Troxler’s new book, “The Red Dog,” received a Historical Book Award at the society’s annual meeting.
The North Carolina Society of Historians has honored Elon Professor Emerita Carole Troxler with a 2017 Historical Book Award for her newest book, “The Red Dog: A Tale of the Carolina Frontier (Lizzy’s Yarn).”
“The Red Dog” is Troxler’s sixth book, and her first work of fiction. An accomplished scholar who retired from Elon as a professor of history in 2003, Troxler has published extensively about the impacts of the American Revolution in the southern backcountry, maritime Canada and the Bahamas, and she was a pioneer in the study of black loyalists.
“The Red Dog” was inspired by her decades of research and was completed during summer breaks from her nonfiction writing projects. Set in the 1760s in the Piedmont region of central North Carolina, the book tells the story of a collection of teenagers and young adults centered around Lizzy, a 13-year-old orphan ordered by the courts to serve a five-year apprenticeship to owners of a Johnston County tavern called “The Red Dog.”
The Piedmont region saw rapid recent settlement during the 1760s, with society being shaped by the religious and political cultures of settlers only a generation or less removed from Europe. Slaveholding in central North Carolina was on the rise due to political connections between coastal planters and Piedmont merchants and lawyers, with incidents of white supremacy also on the rise.
It’s against this backdrop that Troxler crafted “The Red Dog,” which one reviewer says “is often gripping in its suspense. Carole Troxler has long been known in academic circles as a respected historian who has published widely her research into pre- and post-Revolutionary American history. This long-time immersion in 18th-century history made the setting and plot of The Red Dog authentic and believable.”
Troxler’s works of nonfiction include "The Loyalist Experience in North Carolina" (1975), "Shuttle and Plow: A History of Alamance County, North Carolina" (1999), “Pyle’s Defeat: Deception at the Race Path” (2003), “Alamance County, North Carolina, Transcripts of Census and Tax Records” (2011), and "Farming Dissenters: The Regulator Movement in Piedmont North Carolina" (2011). A sixth nonfiction book, “Sallie Stockard and the Adversities of an Educated Woman of the New South,” is scheduled for publication in spring 2018.
A native of LaGrange, Georgia, Troxler holds a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former Woodrow Wilson Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, she has received the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s Christopher Crittenden Award. This is her third book award.