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586 Search Results for "george ellison"
Batting away undeserved prejudice
Published: 2015-04-08 14:53:29Unfortunately, more undeserved prejudice exists about bats than any other animal, except, of course, serpents. In European lore, vampires (a word derived from the Serbian “wampir”) were bloodsucking ghosts, dead men’s souls that siphoned blood from...
Read MoreMore than armchair historians
Published: 2015-03-20 20:10:05Every regular reader of this column has an interest in this region’s history. But most of us are, more or less, armchair historians. We mostly read books or watch documentaries produced either on TV or as videos. We might, from time to time, visit a mu...
Read MoreWe are amusing ourselves to death
Published: 2015-03-20 20:09:26When I am at home, the TV is usually on. I like the company, and since I am almost deaf, I don’t hear the constant yammer, clang and whistle, complete with musical interludes and the smarmy good will of the CNN staff ... all I hear is a low murmur like...
Read MorePoetic license never hurts a good tale
Published: 2015-03-20 20:02:49Accounts of events always vary, especially when one is supposedly factual and one is admittedly fictional. Here's an instance.. One of the most infamous manhunts in this region's history took place in 1906 when a black man named Will Harris shot and kill...
Read MoreRequiem for a heavyweight
Published: 2015-03-20 19:24:46The eastern hemlock has long been one of my favorite trees. Like many people reading this column, my wife, Elizabeth, and I have a number of very large specimens growing on our property, especially alongside a creek that traverses the cove we live in. An...
Read MoreMaking use of natural surroundings
Published: 2015-03-20 17:09:58When the Cherokees emerged as a distinctive culture more than a thousand years ago, they situated themselves so as to take advantage of the many resources available in the southern mountains and adjacent foothills. By locating major settlements in the Pi...
Read MoreA long tradition of greenery and Christmas
Published: 2015-03-20 16:22:14Christmas greenery is a Southern Appalachian specialty. This region has been furnishing the eastern United States with quantities of various evergreen materials (trees, running ground cedar, mistletoe, galax, and so on) for well over a century. Of these,...
Read MoreThe boats that once plied mountain waters
Published: 2015-03-19 17:06:30When one thinks about navigation in regard to the rivers here in the Smokies region, its old-time ferries and modern-day canoes, kayaks, rafts, tubes, and motorboats come to mind. But there have been other sorts of navigation involving flatboats, keelboa...
Read MoreTraditional Cherokee dyes
Published: 2015-03-19 15:42:51“Woven goods—baskets and mats—document what women did, when, and how. They illuminate the work of women who transformed the environments that produced materials for basketry. They point to women’s roles in ceremonial, subsistence, and exchange sy...
Read MoreJames Mooney’s devotion to WNC
Published: 2015-03-19 14:59:33For 36 years, from the time he launched his career with the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1885 until his death in 1921, James Mooney devoted his life to detailing various aspects of the history, material culture, oral tradition, language, arts and reli...
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