Some historians, like fiction writers, set their work deeply and exclusively in a specific locale, but what they have to say transcends those bounds as much as Eudora Welty’s short stories transcended her circumscribed life in Jackson, Mississippi. North Carolina is blessed to have such a historian in David Cecelski, who has mined both the archives of the eastern United States and the memories of eastern North Carolina to write beautifully about people making a living on and along the creeks, sounds, bays, and swamps of our coast since the eighteenth century. David has focused his work especially on North Carolinians of more recently African descent than the rest of us, a people whom other North Carolinians, like other Americans of recent European descent more broadly, have consistently gone out of their way to marginalize and abuse, perpetuating unnecessary misery for both them and the rest of us when life is hard enough without making it worse. David doesn’t shy away from telling the truth of that history at all, but he does not write pity or dwell on suffering for its own sake. He is interested in the stories of individual and family resilience and ingenuity that well up from black water and push to rise above the miasma of willfully dysfunctional human societies.
Hope from Hard Stories
Hope from Hard Stories
Hope from Hard Stories
Some historians, like fiction writers, set their work deeply and exclusively in a specific locale, but what they have to say transcends those bounds as much as Eudora Welty’s short stories transcended her circumscribed life in Jackson, Mississippi. North Carolina is blessed to have such a historian in David Cecelski, who has mined both the archives of the eastern United States and the memories of eastern North Carolina to write beautifully about people making a living on and along the creeks, sounds, bays, and swamps of our coast since the eighteenth century. David has focused his work especially on North Carolinians of more recently African descent than the rest of us, a people whom other North Carolinians, like other Americans of recent European descent more broadly, have consistently gone out of their way to marginalize and abuse, perpetuating unnecessary misery for both them and the rest of us when life is hard enough without making it worse. David doesn’t shy away from telling the truth of that history at all, but he does not write pity or dwell on suffering for its own sake. He is interested in the stories of individual and family resilience and ingenuity that well up from black water and push to rise above the miasma of willfully dysfunctional human societies.