Natives and Newcomers describes North Carolina's Indians and the dramatic changes that occurred when Europeans and Africans entered their land. North Carolinians of the nineteenth century dwelt in an agrarian world. It is the first volume in The Way We Lived in North Carolina, a pioneering series that uses historic places as windows to the past.

Even before Raleigh's lost colony, Europeans had explored the coast and the mountains. the first permanent newcomers were English migrants from Virginia, followed after 1715 by planters and slaves from South Carolina. In the next half-century, thousands of German, Scotch-Irish, and Scottish settlers came by boat from Europe and by wagon from the North. Those who carved out farms in the piedmont had little in common with coastal planters or the backcountry elite of lawyers, judges, and merchants. By the late 1760s, western farmers organized as Regulators to protest unjust taxes, corrupt courts, and threats to private property -- issues that would soon reappear as part of the patriot rhetoric of the American Revolution.

Locations used to illuminate this early period range from the Town Creek Indian Mound to Governor Tryon's Palace. Sites include not only colonial plantations, churches, and forts, but also frontier cabins, wilderness parks, historic trails, and Indian settlements.