Friend, Craig Thompson 1961–

PERSONAL:

Born May 30, 1961, in Glens Falls, NY; son of Gaylord Thompson and Linda Joyce Friend; civil union with Roderick Glenn Turner, July 20, 2004. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Wake Forest University, B.A, 1983; Clemson University, M.A., 1990; University of Kentucky, Ph.D., 1995. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Independent. Hobbies and other interests: Portrait painting.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Raleigh, NC. Office—North Carolina State University, 362 Withers Hall, Raleigh, NC 27695-8108. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY, assistant professor of history, 1995-99; University of Central Florida, Orlando, began as assistant professor, became associate professor of history, 1999-2005; North Carolina State University, Raleigh, associate professor and director of public history, 2005—. Conducted cultural and historic resource surveys for the Cherokee National Forest, Fort Necessity and National Road, and the Cultural Byways on the Information Highway project.

MEMBER:

American Association of State and Local History, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (national conference coordinator), Southern Historical Society, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and contributor) The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1999.

(Editor, with Lorri Glover, and contributor) Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2004.

Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 2005.

Contributor to books, including The Human Tradition in Antebellum America, edited by Michael A. Morrison, Scholarly Resources, 2000. Contributor to periodicals, including American Indian Quarterly, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of the Early Republic, and OAH Magazine of History; also contributor to online review sites, including H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. Florida Historical Quarterly, editor, 1999-2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Focusing on the history of the American South, Craig Thompson Friend has written and edited several well-received volumes in his field. For his first book, The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, Friend gathered essays from scholars across the nation to examine the lives and communities of settlers in frontier Kentucky. Betty Duff on H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online described the contributors as "an impressive as- sembly" and stated that the book "adds considerably to new scholarly literature concerning the settlement of western Kentucky, with the welcome addition of some of the voices silenced in the past."

Friend's second volume, edited with Lorri Glover, is Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, which explores concepts and codes of masculinity across classes, races, and ages. As Janet Moore Lindman reflected in the Journal of Southern History, the book "corrects and complicates the historiography of masculinity in southern history by presenting research about men who owned neither slaves nor land and could not fulfill or aspire to this elite ideal." Mark Peel, writing on H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, deemed Southern Manhood "an important and impressive collection that more than meets its objective of broadening the study of Southern manhood." Among the "outstanding" essays, Peel noted Friend's own, about the failure of one man's attempts to attain upper-class masculinity, calling it "a beautifully wrought study of one life through which many other lives are illuminated."

Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West is Friend's third book and first solo volume. Examining the history of a sixty-mile stretch of road running southwest from the Ohio River to Lexington, Kentucky, he shines a light on the history of not only the region but the nation as well. Andrew Denson in Ohio Valley History highlighted Friend's use of local cultural details to relate the area to its larger context and concluded that the book "is a lesson in how scholarship can be firmly rooted in a specific landscape, yet still address the big historical questions." Reviewing for the William and Mary Quarterly, Marion Nelson Winship (a contributor to The Buzzel about Kentuck) remarked on Friend's "vivid prose" and "elegant discussion," but she also expressed concern that Friend tackles "too many important phenomena, perhaps, since, despite the strength of each discussion, no single theme receives the depth of treatment that any one of them deserves." Winship nonetheless maintained that "this is the right moment for such an excellent sampler" and suggested it might "inspire others to join in writing about the early American Republic in the trans-Appalachian West." Along the Maysville Road is "an ambitious community study," in the words of Journal of Southern History critic Andrew Lee Feight, which "successfully illuminates the dramatic transformation of Kentucky, the upper South, and the larger American nation during the years of the early republic."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 2007, Harold D. Tallant, review of Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West, p. 1162.

Choice, January, 2006, K.B. Raitz, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 917.

Journal of American Culture, December, 2004, Ray B. Browne, review of Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, p. 462.

Journal of American History, September, 2005, Cara Anzilotti, review of Southern Manhood, p. 604; March, 2006, Jeffrey P. Brown, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 1423.

Journal of Southern History, May, 2000, Christopher Morris, review of The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, p. 393; November, 2005, Janet Moore Lindman, review of Southern Manhood, p. 889; May, 2006, Andrew Lee Feight, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 457.

Journal of the Early Republic, summer, 2007, Michael Morrison, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 349.

Ohio Valley History, spring, 2006, Andrew Denson, review of Along the Maysville Road, pp. 68-69.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 1999, review of The Buzzel about Kentuck, p. 45; February, 2005, review of Southern Manhood, p. 147; August, 2005, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 72.

Reviewer's Bookwatch, August, 2004, Henry Berry, review of Southern Manhood; May, 2005, Henry Berry, review of Along the Maysville Road.

Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, autumn, 2006, John E. Stealey III, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 508.

Virginia Quarterly Review, fall, 2005, Jennifer Stertzer, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 289.

William and Mary Quarterly, October, 2005, Marion Nelson Winship, review of Along the Maysville Road, p. 815.

ONLINE

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (January, 1999), Betty Duff, "Trans Appalachian Settlement: The Myth and the Reality"; (January, 2006), Mark Peel, "The Unsteady Quest for Manhood."

North Carolina State University Department of History Web site,http://history.chass.ncsu.edu/ (September 22, 2008), faculty profile.