It then describes how that venture initially paid off, as the influx of thousands of people from the North and the surrounding Virginia countryside helped make Roanoke - presumptuously christened the "Magic City" by New South proponents - the state's third-largest city by the turn of the century. Rand Dotson recounts what life was like for Roanoke's wealthy elites, working poor, and African American inhabitants. He also explores the social conflicts that ultimately erupted as a result of well-intended 3reforms4 initiated by city leaders. Dotson illustrates how residents mediated the catastrophic Depression of 1893 and that year's infamous Roanoke Riot, which exposed the faȧde masking the city's racial tensions, inadequate physical infrastructure, and provincial mentality of the local populace. Dotson then details the subsequent attempts of business boosters and progressive reformers to attract the additional investments needed to put their city back on track.

In telling the tragic and heroic story of Roanoke, the lost colony, award-winning historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman recovers the earliest days of English exploration and settlement in America the often forgotten years before Jamestown and the landing of the Mayflower. Roanoke explores Britain s attempt to establish a firm claim to North America in the hope that colonies would make England wealthy and powerful. Kupperman brings to life the men and women who struggled to carve out a settlement in an inhospitable environment on the Carolina coast and the complex Native American cultures they encountered. She reveals the mixture of goals and challenges that led to the colony s eventual abandonment, and discusses the theories about what might have become of the first English settlers in the New World as they adapted to life as Indians. With a new preface and afterword written by the author, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony brings the fascinating story of America s earliest settlement up-to-date, bringing together new work from scholars in a variety of fields. The story of Roanoke remains endlessly fascinating. It is a tale marked by courage, miscalculation, exhilaration, intrigue, and mystery."

After 400 years, America's oldest mystery--the Lost Colony--is solved in this remarkable & gripping work of historical detection--spinning a tale of intrigue, sabotage, & murder.

New archeological discoveries may finally solve the greatest mystery of Colonial America in this history of Roanoke and Hatteras Islands. Established on what is now North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, the Roanoke Colony was intended to be England’s first permanent settlement in North America. But in 1590, the entire population disappeared without a trace. The only clue to their fate was the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree. For centuries, the legend of the Lost Colony has captivated imaginations. Now, archaeologists from the University of Bristol, working with the Croatoan Archaeological Society, have uncovered tantalizing clues to the fate of the colony. In The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, Hatteras native and amateur archaeologist Scott Dawson compiles what scholars know about the Lost Colony along with what scholars have found beneath the soil of Hatteras.

*National Bestseller* A sweeping account of America's oldest unsolved mystery, the people racing to unearth its answer, and the sobering truths--about race, gender, and immigration--exposed by the story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. In 1587, 115 men, women, and children arrived at Roanoke Island on the coast of North Carolina. Chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, their colony was to establish England's first foothold in the New World. But when the colony's leader, John White, returned to Roanoke from a resupply mission, his settlers were nowhere to be found. They left behind only a single clue--a "secret token" carved into a tree. Neither White nor any other European laid eyes on the colonists again. What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke? For four hundred years, that question has consumed historians and amateur sleuths, leading only to dead ends and hoaxes. But after a chance encounter with a British archaeologist, journalist Andrew Lawler discovered that solid answers to the mystery were within reach. He set out to unravel the enigma of the lost settlers, accompanying competing researchers, each hoping to be the first to solve its riddle. Thrilling and absorbing, The Secret Token offers a new understanding not just of the first English settlement in the New World but of how the mystery and significance of its disappearance continues to define and divide our country.

Grenville and the Lost Colony of Roanoke takes an authoritative look at how the English Nation first attempted to settle America - some thirty-three years before the Mayflower set sail. In the 1580s Sir Walter Raleigh ably assisted by his cousin Sir Richard Grenville set out to found an English Colony in America. After several voyages the colony was finally settled on the island of Roanoke, yet just three years later it had vanished and remains today, one of America's greatest mysteries. Now, in this new account, Andrew Thomas Powell re-investigates. Using eye-witness accounts from sources never previously linked, he provides one of the most extraordinary true stories in English and American history and concludes with the current quest to find out what really happened to them. Filled with new revelations and theories, and exposing some myths, this is the first modern attempt to use original documents to re-examine an extraordinary period in English History. Grenville and the Lost Colony of Roanoke takes an authoritative look at how the English Nation first attempted to settle America - some thirty-three years before the Mayflower set sail.