Contemporary accounts of the first successful English colony in what would become the first thirteen United States. The earliest text dates from 1605, two years before the first landing; the last describes events up to 1614, when the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe secured a brief measure of peace for the beleaguered colony.

Through the eyewitness accounts of those who faught the battles and skirmishes of the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, this book provides the reader with firsthand looks at how it felt. The entries in this volume are taken from first-person narratives by those on the scene, from officers such as Henry Lee and Banastre Tarleton to teenaged scouts such as Thomas Young and James Collins. Some accounts were written immediately after the action, others were written by boy soldiers who had become old men.

Ed Southern's stories are about hard work and hard times and what is required of a boy to become a man in such a place and time. They are also about class-that taboo subject in America-and about anger, love, and yearning. Carefully written, with the best dialogue I've read in years, these terrific and utterly original stories are made to last-like a stone pathway or a brick wall. - Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and The Last Girls