UNC Press Presents Podcast
370 episodes - English - Latest episode: 16 days ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingInterviews with University of North Carolina Press Authors
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Episodes
R. J. Boutelle, "The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny" (UNC Press, 2023)
April 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAs Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity? In The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2023), R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intellectuals like Daniel Peterson, James McCune Smith, Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Martin Delany en...
Shardé M. Davis, "Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education" (UNC Press, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesWhen Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in fall 2020, faculty assigned the tweets as material for course curriculum. Being Black i...
Joseph M. Thompson, "Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism" (UNC Press, 2024)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCountry music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to service members. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists fro...
Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesThe cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth o...
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, ...
John William Nelson, "Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of portages sites where canoes could be carried between waterways, helped secure the region around Chic...
Andrew J. Kirkendall, "Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America" (UNC Press, 2022)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.-Latin American cooperation. In Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America (UNC Press, 2022), Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for U.S.-Latin American relations created by liberal Democrats who came to the fore during the Kennedy Administration and retained significant influen...
Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so ma...
Carly Goodman, "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023) tells the surprising ...
Ariel Mae Lambe, "No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War" (UNC Press, 2019)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAriel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobilized in the mid-1930s to fight fascism both in Cuba and beyond. A wide variety of civic and political groups, including Communists, anarchists, Freemasons, and Afro-Cubans, mobilized to support the Spanish Republican cause, which they connected to their efforts at home to fight persisting colonial st...
Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 17, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWith its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing. Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first his...
Sarah Parry Myers, "Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesEstablished by the Army Air Force in 1943, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program opened to civilian women with a pilot's licence who could afford to pay for their own transportation, training, and uniforms. Despite their highly developed skill set, rigorous training, and often dangerous work, the women of WASP were not granted military status until 1977, denied over three decades of Army Air Force benefits as well as the honour and respect given to male and female World War II ve...
Robin Judd, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesFacing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother surviv...
Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesSince the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agricultural practices. But who really benefits from Right to Farm Laws? And what can be done to promote real agricultural, rural, and environmental justice? Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC Press, 2023) offers valuable history and incisive commentary on these questions. Si...
Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesIn the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-...
Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThroughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juve...
Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesThe first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentr...
Katherine Rye Jewell, "Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesBands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream—and they ended up disrupting popular music and commercial radio in the proces...
Katherine M. Marino, "Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesKatherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) follows the many Latin American and Caribbean women in the first half of the century who not only championed feminism for the continent but also contributed to defining the meaning of international human rights. They drove a transnational movement for women’s suffrage th...
Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018)
December 27, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesHistories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African...
On Native American Warfare: A Discussion with Author and Historian Wayne E. Lee
December 24, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesHow did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores this often-neglected question in his book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). The podcast begins with his explanation of the ‘cutting-off’ style of fight and retreat that characterized this method of warfare and proceeds to...
Trent Masiki, "The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism" (UNC Press, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesDespite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the mean...
Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Second Amendment, or the history of gun safety, duties, and rights. Often, people assume that the number of guns is a natural state – the guns were always there. But were the guns always there? What caused the drastic boom in firearms, and when did it happen? In Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (UNC Press, 2023), Dr. ...
Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)
November 12, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesThe presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations i...
Drew A. Swanson, "A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction" (UNC Press, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFive years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction (UNC Press, 2023...
Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesRacial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of Cincinnati, Sarah Mayorga argues that residents' interpretations of their circumstances, what she calls urban specters, are often partial recognitions of the exploitation and dehumanization produced by racial capitalism. In Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism (UNC Press, 2023), much scholarly work on racial capitalism has n...
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023)
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his ...
Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert, "The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914" (UNC Press, 2024)
October 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIt began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by Dr. Boy...
Jamie L. Jones, "Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling" (UNC Press, 2023)
September 26, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesThrough the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence....
Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)
September 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDo individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards argues that Americans in the South transformed their understanding of inequality during the half century following the Revolutionary War. Drawing ...
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, "Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2022)
September 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling a...
Diane Flynt, "Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South" (UNC Press, 2023)
September 20, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesFor anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful characters abound in this history, including aristocratic Belgian immigrants, South Carolina plantatio...
Josephine Lee, "Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater" (UNC Press, 2022)
September 11, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesThe history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (UNC Press, 2022). Dr. Lee, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, examines the linked histories of orientalism, Blackface and Yellowface, in nineteenth and early twentieth century American theater, showing how identity creation and racialization occurred among mul...
Jeanne K. Firth, "Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice" (UNC Press, 2023)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAfter Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many high-profile chefs in New Orleans pledged to help their city rebound from the flooding. Several formed their own charitable organizations, including the John Besh Foundation, to help revitalize the region and its restaurant scene. A year and a half after the disaster when the total number of open restaurants eclipsed the pre-Katrina count, it was embraced as a sign that the city itself had survived, and these chefs arguably became the de facto heroes of t...
Christian O. Paiz, "The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-And-File History of the UFW Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers' (UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the UFW has lent its rallying cry to a presidential campaign and been the subject of no less than nine books, two documentaries, and one motion picture. Yet the full story of the women, men, and children who powered this social movement has not yet been told. Based on more than 200 hours of original oral history interviews conducted with Coachella Valley residents who...
Juliana Hu Pegues, "Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements" (UNC Press, 2021)
August 25, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesAs the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Ala...
Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 25, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesCarl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and rivetting book that offers the most authoritative account to date of the life and Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from what is today Senegal who was sold to slavery in the early 19th century and brought to Southern US. Moreover, this path paving book offers critical correctives to dominant perceptions of Said’s remarkable life na...
Janiece Johnson, "Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesOn September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western frontier of the United States, reaching the nation's capital and eventually crossing the Atlantic. In the years prior to the massacre, Americans dubbed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the "Mormon problem" as it garnered nati...
Bobby J. Smith II, "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Smith re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and politica...
Jennifer Ritterhouse, "Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s" (UNC Press, 2017)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Roa...
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesTwentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After Wo...
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, "Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLandscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that the corporatization of healthcare delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers ...
Margaret M. Power, "Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism" (UNC Press, 2023)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThroughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far beyond the archipelago. It invested significant energy, members, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric connections between ...
Rebecca Sharpless, "Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)
July 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhile a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. In Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (UNC Press, 2022), Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigenous American, European, and African—collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and food...
Jessica D. Klanderud, "Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh" (UNC Press, 2023)
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourCities are nothing without the streets—the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh (UNC Press, 2023), Jessica D. Klanderud documents the development of class-based visions of political, social, and economic equality in Pittsburgh's African American community between World War I and the early 1970s. K...
Robin James, "The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence" (UNC Press, 2023)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous range of genres and artists while being staunchly committed to local independent art and media. In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone's "Last Great Independent Radio" stations. The station projected a philosophy that prioritized s...
Chad E. Pearson, "Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2022)
May 02, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesDuring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers, government officials, journalists, and powerful individuals deployed a variety of violent tactics to control ordinary people and workers who sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as wel...
Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South" (UNC Press, 2023)
April 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentati...
Beth Bailey, "An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era" (UNC Press, 2023)
April 25, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesBy the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August of that year, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and by the end of the decade, a new generation of Blac...
Ana Schwartz, "Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America" (UNC Press, 2022)
April 23, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesNew England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised ...