A 1730 map of the NC coast that I found in London reminded me that we can learn a lot from what is on maps but sometimes even more from what is not on them.
Tuscarora War
“One Book of Plants Very Lovingly Packt Up”: Searching for John Lawson in London’s Natural History Museum (Part 3)
At London's Natural History Museum, Dr. Mark Carine led my wife and me to the plant specimens that John Lawson collected on the North Carolina coast in 1710 and 1711.
“One Book of Plants Very Lovingly Packt Up”: Searching for John Lawson in London’s Natural History Museum (Part 1)
When my wife and I were in London last summer, we visited the Natural History Museum to see the collection of plants that the naturalist, explorer, surveyor and sometimes fur trader John Lawson sent to the English naturalist James Petiver in 1710 and 1711.
From Aguascogoc’s Ashes
An anthropologist named Frank Speck took this photograph of an American Indian woman and child on Roanoke Island, N.C., in 1915. He referred to them as "Machapunga Indians" (though I will not), a tribe whose homeland had historically been the area around the Pungo River and Lake Mattamuskeet.
On the Great Coharie River
When Dr. Linwood Watson and I visited last winter, he also told me about an extraordinary project that the Coharie Tribe in eastern North Carolina has undertaken to deepen their ancestral ties to the river and the land that has been their home for centuries.
Indian Woods Homecoming
I first got an inkling of how much Indian Woods, in Bertie County, N.C., still means to the Tuscarora people in New York State when I was listening to a talk by a Tuscarora teacher named Vince Shiffert. At the time, I was at an extraordinary conference called “Three Hundred Years at Indian Woods.”
David Cecelski 