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To Know Her Own Historychronicles the evolution of writing programs at a landmark Southern women's college during the postwar period. Kelly Ritter finds that despite its conservative Southern culture and vocational roots, the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina was a unique setting where advanced writing programs and creativity flourished long before these trends emerged nationally.Ritter profiles the history of the Woman's College, first as a normal school, where women trained as teachers with an emphasis on composition and analytical writing, then as a liberal arts college. She compares the burgeoning writing program here to those of the Seven Sisters (Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Barnard, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke) and to elite all-male universities, to show the singular progressivism of the Woman's College. Ritter presents lively student writing samples from the early postwar period to reveal a blurring of the boundaries between \"creative\" and \"expository\" styles.By midcentury, a quantum shift toward creative writing changed administrators' valuation of composition courses and staff at the Woman's College. An intensive process of curricular revisions, modeled after Harvard's \"Redbook\" plan, was proposed and rejected in 1951, as the college stood by its unique curricula and singular values. Ritter follows the plight of individual instructors of creative writing and composition, showing how their compensation and standing were made disproportionate by the shifting position of expository writing in relation to creative writing. Despite this unsettled period, the Woman's College continued to gain in stature, and by 1964 it became a prize acquisition of the University of North Carolina system.Ritter's study demonstrates the value of local histories to uncover undocumented advancements in writing education, offering insights into the political, cultural, and social conditions that influenced learning and methodologies at \"marginalized\" schools such as the Woman's College.

The problem of poor, degraded white people in the antebellum South presented a problem to both reformers and proponents of slavery. Sharpening the differences of race meant easing those of class, ensuring that public schooling did not always receive widespread support. The cult of white superiority absolved the state of responsibility for social mobility. As better schooling was advocated for religious and civic reasons, wealthy planters determined to avoid taxes joined with their illiterate neighbors in fighting attempts at “improvement” that undermined the slave system based on the notion of black inferiority.

Issues of stereotyping with regard to Native American or First Nations peoples have been the subject of scholarly works from a number of different fields, and the element of religion often has loomed large in these treatments. Yet even in an era when the general public is acutely attuned to such issues, stereotypes of First Nations peoples continue to be presented in a number of different public contexts, including European American actors appearing \"brownface\" or \"redface\" in a theatrical production. Perhaps more surprisingly, stereotypes of Native American religions also continue to be presented in selected religious studies textbooks, particularly introductory ones. In this article, the author posits two categories of stereotypes: (1) intellectual; and (2) popular. His analysis hovers around the fault line that divides them, or perhaps the line that is conventionally supposed to separate them, for the distinction between the two ideal types quite often is blurred. The author highlights the observable relationship between selected resilient popular and scholarly representations of Native American religions by discussing the influence of both the John White illustrations and the Theodor de Bry engravings upon emerging and lingering conceptions of indigenous peoples, indigenous religions, and \"religion\" as a general category. The author's contribution is to highlight a particular trajectory that illustrates the influence this particular group of selected images has retained even into the twenty-first century. Using the outdoor drama \"The Lost Colony\" as the primary example, he suggests, first, that the images of indigenous people animated by actors in the play are composite, conflated images with a traceable lineage and, second, that these images, because of acquired cultural cachet, are exemplars of a category of cultural products that continue to inform discursive constructions of general and specific categories of \"religion,\" both academic and popular. Specifically, he considers the White drawings, the de Bry engravings, the Paul Green outdoor drama, and the museum exhibitions that presented them as instruments that have contributed to the continued acceptance (and refinement, such as it is) of generalized and impressionistic notions of an \"American Indian religion\" or \"Native American spirituality.\" In the final, most exploratory section of the article, the author contends that there is an observable relationship between scholarly versions of such notions about First Nations peoples and their religions and acceptance of a sui generis category of religion in which \"religion\" is construed a priori as the presence of an irreducible \"sacred\" that is by definition universal. (Contains 129 notes.)

In small towns, where most whites owned land or stores and most blacks worked as wage laborers, a racialized political order upheld a class structure that ensured that white employers had access to a cheap and reliable source of black labor. A history of how black workers challenged both of these Jim Crow hierarchies when they built a CIO union in Elizabethtown NC between 1946 and 1953 is presented.

We often think of the poor as inhabiting the margins of our world, but that image misses something important. In North Carolina, the poor might better be imagined as the foundation upon which the state’s modern social and economic order was built. That structure first took shape during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as North Carolinians struggled over the organization of wealth and power in the new commercial economy that arose from the death of slavery. Change came about at a frenzied pace. Between 1880 and 1900, the state and private investors financed the construction of more than

In mid-June 1964, Susie Powell, a native of Whitakers, a small town in eastern North Carolina, and a student at Bennett College, scribbled a brief note in her diary. She was one of a group of student volunteers—100 in 1964, followed by another 250 in 1965—selected by the North Carolina Fund as foot soldiers in the battle against poverty. Powell and her compatriots in the North Carolina Volunteers, dubbed the “First One Hundred” by the state’s press, had just finished a three-day orientation at Duke University. They had spent their days in classrooms, listening to professors and public