Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. By Woody Holton. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xxi, 231. 39.95,cloth;39.95, cloth; 14.95, paper.

Professor Woody Holton makes two important points in this fine study of rebellion: the elite gentlemen of Virginia did not always lead the Revolution, but were sometimes pushed from below, and the Chesapeake is not New England. Those of us who live and teach below the Mason-Dixon Line are often painfully aware that the general outlines of U.S. history are not the history of our region. As this detailed study of Virginia s path to Revolution makes clear, many of the generalizations about the origins of the American Revolution only hold for the northern colonies. But this work s greatest contribution is its carefully researched and documented argument that race and class mattered in creating a Revolution.

The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War. By John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 368. $39.95.

This interesting study fits into the growing literature of community studies that seek to expand our knowledge of the Civil War beyond the battlefield and the lives of generals. It looks at that conflict in an understudied region, Western North Carolina, which local myth holds was a Unionist stronghold. As in most local lore, there is a grain of truth but more than an ounce of outright inaccuracy. John Inscoe has explored the role of slavery in Western North Carolina (WNC) in a very fine previous book, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). He and his coauthor continue the debunking of local legend here in this finely nuanced study of the communities of the mountain regions of North Carolina.