The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina.

The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina, by Milton Ready. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. xv, 404 pp. $39.95 cloth.

THE HISTORY OF NORTH CAROLINA AND ITS PEOPLE, JUST LIKE ITS GEOGRAPHY, defies easy categorization. Yet Milton Ready has produced a welcome one-volume guide to the Tar Heel state that is well-organized, wide-ranging and very readable despite these challenges. Few historians these days would attempt such a feat given the proliferation of new scholarship on so many topics, including race, class, and gender, but also politics, culture, and environment. Moreover, chronological coverage necessitates starting quite early, as we now know much about pre-contact Native American societies, and ending late, indeed …