SouthTalks | Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries | Jeremy B.Jones

Author Jeremy B. Jones will read from and discuss his new book Cipher: Decoding My
Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries. From 1808 to 1859, farmer and teacher William Thomas
Prestwood logged his life in an invented secret code, tracking bird migrations, love affairs, and
science experiments from the South Carolina lowlands to the North Carolina mountains.
Bookended by the American Revolution and the Civil War, his recorded life captures all the
beauty and terror of America in its infancy. More than a hundred years later, his handmade
notebooks were discovered in an abandoned house and deciphered and transcribed by a retired
National Security Agency cryptanalyst, leaving Jeremy Jones, the great-great-great-greatgrandson
of the diarist, to wonder what this curious man’s life might reveal about life today.

Jeremy B. Jones is the author of two nonfiction books: Cipher and Bearwallow: A
Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. His essays appear in Oxford American, The Bitter
Southerner, Garden & Gun, and Longreads, among others, and he serves as series coeditor of In
Place, a nonfiction book series from West Virginia University Press. He is a professor of English
studies at Western Carolina University in his native North Carolina.

Видео SouthTalks | Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries | Jeremy B.Jones канала The Center for the Study of Southern Culture