John Hope Franklin has devoted his professional life to the study of African Americans. Originally published in 1943 by UNC Press, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 was his first book on the subject. As Franklin shows, freed slaves in the antebellum South did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. Even in North Carolina, reputedly more liberal than most southern states, discriminatory laws became so harsh that many voluntarily returned to slavery.

Thomas MCAdory Owen, 1866-1920, was at one time Head of the Alabama State Dept. of Archives and History together with his wife Marie Bankhead Owen. In An explanatory note to these records Mr. Owen states that he visited Granville County in Dec. 1895 to examine the official records for a genealogy of the Owen and Grant families of Grassy Creek, also the Williams family. In the process, he conceived the idea of preparing a history of the county, and the county clerk placed at his disposal 10 of the old "Minute" and "Record" books prior to 1800. He noted that there were some gaps in the records, particularly from May 9, 1776 to Feb.. 4, 1777, when apparently no court was held, as the pagination was continuous in the Book. He abstracted just about everything, and he listed the documents he did not abstract. This includes wills and inventories, bastardy bonds. (lots of these), apprenticeship indentures, marriage and bonds etc. Some documents that he considered important he copied in full. His notes start in 1746 and most stopped after the Revolution, but he continued the marriage bonds to 1815. The records this book is taken from are as follows: Vol. I, county court minutes, 2 Dec. 1749-4 Dec. 1750 & Record Book 1750-1761; Ibid, Vol. II, 5 March 1750/1-21 Sept. 1759; Ibid, Vol. III, 1759-1767 lost; Ibid, Vol. IV, 3 August 1768-20 July 1770; Ibid, Vol. V, 5 May 1774-3 Feb. 1778; Ibid, Vol. VI, 7 August 1781-6 Aug. 1783; Vol. II, minute & record book 1760-1762; Vol. III, minute & record book 1762-1765; Vol. IV, record book 1765-1772, county court minutes 2 Feb. 1767-3 May 1779, county court minutes 19 July 1769-18 Aug. 1772; Vol. V, minute & record book 4 May 1774-1782; Vol. VI, minute & record book 1782-1785 and 6 Nov. 1781-5 May 1785; Selective Marriages License Bonds, Coroners Inquisitions.

Includes "Index to The Carolina Indian Voice" for January 18, 1973-February 4, 1993 (p. 189-248).

In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful businesspeople and winning the respect of their white neighbors. Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included. North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analyzing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences and behavior reflected and influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state and region. Her work expands our knowledge of black and white women by studying them outside the plantation setting. Bynum searched local and state court records, public documents, and manuscript collections to locate and document the lives of these otherwise ordinary, obscure women. Some appeared in court as abused, sometimes abusive, wives, as victims and sometimes perpetrators of violent assaults, or as participants in ilicit, interracial relationships. During the Civil War, women freqently were cited for theft, trespassing, or rioting, usually in an effort to gain goods made scarce by war. Some women were charged with harboring evaders or deserters of the Confederacy, an act that reflected their conviction that the Confederacy was destroying them. These politically powerless unruly women threatened to disrupt the underlying social structure of the Old South, which depended on the services and cooperation of all women. Bynum examines the effects of women's social and sexual behavior on the dominant society and shows the ways in which power flowed between private and public spheres. Whether wives or unmarried, enslaved or free, women were active agents of the society's ordering and dissolution.