About the Contributors & Editors

About the Contributors & Editors T. H. Breen became interested in the history of the Great Wagon Road when he was living in North Carolina and enjoying a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park. He is currently the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University and author of Tobacco Culture: The Mentality ofthe Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve ofRevolution (Princeton ) and Imagining the Past:-East Hampton Stories (Georgia). Breen is completing a book on the origins of the American Revolution. His recent essay on the life and death of a colonial slave is the basis for a new opera commissioned by the Northwestern School of Music. James G. Ferguson, Jr., lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and, although born a Yankee, considers himself a tenured southerner . He and his wife, Eleanor Earle Ferguson , collaborated with the late Bill Neal on Bill Neat's Southern Cooking, and they coauthored Dining at the Homesteadwith Chef Albert Schnarwyler. They are collaborating on Burgundy a la Carte— Culinary Traditions and Tradents, to be published in 1997. Jim Ferguson will teach an honors seminar in Culinary Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1997. David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a position he has held since 1982. The urban South and southern history are his main interests. He has written or edited ten books, including two award-winning works, Cotton Fields andSkyscrapers : Southern City and Region (1982) and Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture (1990). He is the editor of TheJournalofUrban History and is completing a book, America's Other Place, a study about southern distinctiveness. James L. LelOUdiS is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Leloudis is coauthor of Uke a Family: The Making ofa Southern Cotton Mill World and author of Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880—1920. He is coeditor for reviews for Southern Cultures. Jerry Leath Mills was educated at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard. From 1965 until his retirement in 1997, he served on the faculty in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was professor of English, editor of Studies in Philology, and an associate editor of The Southern UteraryJournal. He is also coeditor for reviews for Southern Cultures. David Mottke-Hansen is director of the Southern Historical and Folklife Collections in the Academic Affairs Library and director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Moltke-Hansen is associate editor of Southern Cultures and writes on southern intellectual history. Theda Perdue is professor ofhistory at the University of Kentucky. She is author of Slavery and the Evolution ofCherokee Society, IJ40—1866 (1979), Native Carolinians (1985), and The Cherokee (1988). She has edited, among other books, Nations Remembered: An OralHistory ofthe Five Civilised Tribes (1980) and Cherokee Editor: The Writings ofElias Boudinot ( 1983). Most recently, she coedited with her husband, Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal (1995 ). Her book, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, i/oo-i8jj is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. John Shelton Reed is spending 1 996—97 as Pitt Professor of American History and 129 Institutions at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow ofSt Catharine's College. His latest book, with Dale Volberg Reed, is¡oar Things Everyone Should Know About the South. He is coeditor oí Southern Cultures. Floyd Waldrep was born 1 5 September 1907 in Fulton, Mississippi. He grew up in Red Bay, Alabama, located on a branch of the Illinois Central Railroad. Waldrep earned a living pushing a pencil in banks, and later at DuPont and Reynolds Metals companies. He began writing after retirement and studied at the University of Alabama and at Shelton State College. As Waldrep says, though, he may have learned as much from the stories he made up for his children each night as he did in school. Harry L. Watson is professor of history at the University of North...