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Albemarle Son

Name: Albemarle Son
Author: Mary Maillard

THE COMING OF AGE LETTERS OF TRISTRIM LOWTHER SKINNER 1833-1849

edited by Mary Maillard ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A useful and well-prepared addition to the scholarly research on pre–Civil War Southern planters.

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These historical letters to and from a young North Carolina man shed light on the education and development of an antebellum planter.

Tristrim “Trim” Lowther Skinner (1820-1862) was the well-educated only son of Edenton, North Carolina, planter Joseph Blount Skinner (1781-1851). At age 20, Trim took over management of his father’s enterprises. He served in the North Carolina General Assembly from 1846 to 1848, married Eliza Fisk Harwood (1827-1888) in 1849, and died in the Civil War as a Confederate captain in the 1st North Carolina Infantry Regiment. These collected letters begin when 13-year-old Trim was at boarding schools in North Carolina and Philadelphia, continuing through his college years and beyond as he became more seriously involved in farming and other business concerns; the letters end soon after his marriage. As she has in similar volumes, Maillard (The Belles of Williamsburg, 2015, etc.) offers a scholarly and well-researched collection of letters from the Skinner Family Papers housed in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, supported by a full scholarly apparatus including notes, bibliography, and index. Through these letters, readers learn in detail how a planter—and how a future Confederate officer—was made. Trim’s youthful curriculum sounds daunting: “I recite a lesson in Tacitus—one in philosophy—one in geography and one in greek,” [sic] writes 15-year-old Trim of his morning routine. He also reports on a duel in college that ended, somewhat ignominiously, without either party receiving much injury despite using guns and “3 or 4 pistols.” But Greek and dueling are put aside, and Trim’s adult letters chiefly reflect his close interest in crops, weather, and illness. In a typically detailed 1847 letter, he tells his father: “The worms have injured the stand of corn a good deal, and there is a long (1 1/2 inch) black caterpillar with smooth skin still at work.” The portrait that emerges is one of a hardworking manager always worried about crop prices, with little time for sipping mint juleps.

A useful and well-prepared addition to the scholarly research on pre–Civil War Southern planters.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 481

Publisher: Amazon Digital Services

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

- BOOK REVIEW
The Belles of Williamsburg
edited by Mary Maillard

- BOOK REVIEW
ON THE CARPET
edited by Mary Maillard

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.