Circa 1903: North Carolina's Outer Banks at the Dawn of Flight - Softcover

Tise, Larry E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469651149 ISBN 13: 9781469651149

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019

Synopsis

Standing along the coast of today's Outer Banks, it can be hard to envision the barrier island world at Kitty Hawk as it appeared to Wilbur and Orville Wright when they first arrived in 1900 to begin their famous experiments leading to the world's first powered flight three years later. Around 1903, the islands and inland seas of North Carolina's coast were distinctive maritime realms--seemingly at the ends of the earth. But as the Wrights soon recognized, the region was far more developed than they expected.

This rich photographic history illuminates this forgotten barrier island world as it existed when the Wright brothers arrived. Larry E. Tise shows that while the banks seemed remote, its maritime communities huddled near lighthouses and lifesaving stations and busy fisheries were linked to the mainland and offered precisely the resources needed by the Wrights as they invented flight. Tise presents dozens of newly discovered images never before published and others rarely seen or understood. His book offers fresh light on the life, culture, and environment of the Carolina coast at the opening of the twentieth century, an era marked by transportation revolutions and naked racial divisions. Tise subtly shows how unexplored photographs reveal these dramatic changes and in the process transforms how we've thought of the Outer Banks for more than a century.

About this title

About the Author:

Larry E. Tise was the Wilbur and Orville Wright Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University from 2000 to 2015.

Review:

This book will be of interest to those who want to learn more about the Wrights--and especially the Outer Banks and its rich history. In words and images, Tise shows how the environment, the people, and the events at the time impacted the Wrights and their flights.--Alton Ballance, author of Ocracokers
With powerful, telling archival photographs and maps and great reportage, noted historian Larry Tise opens the window high and wide on coastal and sound-country Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century, upon the natural and human world the Wrights found there. Fascinating, illuminating, and vivid!--Bland Simpson, author of The Coasts of Carolina: Seaside to Sound Country

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1469651149
• ISBN 13: 9781469651149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240