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71 books match the query 'North Carolina' and 7 start with s

cover of Selected Poems

Selected Poems

James Applewhite

Duke University Press, 2005

James Applewhite has produced nine extraordinary books of poetry. This volume is the first anthology of his remarkable oeuvre. It brings together chronologically arranged selections from all of his previous books, from the first, published in 1975, through the most recent, published in 2002. Applewhite’s poetry is deeply rooted in the history and rhythms of rural North Carolina, where he was born and raised, and these poems mark stages in an artistic and personal journey he has undertaken over the past thirty years.

In impeccable and surprising language, Applewhite depicts the social conventions, changes, frictions, and continuities of small southern towns. He celebrates that which he values as decent and life-enhancing, and his veneration is perhaps most apparent in his response to the natural world, to the rivers and trees and flowers. Yet Applewhite’s love for his native land is not straightforward. His verse chronicles his conflicted feelings for the region that gave him the initial, evocative language of place and immersed him in a blazing sensory world while it also bequeathed the distortions, denials, and prejudices that make it so painful a labyrinth. Rendering troubled legacies as well as profound decency, Applewhite reveals the universally human in a distinctively local voice, within dramatic and mundane moments of hope and sorrow and faith.

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cover of Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World

Showroom City

Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World

John Joe Schlichtman

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world

High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner. 

Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.

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cover of Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South

Sounds Like Home

Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South

Mary Herring Wright

Gallaudet University Press, 1999

New edition available: Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South, 20th Anniversary Edition, ISBN 978-1-944838-58-4
Features a new introduction by scholars Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill

Mary Herring Wright’s memoir adds an important dimension to the current literature in that it is a story by and about an African American deaf child. The author recounts her experiences growing up as a deaf person in Iron Mine, North Carolina, from the 1920s through the 1940s. Her story is unique and historically significant because it provides valuable descriptive information about the faculty and staff of the North Carolina school for Black deaf and blind students from the perspective of a student as well as a student teacher. In addition, this engrossing narrative contains details about the curriculum, which included a week-long Black History celebration where students learned about important Blacks such as Madame Walker, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and George Washington Carver. It also describes the physical facilities as well as the changes in those facilities over the years. In addition, Sounds Like Home occurs over a period of time that covers two major events in American history, the Depression and World War II.

Wright’s account is one of enduring faith, perseverance, and optimism. Her keen observations will serve as a source of inspiration for others who are challenged in their own ways by life’s obstacles.

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cover of Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South

Sounds Like Home

Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South

Mary Herring Wright

Gallaudet University Press, 2019

Originally published in 1999, Sounds Like Home adds an important dimension to the canon of deaf literature by presenting the perspective of an African American deaf woman who attended a segregated deaf school. Mary Herring Wright documents her life from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, offering a rich account of her home life in rural North Carolina and her education at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, which had a separate campus for African American students. This 20th anniversary edition of Wright’s story includes a new introduction by scholars Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill, who note that the historical documents and photographs of segregated Black deaf schools have mostly been lost. Sounds Like Home serves “as a permanent witness to the lives of Black Deaf people.”
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cover of Southern Capitalism: The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880–1980

Southern Capitalism

The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880–1980

Philip J. Wood

Duke University Press, 1986

Southern Capitalism challenges prevailing views of Southern development by arguing that the persisting peculiarities of the Southern economy—such as low wages and high poverty rates—have not resulted from barriers to capitalist development, nor from the lingering influence of planter values. Wood argues that these peculiarities can instead be best understood as the consequence of a strategy of capitalist development, based on the creation and preservation of social conditions and relations conducive to the above-average exploitation of labor by capital. focusing on the evolving relationship between capital and labor as the core of this strategy, Wood follows the process of capitalist industrialization in North Carolina from its beginnings in the aftermath of the Civil War to the 1980s.
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cover of Strike!

Strike!

Mary Heaton Vorse

University of Illinois Press, 1991

The most famous of the bloody southern textile strikes that took place in the late 1920s occurred at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, where workers endured fifty-five-hour work weeks, the stretchout, and pay so low that everyone in their families over sixteen normally was expected to enter the mill. Strike! is a vivid portrait of the mill workers' living and working conditions, the discomfort of the few southern liberals, the labor spies, the wavering morale of the strikers, the shootings, deaths, and trials, and the vigilante mobs.
 
The story is told by Mary Heaton Vorse, the leading labor reporter of the period, who had covered major strikes since 1912. This novel was the first of six inspired by the Gastonia strike. Critics hailed it as the best.
 
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cover of Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State

Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State

Kirstine Taylor

University of Chicago Press, 2025

The story of how the American South became the most incarcerated region in the world’s most incarcerated nation.

Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the southern United States. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons were among the sweeping changes that forever altered the southern landscape and bolstered the region’s capacity to punish. What prompted this southern revolution in criminal punishment?

Kirstine Taylor argues that the crisis in the cotton fields and the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in the south’s rising metropolises prompted lawmakers to build expansive, modern criminal punishment systems in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Taking us inside industry-hunting expeditions, school desegregation battles, the sit-in movement, prisoners’ labor unions, and policy commissions, Taylor tells the story of how a modernizing south became the most incarcerated region in the globe’s most incarcerated nation.

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