Here is a county history that is extraordinarily rich in primary source materials, including abstracts of deeds from 1681 through the Revolutionary War period and, moreover, petitions, divisions of estates, wills, and marriages found in the records of Perquimans and adjacent North Carolina counties. Numbering in the tens of thousands, the records provide the names of all principal parties and related family members, places of residence and migration, descriptions of real and personal property, dates, boundary surveys, names of executors, witnesses, and appraisers, and dates of recording. Altogether, the index contains references to about 35,000 persons! Researchers should note that Perquimans was one of the original North Carolina precincts--with very close ties to the southeastern Virginia counties of Norfolk, Princess Anne, Nansemond, and Isle of Wight--and for many years had fluid boundaries with the North Carolina counties of Chowan, Gates, and Pasquotank.

Historians have often glorified eighteenth-century Virginia planters' philosophical debates about the meaning of American liberty. But according to Noeleen McIlvenna, the true exemplars of egalitarian political values had fled Virginia's plantation societ

This volume includes the names of almost 13,000 men who served in the NC State Troops and/or NC Militia during the American Revolution. Some men also served in the NC Continental Line. This list includes the person's home county, known officers, and known battles and skirmishes, if any.

The first biography of the acclaimed African American linguist and author of Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect In this first book-length biography of the pioneering African American linguist and celebrated father of Gullah studies, Margaret Wade-Lewis examines the life of Lorenzo Dow Turner. A scholar whose work dramatically influenced the world of academia but whose personal story—until now—has remained an enigma, Turner (1890-1972) emerges from behind the shadow of his germinal 1949 study Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect as a man devoted to family, social responsibility, and intellectual contribution. Beginning with Turner's upbringing in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., Wade-Lewis describes the high expectations set by his family and his distinguished career as a professor of English, linguistics, and African studies. The story of Turner's studies in the Gullah islands, his research in Brazil, his fieldwork in Nigeria, and his teaching and research on Sierra Leone Krio for the Peace Corps add to his stature as a cultural pioneer and icon. Drawing on Turner's archived private and published papers and on extensive interviews with his widow and others, Wade-Lewis examines the scholar's struggle to secure funding for his research, his relations with Hans Kurath and the Linguistic Atlas Project, his capacity for establishing relationships with Gullah speakers, and his success in making Sea Island Creole a legitimate province of analysis. Here Wade-Lewis answers the question of how a soft-spoken professor could so profoundly influence the development of linguistics in the United States and the work of scholars—especially in Gullah and creole studies—who would follow him. Turner's widow, Lois Turner Williams, provides an introductory note and linguist Irma Aloyce Cunningham provides the foreword.