This is a 175th anniversary history/family history.

In Queer Opera, Andrew Sutherland argues that operas often reflect characteristics of the society and epistime in which they are written but that they also do much more than that; operas have agency. LGBTQ+ social, cultural, and political issues have become an increasingly defining feature of twenty-first century life, and as agency for change, composers have turned to opera to underscore the lived queer experience. Sutherland posits that operas written before the sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century utilized a codified language both in the libretto and score, communicating with those observers open to a queer reading. He explores the growing trend of local, small-scale, independent opera companies seen around the world towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and argues that this has emboldened queer artists to reclaim opera as a queer space. He further argues that for several centuries, opera houses have been safe havens for queer composers, librettists, performers, and designers, and yet it is only relatively recently that any serious attempt at queer representation in operatic works has begun to be realized. In this book, he examines narratives and music of selected operas to walk through queer history in Western societies and shines a light on how many of opera’s well-known characters, based on historical figures who represent pivotal moments in the queer story, are responsible in a variety of ways for the continued struggle for queer acceptance.

Progress is a contradictory term, one that inherently means an improvement of luxury and an advancement of technology, yet usually at the expense of a community's identity, traditions, and history. Though many buildings survived Civil War skirmishes and Northern occupation during Reconstruction, these same structures did not escape the plans of ambitious entrepreneurs and thus disappeared from Wilmingtone(tm)s landscape, only to be replaced, over time, by shopping plazas and nationally recognizable commercial facades. Cape Fear Lost celebrates places that have vanished from presentday Wilmington. In this volume of more than 200 photographs, you will be able to explore the Wilmington of a bygone era, one punctuated by unpaved tree-lined streets and architecturally diverse dwellings. As you thumb through these pages, you will experience firsthand the beauty of many former mansions scattered throughout the downtown area, familiar churches, civic buildings and schools that once dotted the cityscape, the many businesses that utilized the pedestrian, horse-and-wagon, and shipping traffic along Market Street, and the transformation of Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach from humble summer bungalows into major tourist retreats. These varied scenes allow you an extraordinary insight into this coastal communitye(tm)s changing character over the past century and a half.