Books by "George G. Suggs Jr."
3 books found
Washing the Disciples' Feet is a book of reflections upon my growing-up experiences in the White Oak Original Free Will Baptist Church in Bladenboro, North Carolina. As a teenager whose immediate and extended family provided not only the congregation's majority membership but also the leadership from the founding of the church until my departure for military service, I was positioned to observe, participate and, especially, to be influenced by church doctrine and practices, by church leaders and influential members, and by the general harmony and occasional conflict that occurred among its members. Like dozens of other young people--principally my cousins--whose families dominated the congregation, White Oak Church was instrumental in shaping my character as it did theirs. Through vignettes concerning life in the church during my youth, this book is intended to pay tribute to past members of a religious institution that continues to thrive though in a different age.
In this book, the author recaptures life as he lived and observed it during the Great Depression and World War II in the small southern town of Bladenboro, North Carolina. Despite this being a troublesome era, it was the authors good fortune to grow up where families were large and strong, and people knew and respected each other. Amid segregated schools and churches and other class distinctions in those hard times, social and racial relations were peaceful. A Return to the Boro takes slices of life from this small Carolina textile town that reveal, in a small way, the caring relationships that existed among all classes at a time when the world seemed to be going to pot. It provides a glimpse of a way of life now gone. For many readers of this era, this book may provoke a trip down memory lane. If so, the author hopes that their memories will be as positive about the past as are his.
Among the hordes of starry-eyed 'argonauts' who flocked to the California gold rush of 1849 was an Australian named Edward Hargraves. He left America empty-handed, only to find gold in his own backyard. The result was the great Australian rush of the 1850s, which also attracted participants from around the world. A South African named P.J. Marais was one of them. Marais too returned home in defeat - only to set in motion the diamond and gold rushes that transformed southern Africa. And so it went. Most previous historians of the gold rushes have tended to view them as acts of spontaneous nationalism. Each country likes to see its own gold rush as the one that either shaped those that followed or epitomized all the rest. In The Gold Crusades: A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1849-1929, Douglas Fetherling takes a different approach. Fetherling argues that the gold rushes in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa shared the same causes and results, the same characters and characteristics. He posits that they were in fact a single discontinuous event, an expression of the British imperial experience and nineteenth-century liberalism. He does so with dash and style and with a sharp eye for the telling anecdote, the out-of-the-way document, and the bold connection between seemingly unrelated disciplines. Originally published by Macmillan of Canada, 1988.