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Posts Tagged ‘ben steelman’

Signs of segregation disappeared quickly (unless they didn’t)

Posted in Just A Bite, tagged , , , , , on December 15, 2017 | Leave a Comment »

“Segregation of public facilities — including water fountains and restrooms — was officially outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson…. “In Raleigh, Wilmington and other Southern cities, businesses seem to have complied grudgingly but promptly…. In smaller towns and rural areas, however, Jim Crow customs lingered […]

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Wilson was ready for its ABC store (was it ever!)

Posted in On This Day, tagged , , , , on July 2, 2016 | Leave a Comment »

On this day in 1935: The first ABC store in North Carolina  opens in Wilson, with a line of customers waiting — so many that more than 100 had to be turned away at the 6 p.m. closing time. — From “ABCs of N.C. liquor sales” by Ben Steelman, part of a fact-packed and entertaining Wilmington […]

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Reality takes bite out of Confederate spy tale

Posted in Just A Bite, tagged , , , , on June 20, 2016 | Leave a Comment »

“It’s one of the more glamorous stories of the Cape Fear coast: Confederate spy  Rose O’Neale Greenhow, widow of a minor Washington bureaucrat and a sometime diplomat, is riding a blockade runner back into Wilmington. Her ship runs aground and she drowns in the Atlantic — weighed down by treasure sewn in the linings of […]

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The Wilmington native who envisioned VQR

Posted in Tar Heelia, tagged , , , , on September 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Ben Steelman offers a footnote to the Virginia Quarterly Review drama-turned-melodrama: “The VQR’s founding, in 1925, was in large part the work of a Wilmington native, UVa President Edwin A. Alderman. Ten years earlier, Alderman had called for ‘an organ of liberal opinion …’ (that’s as in liberal arts, not politics) ‘solidly based, thoughtfully and […]

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