligator Swamp.
Originally published in Coastwatch
magazine, the 22 essays in A Historian's Coast combine history,
ecology, and a homegrown curiosity about the coastal past. Most of them
center around a rare travel journal, a long-forgotten book, or a lost
diary, excerpts of which are included. But perhaps adventures is
a more apt description than essays. In an effort to make musty
archives come alive, Cecelski gets in his boat and explores coastal
places to see how they have changed since those long-ago days. Maybe you
have seen him. "I am the one in the small boat paddling into the
swamp and, as always, into the past," he says.
about the author
A native of Tidewater North Carolina, David Cecelski is a historian
affiliated with the Southern Oral History Program at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Along Freedom Road
and the coeditor of Democracy Betrayed and Recollections of My
Slavery Days.
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