Brevard College’s Pastimes history club will host a presentation on “Moonshining and NASCAR” by UNC-Asheville Professor of History Dr. Dan Pierce on Thursday, Oct. 3.
The 7 p.m. presentation, held in the College’s J.A. Jones Library, is free and open to the public.
“Dr. Pierce is not only an engaging speaker,” says Dr. Margaret Brown, Pastimes advisor and a historian at Brevard College, “his solid research confirmed what southerners have said for decades—staying one step ahead of revenuers led to the tradition of race car driving.”
Dr. Pierce is the author of Corn From a Jar: Moonshining in the Great Smoky Mountains (Great Smoky Mountains Association, 2013) and Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France (UNC Press, 2010). According to Our State magazine, “If you’re a Southerner, by birth or by inclination, and love Southern foodways, folkways, highways, and low-ways, you’ll lap up Daniel S. Pierce’s Real NASCAR … like grits and red-eye gravy, even if you’ve never been to a stock car race or watched one on television.”
He is also the author of The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park (UT Press, 2000) and has had his work published in The New York Times, Southern Cultures, Smokies Life magazine, and numerous encyclopedias including the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Dr. Pierce has appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation; The History Channel; North Carolina People with WilliamFriday; North Carolina Bookwatch; and the South Carolina ETV Emmy Award winning program, “Take on the South.” He earned his doctorate at the University of Tennessee, where he worked with distinguished southern historian James C. Cobb.