Jack Temple Kirby charts the history of the low country between the
James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The
Algonquian word for this country, which means 'swamp-on-a-hill,'
was transliterated as 'poquosin' by seventeenth-century English
settlers. Interweaving social, political, economic, and military
history with the story of the landscape, Kirby shows how Native
American, African, and European peoples have adapted to and
modified this Tidewater area in the nearly four hundred years since
the arrival of Europeans. Kirby argues that European settlement
created a lasting division of the region into two distinct zones
often in conflict with each other: the cosmopolitan coastal area,
open to markets, wealth, and power because of its proximity to
navigable rivers and sounds, and a more isolated hinterland, whose
people and their way of life were gradually--and
grudgingly--subjugated by railroads, canals, and war. Kirby's
wide-ranging analysis of the evolving interaction between humans
and the landscape offers a unique perspective on familiar
historical subjects, including slavery, Nat Turner's rebellion, the
Civil War, agricultural modernization, and urbanization.