Description: This innovative history of the Okefenokee Swamp reveals it as a place where harsh realities clashed with optimism, shaping the borderland culture of southern Georgia and northern Florida for over two hundred years. Megan Kate Nelson offers a new view of the Okefenokee, its inhabitants, and its rich and telling record.
Brief description: MEGAN KATE NELSON is a writer, historian, and cultural critic. Based in Lincoln, Massachusetts, she has written about Civil War and western history for a number of national publications. Nelson also writes a regular column on Civil War popular culture, "Stereoscope," for Civil War Monitor, and her blog, Historista examines the "surprising and weird ways that people engage with history in everyday life." Nelson is also the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia). She has taught at Texas Tech University; California State University, Fullerton; Harvard University; and Brown University.
Review Quotes:
Megan Kate Nelson has tapped a voluminous wealth of source materials to produce a cultural study of Georgia's great Okefenokee Swamp. . . . Overall, this book is an intriguing read. Nelson's descriptions of the cypress milling operations are, in fact, are some of the best this reviewer has encountered.
--Journal of Southern History