In this broad, sweeping history of Durham County, Jean Bradley Anderson begins with a discussion of the geography, climate, and geology of the region from the seventeenth century to 1981, its centennial year. This remarkably comprehensive work moves beyond traditional local histories that focus on powerful families. Rather, Anderson integrates the stories of well-known figures with those of ordinary men and women, blacks and whites, to create a complex but fascinating portrait of Durham's economic, political, social, and labor history.Drawing on extensive primary research, Durham County examines the origins of the town of Durham and recounts the growth of communities around mills, stores, taverns, and churches in the century preceding the rise of tobacco manufacturing. It examines all phases of life in the county: agriculture, architecture, the arts, education, industry, politics, and religion. Anderson pays particular attention to such turning points as the coming of the railroad; the Confederate surrender at the Bennett Place; the war's connection to the rise and flourishing of the tobacco industry; the move to Durham of Trinity College; the development of the Research Triangle Park and the subsequent rise of the health service and high-tech industries.

Many Excellent People examines the nature of North Carolina's social system, particularly race and class relations, power, and inequality, during the last half of the nineteenth century. Paul Escott portrays North Carolina's major social groups, focusing on the elite, the ordinary white farmers or workers, and the blacks, and analyzes their attitudes, social structure, and power relationships. Quoting frequently from a remarkable array of letters, journals, diaries, and other primary sources, he shows vividly the impact of the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Populism, and the rise of the New South industrialism on southern society. Working within the new social history and using detailed analyses of five representative counties, wartime violence, Ku Klux Klan membership, stock-law legislation, and textile mill records, Escott reaches telling conclusions on the interplay of race, class, and politics. Despite fundamental political and economic reforms, Escott argues, North Carolina's social system remained as hierarchical and undemocratic in 1900 as it had been in 1850.