Chapel Hill in Plain Sight

Writer Daphne Athas reveals a time when the eponymous college town was and wasn't the Southern part of heaven. This narrative traverses the twentieth-century milestones—the Depression, World War II, the McCarthy hearings, the transformation of the public university into the juggernaut of the New South's technocracy. She traces the town's literary heritage as well as generations of local mysteries and murders. She infuses this history with a local population of writers, red-baiters, philosop...