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Although the Great Awakening temporarily split Presbyterians into Old Side and New Side, moderation prevailed as Presbyterians tamed the New Light with their traditional emphases on clerical training, education, and theological and ecclesiastical balance. Ministers like Samuel Davies exemplified temperateness as they worked to promote religious warmth – not heat – in conversion, at the same time wresting toleration from the Anglican Church. Presbyterians concentrated their efforts within their own ethnic communities in the Shenandoah Valley and southern Piedmont, expecting potential converts to be attracted to their system and communion seasons.

The final days before Giuseppe Garibaldi's departure for Sicily were a time of feverish preparations. In Salemi, Francesco Crispi's main task was to start forming a provisional government. This chapter chronicles the revolution in Italy and the role of Crispi and Garibaldi in it; the victory of Garibaldi and his men over the Bourbon forces that were blocking the road to Palermo a few miles to the northeast at Calatafimi; Garibaldi's emergence as the leader of an alternative government to that of the Bourbons and his creation of a new post of Secretary of State, with Crispi as its first incumbent; Garibaldi's capture of Palermo; Crispi's power struggle with his rival, Giuseppe La Farina; Crispi's attempt to bolster the position of the democrats in Sicily; Garibaldi's sending of Agostino Depretis to Palermo to serve as Pro-Dictator in his absence; the surrender of Garibaldi's men to Victor Emmanuel's troops; and the annexation of the southern provinces to Piedmont.

This chapter locates Milton's Sonnet XV ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’ in the political and cultural milieu in which it was produced, in order to present a new facet to the poem's critical tradition and the work it performs in the history of tolerationism and nationhood. The first section establishes a framework for interpreting Parliament's reaction to the Piedmont massacre and to the corresponding English-Irish crisis, revealing the ways that toleration and imperialism operated side by side and were integral to the Interregnum government's mission to advance a nationalist agenda. The second part of the argument historicizes the ‘resolution’ Milton presents in the ‘sestet’ of his sonnet, specifically the advancement of the Reformation through the planting of Protestantism in Catholic soils. By studying Sonnet XV in these contexts, one discovers how ‘the blood of the martyrs becomes the seed of colonialism’, thus capturing the imperial potential implicit in the acts and expressions of tolerationism.

Peles’s chapter considers whether the refuse of specific households of historic Native Americans of the North Carolina Piedmont can be identified from densely occupied village sites. She notes that on sites with well-documented histories, different occupations can be more easily identified than on sites with few to no associated historic records. Peles takes a community perspective on the concept of household, and while the features from which she draws her zooarchaeological and ethnobotanical data cannot necessarily be connected to individual households, a theoretical perspective ordered around households provides opportunity to look at village-wide data as a result of the collective decisions of households within the community. Using correspondence analysis, Peles looks to see if there are relationships between certain plants and animals among six village sites and if the assemblages are similar to each other. Peles finds that there are distinct differences in the foods different communities exploited during a period of growing uncertainty marked by pressure from European intrusions. She is able to show that study of food remains at multiple scales, coupled with firm contextualization of the deposits, supports exploration of and sound hypotheses about the agency of households and the individuals who compose them.

From AD 800 to 1300, Piedmont Village Tradition (PVT) settlements were characterized by small numbers of loosely arranged households. In the Late Woodland period (after AD 1300) in the Dan, Eno, and Haw River valleys, these households coalesced into villages with planned layouts and cooperatively built structures. However, in the upper Yadkin River Valley, the pattern of loosely arranged households appears to have continued until out-migration from the valley in the 1600s. Through the examination of regional settlement ecology and site-level spatial patterning, this chapter explores how the environment and the sociopolitical and economic landscapes that resulted from the formation of PVT and Mississippian villages influenced the distinctive cultural patterns in the upper Yadkin River valley and the North Carolina peidmont.

This book concludes by describing the lives of ordinary Piedmont textile workers throughout the late nineteenth century and much of the first half of the twentieth century as riddled with poverty, hunger, hardship, disease, and, in some cases, despair. Before the passage of the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, these workers, disparagingly called “lintheads” or “factory trash” by townspeople and farmers alike, operated clattering weaving looms and spinning frames for ten or eleven hours a day, five days a week, plus a half day on Saturdays, for some of the lowest industrial wages in the United States. They worked in hot, humid conditions. Fine strands of lint and dust choked the air amid the deafening roar of the machinery, and these made eventual hearing loss and brown lung disease strong probabilities.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book tells the story of the rise of a crop culture as well as the decline of the environment that accompanied tobacco cultivation, from severe erosion to deforestation to insect infestations. It seeks to understand not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the mental calculations and justifications that accompanied tobacco farming. The book focuses on the birthplace of a bright tobacco culture that would eventually cover substantial swaths of the South—three contiguous Piedmont counties, Halifax and Pittsylvania in Virginia, and Caswell in North Carolina—from early experiments with bright leaf around 1840 until the nadir of local farm fortunes at the end of the nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses the opening of southern Virginia Piedmont and the adjoining reaches of North Carolina to Euro-American settlement, and how tobacco shaped these districts from their earliest days. Over the course of the century, planters, farmers, and slaves built a rural landscape which centered on the cultivation of fire-cured (or dark) tobacco—the traditional Chesapeake crop that had served as a staple since the early days of Jamestown. This landscape was the product of an existing tobacco culture transported from the coastal plain of eastern Virginia and adapted to the Piedmont environment, and it would shape regional farmers' adoption of a new staple beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The chapter also examines the cultivation of dark tobacco, which laid a foundation for the bright tobacco culture that would sweep the region before the Civil War.

This chapter describes the development of bright tobacco, which became the literal lifeblood of the region's countryside and towns following the Civil War. The elements of a bright tobacco culture that came to dominate Southside farming caused subtle changes to the traditional routines of the farminig of dark tobacco. Farmers selected varieties of seed for certain color and taste characteristics; they planted these seeds on new portions of the Piedmont landscape; and they experimented with new methods of curing their tobacco. While none of these changes seemed dramatic departures from the tobacco culture that had existed in the Southside since the mid-1700s, collectively these practices would alter both land and people over the following decades.

This chapter analyzes the people who harnessed the New South to white coal in the Savannah and other river basins during a critical period in the region's history, between 1890 and 1933. It seeks to unravel the origins of sociologist Rupert Vance's hydroelectric “complex” and “the Piedmont crescent of industry,” since waterway manipulation and energy generation are vital components of southern modernization. William Church Whitner, industrialist James B. Duke, and Preston Arkwright understood that water-generated electricity in the Southeast was an “Agent of Power”; the Super Power Grid established in the Southeast made this clear. Dam-crazy private energy company executives and engineers believed they had tamed southeastern rivers while cultivating a modern urban-industrial landscape linked by Super Power transmission lines. Southern rivers, however, displayed a persistent capacity to function by their own rules—in the form of dry riverbeds and raging floods.

This chapter argues that tobacco farm families in the Piedmont drew on the evolving culture of bright tobacco agriculture in their challenges to the market forces, especially the monopoly power of the American Tobacco Company after 1890, that drove down tobacco prices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It begins with a description of the tobacco auction markets and how these fit within the culture of bright tobacco. It then moves through a chronological discussion of various protest organizations, local and national, that Piedmont farmers sought to use to challenge the power of tobacco companies in the years between the 1870s and World War I. It argues that tobacco farm families looked to these organizations not out of a generalized angst about the effects of industrial capitalism, but because of their specific complaints about the markets. None of the organizations were able to provide them vehicle for challenging the power of tobacco manufacturers, however.

The topic of Mississippian origins in the North Carolina Piedmont has received very little attention from archaeologists since the 1950s. This chapter pulls together information from multiple sites, especially the extensively excavated Town Creek site, to present an overview of Early Mississippian in the North Carolina Piedmont. The presence of Mississippian lifeways in the region is indicated by the appearance of complicated-stamped ceramics by around A.D. 1150-1200. Associated social changes include the appearance of archaeologically visible households and the development of a civic-ceremonial center at the Town Creek site. Public and domestic architecture as well as evidence for ritual activities suggests that social groups interacted and were integrated at multiple scales within the Early Mississippian community at Town Creek.

This chapter discusses Sebastiano Vassalli's historical novel, The Chimera, which is set in a rural Piedmont village in the seventeenth century. In the work excerpted here, the ever-present fog clouding the Padania landscape parallels the clouding of anthropological memory. The writer, as a time traveler and investigative archeologist, must first of all unearth history or better his story: the story of Antonia, the “witch of Zardino,” resurrected by its late twentieth-century chronicler. Vassalli provides an indirect explanation here for his own later development into a maker of historical fictions accessible to a much wider readership: “I asked myself what on earth can help us to understand the things of the present unless they are in the present? Then it dawned on me. Looking out over this landscape, the nothingness of it, it came to me that in the present there is no story worth telling. The present is hubbub.”

This chapter examines the factors that accounted for the success of three California wineries: the Italian Swiss Colony winery of Asti in Sonoma County, the Italian Vineyard Company of Secondo Guasti, and the E. and J. Gallo Winery of Ernest and Julio Gallo. It first provides a background on Piedmont, the place where the Italian immigrants who founded the three wineries came from. It then considers the myth of a “Piedmont on the Pacific” and its inclusion in the work of novelist Cesare Pavese. It argues that traditional explanations for the success of Rossi, Guasti, and the Gallos are not only essentialist and determinist, but also laden with stereotypes. Finally, it discusses how similarities in landscape, ecology, and climate between California and Italy have contributed to the achievements of Piedmontese winemakers as well as the successful transplantation of Old World wine culture and expertise from Langhe and Monferrato to the U.S. west coast.

This chapter examines the culture and economy of wine in Italy and California. It begins with an overview of the wine culture and economy in Piedmont during the nineteenth century, and especially how wine had become a thriving sector of the local economy. It considers three factors that contributed to the wine boom in Piedmont: the growing international prestige of Piedmontese wines, the improvement of local winemaking knowledge, and the emergence of a large-scale capitalist winemaking industry. The discussion then shifts to the California wine industry and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the role played by Piedmontese immigrants in the early development of the industry. The chapter also analyzes the impact of Prohibition on Piedmontese immigrant winemakers in California and on Italian immigrants in general.

This chapter examines the role of ethnic cooperation in the success of Piedmontese immigrants as winemakers in California. According to Sebastian Fichera, a historian who chronicles San Francisco's Italian community, Piedmont-born winemakers were so successful on the Pacific Coast because of their participation in an ethnic economy that integrated fellow Italian entrepreneurs, financiers, workers, middlemen, retailers, and consumers. He argues that sociocultural factors are at work in the success of the community as a whole by assigning full credit to the presence of a solid initial core of Northern Italian immigrants in San Francisco. Fichera considers Andrea Sbarboro and Pietro Carlo Rossi as the most important pioneers of the Italian adventure in California winemaking, as well as some of the best representatives of the group of middle-class merchants, bankers, and businessmen who spread crucial cooperative spirit among San Francisco's Italian American community.

This chapter examines how the dynamics of race influenced the “modes of incorporation” of Piedmontese winemakers in California. More specifically, it explains how race helped Piedmontese winemakers achieve greater success compared to other Italian immigrants. It also considers the Piedmontese immigrants' flexibility in adapting to the segregation imposed on them by the stigma and risks of wine production itself, which forced competitors of other nationalities to flee the industry. Focusing on the histories of the Italian Swiss Colony, the Italian Vineyard Company, and the E. and J. Gallo Winery, the chapter shows how Italian immigrant regionalism—the affiliation with a single region of Italy—in late nineteenth-century California grew out of the local, village-centered identities that linked labor migrants to their native paesi and emerged as an alternative to nationalism. It argues that Piedmontese immigrants benefited from this new regional identity to establish and secure their hegemony over wine well into the twentieth century.