Böcker av Jack Temple Kirby

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.

Jack Temple Kirby's massive and engaging study examines the rural southern world of the first half of the twentieth century, its collapse, and the resulting "modernization" of southern society. Rural Worlds Lost is the first book to thoroughly assess the profound changes modernization has wrought in the US South.

The American South is generally warmer, wetter, weedier, snakier, and insect infested and disease prone than other regions of the country. This title offers a personal recounting of the centuries-old human-nature relationship in the South. It explores various South's peoples and their landscapes.