Posted in Just A Bite, tagged abolition, caning, sen charles sumner, sen preston brooks on May 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
“The uppermost topic in the papers, North and South, is the recent chastisement of Senator [Charles Sumner of Massachusetts] by Mr. [Preston] Brooks of South Carolina. The affair has been a perfect Godsend to the Abolitionists… Sumner will be glorified into the dignity of a persecuted patriot. “Sumner deserved what he got, but Brooks caned [...]
Posted in History, tagged charlotte observer, conagra, garner nc, jack betts, new york times disunion, north carolina collection gallery, slim jim on May 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
– Jack Betts, the Great State’s foreign correspondent in Raleigh for the past two decades, debarks more suddenly than but just as gracefully as his positively-addicted readers would expect. Jack will dispute this — of course! — but it was his unrelenting editorials and columns that took the lead in sparing Eastern North Carolina the [...]
Posted in History, On This Day, Tar Heelia, tagged jon baskin, josh hamilton, little league, n + 1, raleigh nc on May 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“The most striking pages… tell the tale of Texas Rangers All-Star Josh Hamilton’s astoundingly precocious talent. “At the age of 6, Hamilton could throw a baseball 50 mph — his first peg from shortstop in Little League knocked his bewildered first baseman to the ground. Shortly thereafter, he was elevated to a ‘Majors’ team in [...]
Posted in Just A Bite, Literature, tagged a gentle madness, book collecting, deborah milton clarke, duke university, john milton, nicholas a. basbanes, paradise lost, rare books, reynolds price on May 19, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Reynolds Price was doodling on a paper placemat in a Harvard Square cafe on a spring morning in 1992 when he told me about the copy of ‘Paradise Lost’ he had bought for himself five years earlier after surviving extensive treatment for spinal cancer. Price… teaches a course on John Milton at Duke University, but [...]
Posted in Just A Bite, tagged 1852, edenton, slavery, soul by soul, walter johnson on May 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“In December 1852, William Pettigrew reported to a slaveholding correspondent, the town of Edenton, North Carolina, was still full of talk about a rebellion said to have been planned by Josiah Collins’s slaves in October. “Those implicated had been sold to a trader and gathered into a coffle [that is, a line of slaves chained [...]
Posted in From the Stacks, History, Tar Heelia on May 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
You ask, “8,000 what? 8,000 square feet? Is Dorton Arena planning an expansion?” No. We’re not aware of such. “Is someone hoping to set a world record by cramming 8,000 people into the building once derided as the ‘Cow Palace’?” Again, no. The fire marshal need not worry that anyone is trying to include more [...]
Posted in Tar Heelia, tagged clayton nc, erik larson, in the garden of beasts, nazi germany, the nation magazine on May 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Born on October 21, 1869, at his parents’ home in the tiny hamlet of Clayton, North Carolina, [William] Dodd entered the bottom stratum of white Southern society…. “He fought his way upward, at times focusing so closely on his studies that other students dubbed him ‘Monk Dodd.’… He got his bachelor’s degree [from what would [...]
Posted in History, Just A Bite, Tar Heelia, tagged free press, freedom of religion, guilford county nc, jesse mcbride, ten commandments, wesleyan church on May 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Jesse McBride was an antislavery preacher from the Wesleyan Church. He came to North Carolina from Ohio and preached to congregations in Guilford and surrounding counties. [In 1850] McBride gave a young white girl a pamphlet [suggesting] that slaveholders lived in violation of the [Ten] Commandments. He was charged with violation of an 1830 North [...]
Posted in Just A Bite, tagged charlotte observer, curtis johnson, knight newspapers, ralph nicholson, richmond indiana on May 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Charlotte’s Observer, the biggest (circ. 138,183) daily in the Carolinas, is a newspapering nugget of gold that seldom glitters. Its news pages are a typographical mishmash, its editorial voice a whisper. Yet because in its leisurely stride it picks up every crumb of news in its territory, the 82-year-old Observer is one of the biggest [...]
