Upcountry

Having taken to the lifestyle of a middle-aged civilian, the last thing Paul Brenner wanted to do was return to work for the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, the agency that thanked him for years of life-risking service by forcing him into early retirement. But when an old friend calls in a career's worth of favours, Paul finds himself moonlighting for the Army as he investigates a puzzling murder that took place thirty years before in the midst of the Vietnam war. Forced to return to the country that haunts him and work for the people who cast him aside, Paul must engage in the battle of his life as he attempts to find justice in a world of staggering corruption.

In Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry, Bruce W. Eelman follows the evolution of an entrepreneurial culture in a nineteenth-century southern community outside the plantation belt. Counter to the view that the Civil War and Reconstruction alone brought social and economic revolution to the South, Eelman finds that antebellum Spartanburg businessmen advocated a comprehensive vision for modernizing their region. Although their plans were forward looking, they still supported slavery and racial segregation. By the 1840s, Spartanburg merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, and other professionals were looking to capitalize on the area’s natural resources by promoting iron and textile mills and a network of rail lines. Recognizing that cultural change had to accompany material change, these businessmen also worked to reshape legal and educational institutions. Their prewar success was limited, largely due to lowcountry planters’ political power. However, their modernizing spirit would serve as an important foundation for postwar development. Although the Civil War brought unprecedented trauma to the Spartanburg community, the modernizing merchants, industrialists, and lawyers strengthened their political and social clout in the aftermath. As a result, much of the modernizing blueprint of the 1850s was realized in the 1870s. Eelman finds that Spartanburg’s modernizers slowed legal and educational reform only when its implementation seemed likely to empower African Americans.

World War II changed America, and the history of Upcountry South Carolina during this era testifies to the wars deep impact. On the homefront, Upcountry residents grew victory gardens, supported recruits at local bases and soldiers abroad, and manufactured textile goods, including uniforms and parachutes, crucial for the war effort. As thousands of young men and women came into the Upcountry to train at Spartanburgs Camp Croft and Greenvilles Army Air Base, thousands more were sent to Europe, the Pacific, and beyond. More than 166,000 South Carolinians fought for the United States, including 5 Congressional Medal of Honor winners. The resulting import and export of culture through the war and long after reflects the modernization and diversification that occurred across the South. Using words and images from the men and women who lived through it all, Furman University professor and Upcountry History Museum historian Courtney Tollison examine the ways that Upcountry South Carolina affected World War II and how the war affected the region.

This collection of Civil War correspondence chronicles the lives and concerns of three Confederate families in Piedmont, South Carolina. The letters in Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War provide valuable firsthand accounts of both battlefronts and the home front, sharing rich details about daily life as well as evolving attitudes toward the war. As the men of service age from each family join the Confederate ranks, they begin writing from military camps in Virginia and the Carolinas, describing combat in some of the war’s more significant battles. Though they remain staunch patriots to the Southern cause until the bitter end, the surviving combatants write candidly of their waning enthusiasm in the face of the realities of combat. The corresponding letters from the home front offer a more pragmatic assessment of the period and its hardships. Emblematic of the fates of many Southern families, the experiences of these representative South Carolinians are dramatically illustrated in their letters from the eve of the Civil War through its conclusion.

In From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, Stephen A. West revises understandings of the American South by offering a new perspective on two iconic figures in the region's social landscape. "Yeoman," a term of praise for the small landowning farmer, was commonly used during the antebellum era but ultimately eclipsed by "redneck," an epithet that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In popular use, each served less as a precise class label than as a means to celebrate or denigrate the moral and civic worth of broad groups of white men. Viewing these richly evocative figures as ideological inventions rather than sociological realities, West examines the divisions they obscured and the conflicts that gave them such force. The setting for this impressively detailed study is the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina, the sort of upcountry region typically associated with the white "plain folk." West shows how the yeoman ideal played a vital role in proslavery discourse before the Civil War but poorly captured the realities of life, with important implications for how historians understand the politics of slavery and the drive for secession. After the Civil War, the South Carolina upcountry was convulsed by the economic transformations and political conflicts out of which the redneck was born. West reinterprets key developments in the history of the New South--such as the politics of lynching and the phenomenon of the "Southern demagogue"--and uncovers the historical roots of a stereotype that continues to loom large in popular understandings of the American South. Drawing together periods and topics often treated separately, West combines economic, social, and political history in an original and compelling account.

Prince Roger MacClintock is heading for a ceremonial appearance when his space ship crashes, stranding him and his guardian Royal Marines on a jungle planet held by enemy forces. To survive, they must trek to the planet's only spaceport, and a spoiled prince must learn to be a man. This is the first volume in a new series by the bestselling author of the Honor Harrington adventures.