Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 3.1 (November 1995)

From the Editor ...

It has been a busy semester at the Roanoke Colonies Research Office. Work continues on the Roanoke Colonization bibliography project, for which we have almost 500 checklist entries thus far. To complete the project’s first stage, a graduate assistant has been assigned exclusively to entering data. Our other major project, making ready for publication those papers from the 1993 “Roanoke Decoded” symposium which authors have agreed to make available, continues at a good pace. The first papers should be ready by the time the May 1996 issue of the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter comes out.

Apologies to David Cecelski for errors in our May 1995 article about the Pamlico-Tar River Foundation’s Earth Day Symposium, “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Eden: Revisited.” Aside from misspelling his last name, we also included some incorrect information, such as the fact that it was longleaf pines, not loblollies, that covered eastern North Carolina prior to the Civil War. Anyone interested in the full text of Mr. Cecelski’s presentation can write to the Roanoke Colonies Research Office or to Mr. Cecelski himself at the Southern Oral History Program, Department of History, CB #3195, 406 Hamilton Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3195. Mr. Cecelski also has an interesting article on similar subjects to his PTRF presentation in the most recent issue of the North Carolina Literary Review, “A World of Fisher Folks” (2.2 [1995]: 183-199).

Special thanks to Mary Moss Darden of Virginia Beach, Virginia, whose help has come in several forms in recent months. First, she has generously donated a copy of Charles W. Porter’s Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina (National Park Service Historical Handbook Series 16 [Washington: U. S. Department of the Interior, 1952]) to help augment the Roanoke Colonies Research Office’s growing library. Also, she brought to the office’s attention several bibliographic references, including the fact that we had missed mention of Susan Schmidt Horning’s North Carolina Historical Review article in past issues of the newsletter. Please remember that we are always looking for items to include on our yearly checklist as well in our  comprehensive bibliography project.

Russell K. Skowronek has sent 30 offprints of the Historical Archaeology article he co-authored with John W. Walker, “European Ceramics and the Elusive ‘Cittie of Raleigh’” (27 [1993]: 58-69) to the office so that we can make them available for free. If you are interested, please write telling us how many copies you would like, and we will send them out on a firstcome- first-serve basis.

Full color offprints of Ivor Noël Hume’s Colonial Williamsburg article “Roanoke Island: America’s First Science Center” (16.3 [1994]: 14-28) is available from the Lost Colony Gift Shop at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. For price information on this and other available items (including books, map prints, and the usual t-shirts, etc.), call for their Gift Guide at (800) 488-5012, Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., or write to: The Lost Colony Gift Shop, 1409 Highway 64/264, Manteo, NC, 27954.

Finally, I had the pleasure of teaching an undergraduate honors seminar this past semester on “Roanoke Island and the ‘Lost Colony’ over the Past 400 Years,” an interdisciplinary exploration of how Roanoke colonization and its surrounding issues have been treated in the colonization efforts’ primary documents as well as by modern historians, archaeologists, and by authors of literary works. I hope to report on the outcome of the class in the next issue.

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