Designed as a textbook for use in North Carolina history classes, this is a useful one-volume history of the state. But there are flaws. The style is standard textbook English, making for rather dull reading. Arts and literature receive only about three pages of text, leaving the impression the state has been a vast cultural wasteland for 400 years. The emphasis is on the positive, e.g., lynching is dismissed as "an unfortunate blot on the record of North Carolina." Though nothing new is added to the interpretation of the state's history, this book will no doubt become the standard s.