On February 11, 1780, a British army led by General Sir Henry Clinton came ashore on Johns Island, South Carolina. By the end of March, the British had laid siege to Charleston, the most important city south of Philadelphia. By the middle of May, they had taken the city and the American army defending it. On March 15, 1781, that same British army left the field at Guilford Courthouse exhausted, decimated, stripped of supplies and rations, and victorious in name only. Its march away from Guilford Courthouse would end only a few months later at Yorktown, Virginia, where it would surrender. How did this happen? Although historians have debated the causes for centuries, they have often ignored how it felt to live, fight, and survive. What was it like to be British or American, Tory or Whig, regular soldier or militia, partisan, outlaw, or would-be bystander as the two sides (and those who drifted from side to side) went at each other with a fury across the Carolina countryside? Through the eyewitness accounts of those who fought the battles and skirmishesVoices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas provides the reader with firsthand looks at how it felt. The entries in this volume are taken from first-person narratives by those on the scene, from officers such as Henry Lee and Banastre Tarleton to teenaged scouts such as Thomas Young and James Collins. Some narratives, like Daniel Morgan's report of the Battle of Cowpens, were written immediately or soon after the action; others, like Young's, were written when the boy soldiers had become old men. Some were written (and sometimes embellished) specifically for publication, while others were written as private correspondence or official reports. Some express a great deal of emotion and describe the authors' immediate experiences of war, while others concentrate on logistics, strategy, tactics, and the practical realities of an army battle; some, like Lee's, manage to do both. The American Revolution in the Carolinas was nasty, brutish, and relatively short, though it must not have felt short to those who lived through it. It moved with a furious swiftness, the center of action shifting from Charleston to Camden, from Charlotte to King's Mountain, and from Cowpens to Guilford Courthouse in a matter of months, weeks, or sometimes days. Accounts that describe what it was actually like at all of these hot spots as well as the events that lead up to the actual fighting are included in this book. Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas gives the reader some idea of what it was like to be part of a war when two states were ripped apart but a nation was made. Ed Southern was a Wake Forest senior studying in London when he walked into the 200-year-old bookshop Hatchard’s and realized how excited the possibilities presented by shelves full of books made him. After graduation, he worked at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Hanging around after he finished setting up for lectures, concerts, performances, and classes gave him an excellent postgraduate education in the liberal arts, which came in handy later when he dropped out of graduate school. He went to work for one of the major bookselling chains and was a member of the training team sent to open the company’s first store in London, a massive four-story media emporium on Oxford Street. It was a bit like coming full circle, but not quite. A year later, he left the bookstore and went to work for John F. Blair, Publisher, as the sales director. He presently serves as the executive director of the North Carolina Writers Network.

In December 1606, three ships carrying 144 passengers and crew sailed from London bound for a land that had already claimed more than its share of English lives. In May of the following year, little more than 100 men would disembark to settle on a small peninsula in the James River. Eight months later, only 38 men were still alive in the fort they had named Jamestown. Jamestown is well known as the first permanent English settlement in the New World; largely unknown is how fragile that permanence was. Most Americans have a general awareness of the dangers faced on any frontier, but not the particular hardships that confronted the Jamestown colonists—starvation, disease, conspiracy, incompetent leaders, and, of course, intermittent war with the neighboring Native Americans. This volume collects contemporary accounts of the first successful colony the first thirteen United States. The earliest text dates from 1605, two years before the first landing; the last describes events up to 1614, when the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe secured a brief measure of peace for the beleaguered colony. Most of the accounts were written by the colonists themselves; others reflect the perceptions and expectations of investors and observers back in England, while two reveal the keen and hostile interest taken in the colony by England’s chief rival, Spain. Several of them were written for widespread publication; others were either private letters or reports meant only for certain audiences. These narratives take the reader from the London stage to Powhatan’s lodge, from the halls of royal power to the derelict hovels of the Starving Time.They show the modern reader what an adventure the founding of English America was—the desperate battles and fraught negotiations with Powhatan, the political intrigues in Europe and Virginia, the shipwreck that inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the discoveries that thrilled the colonists, the discoveries that broke their hearts. Ed Southern, a graduate of Wake Forest University, is a descendant of John Southern, who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. Ed Southern was a Wake Forest senior studying in London when he walked into the 200-year-old bookshop Hatchard’s and realized how excited the possibilities presented by shelves full of books made him. After graduation, he worked at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Hanging around after he finished setting up for lectures, concerts, performances, and classes gave him an excellent postgraduate education in the liberal arts, which came in handy later when he dropped out of graduate school. He went to work for one of the major bookselling chains and was a member of the training team sent to open the company’s first store in London, a massive four-story media emporium on Oxford Street. It was a bit like coming full circle, but not quite. A year later, he left the bookstore and went to work for John F. Blair, Publisher, as the sales director. He presently serves as the executive director of the North Carolina Writers Network.

A wry and witty commentary on college sports and identity in the complicated social landscape of the South. Ed Southern, lifelong fan of the Wake Forest University Demon Deacons, the smallest school in the NCAA's Power 5, set out to tell the story of how he got tangled, in vines of history and happenstance, with the two giants of his favorite sport: the Crimson Tide and the Clemson Tigers. He set out to tell how a North Carolina native crossed the shifty, unmarked border between Tobacco Road and the Deep South. He set out to tell how the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, from beyond the grave, introduced him to his wife, a Birmingham native and die-hard Alabama fan. While he was writing that story, though, 2020 came along. Suddenly his questions had a new and urgent focus: Why do sports mean so much that so many will play and watch them in the face of a global pandemic? How have the South's histories shaped its fervor for college sports? How have college sports shaped how southerners construct their identities, priorities, and allegiances? Why is North Carolina passionate about college basketball when its neighbors to the South live and die by college football? Does this have anything to do with North Carolina's reputation as the most "progressive" southern state, a state many in the Deep South don't think is "really" southern? If college sports really do mean so much in the South, then why didn't everyone down south wear masks or recognize that Black Lives Matter, even after the coaches told us to? Fight Songs explores the connections and contradictions between the teams we root for and the places we plant our roots; between the virtues that sports are supposed to teach and the cutthroat business they've become; between the hopes of fans and the demands of the past, present, and future.

Ed Southern's stories are about hard work and hard times and what is required of a boy to become a man in such a place and time. They are also about class-that taboo subject in America-and about anger, love, and yearning. Carefully written, with the best dialogue I've read in years, these terrific and utterly original stories are made to last-like a stone pathway or a brick wall. - Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and The Last Girls