New Voyages to North Carolina offers a bold new approach for understanding and telling North Carolina's history. Recognizing the need for such a fresh approach and reflecting a generation of recent scholarship, eighteen distinguished authors have sculpted a broad, inclusive narrative of the state's evolution over more than four centuries. The volume provides new lenses and provocative possibilities for reimagining the state's past. Transcending traditional markers of wars and elections, the contributors map out a new chronology encompassing geological realities; the unappreciated presence of Indians, blacks, and women; religious and cultural influences; and abiding preferences for industrial development within the limits of ""progressive"" politics. While challenging traditional story lines, the authors frame a candid tale of the state's development. Contributors include Dorothea V. Ames, Karl E. Campbell, James C. Cobb, Peter A. Coclanis, Stephen Feeley, Jerry Gershenhorn, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Patrick Huber, Charles F. Irons, David Moore, Michael Leroy Oberg, Stanley R. Riggs, Richard D. Starnes, Carole Watterson Troxler, Bradford J. Wood, and Karin Zipf.

Daniel Russell is a good example of what Carl Degler has termed ""the other South."" The son of an aristocratic eastern North Carolina family of staunch Whig-Unionists, he entered politics when the Republican party first appeared in the state after the Civil War. For more than forty years thereafter he fought the solid South mentality of the Bourbon Democrats, first as a Radical Republican judge, then as a Greenbacker congressman, and finally as a Republican governor with Populist sympathies-the only chief executive of his party that North Carolina had between Reconstruction and the 1970s. The basic themes of Russell's political life were racial and economic in nature. As a judge on the state superior court he ruled in the Wilmington opera house case of 1873 that blacks could not be denied accommodations on the account of their race. As a congressman he embraced the cause of currency reform and the regulation of corporate enterprise. Elected governor in 1896 by an uneasy coalition of Populists and Republicans, an alliance that Crow and Durden fully examine, he pushed reforms designed to bring nonresident corporations under stricter state supervision and challenged the ninety-nine-year lease of the state-owned North Carolina Railroad to J.P. Morgan's Southern Railway Company. The Democrats' triumphant white-supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 and the resulting disfranchisement of black voters, however, crushed these progressive initiatives, and afterward the complex and sometimes irascible Russell kept a low profile until his tern ended in 1901. His final years were taken up by a famous interstate lawsuit that he initiated to force North Carolina to pay certain Reconstruction debts it had repudiated. The reasons for Russell's political failure while southern Progressives of the period generally succeeded shed much new light on the reform movement in the South between 1890 and 1910. Although the reforms that he took up were no more radical than those called for by his contemporaries, Crow and Durden find in this first full account of his career that ""in the last analysis, Russell's unique blend of Old South paternalism toward blacks with New South radicalism concerning currency and railway reform challenged too many taboos of race, class, and party.

These essays pose new questions concerning the social and political origins of the Revolution in the South, the social disorder indiced by the war, and the impact of the conflict and its ideologies on blacks and women. Contributors are: Pauline Maier, Robert M. Weir, Jack P. Greene, Marvin L. Michale Kay, Lorin Lee Cary, John Shy, Clyde R. Ferguson, Mary Beth Norton, Michael Mullin, and Peter H. Wood.
Originally published in 1978.
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New Voyages to North Carolina offers a bold new approach for understanding and telling North Carolina's history. Recognizing the need for such a fresh approach and reflecting a generation of recent scholarship, eighteen distinguished authors have sculpted a broad, inclusive narrative of the state's evolution over more than four centuries. The volume provides new lenses and provocative possibilities for reimagining the state's past. Transcending traditional markers of wars and elections, the contributors map out a new chronology encompassing geological realities; the unappreciated presence of Indians, blacks, and women; religious and cultural influences; and abiding preferences for industrial development within the limits of ""progressive"" politics. While challenging traditional story lines, the authors frame a candid tale of the state's development. Contributors include Dorothea V. Ames, Karl E. Campbell, James C. Cobb, Peter A. Coclanis, Stephen Feeley, Jerry Gershenhorn, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Patrick Huber, Charles F. Irons, David Moore, Michael Leroy Oberg, Stanley R. Riggs, Richard D. Starnes, Carole Watterson Troxler, Bradford J. Wood, and Karin Zipf.