Snow day recipes from the collection.

Tonight’s weather report brings snow to the Tar Heel State and snow-mania has set in.

Nothing like some snow cream to help you enjoy the wintery weather.

“Granny’s Snow Cream”

“Snow Cream Custard” from Welkom: Terra Ceia Cookbook III, a Collection of Recipes.

“Snow Cream” from A Taste of the Old and the New.

Other snow inspired recipes…

“Pineapple Snow”

“Snow Ball Cookies” from Hyde County Cook Book.

“Chocolate Filled Snowballs” from Home Cookin’.

“Snow Covered Orange Balls” from Peace Cookbook.

“Berries in the Snow” from Classic Cookbook.

Check out what’s new in the North Carolina Collection.

Several new titles just added to “New in the North Carolina Collection.” To see the full list simply click on the link in the entry or click on the “New in the North Carolina Collection” tab at the top of the page. As always, full citations for all the new titles can be found in the University Library Catalog and they are all available for use in the Wilson Special Collections Library.

Dylan’s fans found lyrics more than just ‘Alright’

On this day in 1974: Having set off an Elvis-level ticket-buying frenzy, Bob Dylan makes his first visit to Charlotte at a time when Watergate is threatening the Nixon presidency.

Reports the Observer’s Polly Paddock from the original Charlotte Coliseum: “The high point of the night had to come with ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).’ When he reached the prophetic line, ‘Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,’ Dylan’s fans went wild.”

 

Shouting down Klansman violated ‘noblest traditions’

On this day in 1975: Black hecklers prevent David Duke, a little-known Ku Klux Klansman from Louisiana, from speaking at the University of North Carolina’s Memorial Auditorium.

Chancellor Ferebee Taylor calls the incident “a transgression of one of the highest and noblest traditions of this institution.”

Duke will go on to form the National Association for the Advancement of White People in 1980, be elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1989, challenge incumbent George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and run unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate and House seats in 1996 and 1999, respectively.

 

Who Threw That Hat in the Ring?

I am a person who wears hats, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would notice when campaigns used headgear to make a point. Chapeaux faux-pas have been a bit of a tradition in American politics—many of us remember the unfortunate images of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in a helmet or the tittering when John F. Kennedy didn’t wear a hat at his inauguration. None of the hats below was voluntarily donned by candidates, rather they were Photoshop creations, assigned to a candidate to signify some aspect of his unsuitability for office.

The green triangular cloth cap is instantly recognizable as Robin Hood’s hat of choice. Here the North Carolina Democratic Party uses it to get your attention while it accuses Mitt Romney of being a reverse Robin Hood—taking from people of modest means to give to the rich. The verso of the card details how he will do this. It also includes a photo of “Romney Hood and his Merry Men in Congress”—John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Kantor—all looking anything but merry.

We received a lot of mailings for the race for the open seat in North Carolina House District 63. From the material we received, it appears as though both candidates were well funded, and that the race got personal at times. (More about these points in a later post.) Here Republican candidate Steve Ross has been Photoshopped into a classic “Greetings from …” postcard, to make an issue of his trip to Mexico that the Democratic Party of North Carolina claims was taxpayer funded.

But the winner for most distinctive headgear goes to this creation of the North Carolina Republican Party. Jim Messina was the Democratic candidate challenging the incumbent representative, Republican Thomas Murry, in North Carolina House District 41. Messina graduated from Harvard University and works in high tech, but in this mailing he is accused of supporting “an extreme agenda that rejects modern scientific fact and will ultimately kill economic expansion in North Carolina.” This is apparently an oblique (at least to me) reference to Messina’s objections to fracking and/or his belief in climate change. Messina lost to Murry by 1,489 votes.

New Yorker rediscovers South according to W. J. Cash

“For a century after losing the Civil War, the South was America’s own colonial backwater — ‘not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it,’ W.J. Cash wrote in his classic 1941 study, ‘The Mind of the South’….

“Cash has this description of ‘the South at its best’: ‘proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.’ These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often  calls on. The South’s vices — ‘violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas’ — grow particularly acute during periods when it it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both — dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.”

— From “Southern Discomfort” by George Packer in The New Yorker (Jan. 21, 2013)

 

Artifact of the Month: Tobacco pouch

Our January Artifact of the Month follows in the tobacco-tinged footsteps of last month’s Artifact, although this one is quite a bit older and, one might argue, a little easier on the eyes than the Joe Camel holiday lighter.

tobacco pouch

tobacco pouch

This tobacco pouch once held Seal of North Carolina Plug Cut tobacco, a product of the Marburg Brothers company. The pouch came to us via a collection of materials donated to the Southern Historical Collection from a descendant of Wylie Becton Fort (1841-1926), a landowner from Wayne County who attended UNC before enlisting in the Confederate Navy. The collection consists mostly of manuscript materials related to Mr. Fort and his family. The tobacco pouch will be housed in the NCC Gallery to ensure its preservation according to museum standards.

If you’ve never seen a tobacco pouch before, you’ve probably correctly surmised that it was simply a pouch for carrying tobacco. But you may not know that sewing the drawstrings into these pouches was once a popular way for people — often women — in the South to earn extra income. If you’re curious, you can see letters and photos related to tobacco bag stringing in this online exhibit.

Selling “cool”

The advertising strategy of Seal of North Carolina Plug Cut Tobacco focused on associating the brand with the state of North Carolina, a state known for its superior tobacco. A great example can be found via this cigarette card, shared by Flickr user Harvey&Marie, which boasts of “old North Carolina leaf”:

cigarette card

It’s worth noting that the phrase “smokes cool” appears in the advertising language used for this tobacco, prefiguring the “smooth” and “cool” themes that featured so heavily in the Joe Camel ad campaign. Of course, “cool” had a different shade of meaning back in Mrs. Cleveland’s day.

Mrs. Cleveland, of course, is Frances Folsom Cleveland, the 27th first lady of the United States, making this yet another reflection of how much has changed in our cultural perceptions of tobacco use. And, for that matter, our cultural perceptions of first ladies.

We’re grateful to the donor for sharing this tobacco pouch; a seemingly empty bag that holds a good bit of history.

Something to fill the time between inaugurations

Loyal blog readers and sundry others know that the North Carolina Collection collects political ephemera, including those annoying post cards and letters that fill our mailboxes in election season. During the 2008 presidential election cycle, friends of the Collection sent us more than 700 pieces of campaign ephemera. During the 2012 campaign season we received approximately 1,400 pieces. Thank you! The collection doesn’t span Murphy to Manteo, but it is darn close—Yancey County to Manteo, and points in between: Carrboro, Cary, Elizabeth City, Fayetteville, Gastonia, High Point, Mayodan, Mebane, and Wilmington, to name a few.

We’ll organize these postcards and flyers by office being contested and have them ready for researchers this spring. In the meantime, I’d like to share some observations—and a few sample images—with you. Watch for postings on Wednesday and Friday of this week, and on Inauguration Day. Please keep in mind this selection is subjective in the extreme. These are items that caught my eye based on the image, or how an issue was framed, or the humor. Don’t read politics into my choices. This is more a popular culture exercise than a political one.

Redistribution of wealth was Unionists’ aim

“Planters in the low country of North Carolina… were terrified to learn that, as one wrote, Unionists among the lower classes had ‘gone so far as to declare [that they] will take the property from the rich men & divide it among the poor men.’

“It was no idle threat. From near the war’s beginning , bands of Unionists had been raid coastal plantations. Formed initially to protect themselves from conscription and Confederate raiders, their objectives eventually expanded  to include driving planters from their land and dividing it among themselves.”

— From “Bitterly Divided: “The South’s Inner Civil War” by David Williams (2010)

 

Unexpected combinations – recipes from the collection.

A few recipes with some interesting pairings.

“Velveeta Fudge” from Welkom: Terra Ceia Cookbook III, a Collection of Recipes.

“Apple Shrimp Bake”

“Banana Cheese Sandwiches” from Love Yourself Cookbook: Easy Recipes for One or Two.

“Cabbage Custard” from Good Eatin’ from Duke Memorial United Methodist Church, Durham, North Carolina.

“Sausage Cake” from Hyde County Cook Book.

“Shelly’s Peanut-Tuna Shells”

“Creamed Peanuts and Onions” from Peanuts on Parade: Prize-Winning Recipes.

“Pork and Bean Cake” from Dixie Classic Fair for Northwest North Carolina: Favorite Recipes from Friends of the Fair.