William J. Bauer Jr. (Wailacki and Concow, and an enrolled member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes) is author of the new book We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941.  The federally recognized Round Valley Indian Tribes are a small, confederated people whose members today come from twelve indigenous California tribes. In 1849, during the California gold rush, people from several of these tribes were relocated to a reservation farm in northern Mendocino County. Fusing Native American history and labor history, Bauer chronicles the evolution of work, community, and tribal identity among the Round Valley Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that enabled their survival and resistance to assimilation.

In a guest post for the First Peoples blog, Bauer talks about the importance of kinship in American Indian culture, particularly for American Indian historians who study their own communities. Bauer begins:

In the 1940s, the Dakota novelist and scholar Ella Deloria wrote eloquently about the significance of kinship and family in Dakota life. Kinship, Deloria explained, was an all-encompassing aspect of being Dakota, governing relationships within Dakota communities and with outsiders. When it comes to writing American Indian history, Deloria’s comments resonate far beyond the Dakota people, and they are as significant now as they were when first published some seventy years ago. This is especially true for American Indian scholars who write about the histories of our communities and homelands. When we research and write about our communities, we inevitably discover our own family histories, which offer an opportunity to interpret and organize our studies. Three narratives from my own research demonstrate the potential of writing American Indian history in a family way.

Bauer’s piece reveals the bonds of kinship that informed both his documentary and oral history sources for his new book. Read his full article here.

–ellen

Today is the 42^nd anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, certainly not a happy memory—in fact , the opposite of that—but one well worth stopping to ponder. On this day in 1968, during the Vietnam War, the massacre was carried out by United States troops.  Under the direction of Lt. William L. Calley Jr., a unit of the army tortured, sexually abused, and massacred more than 500 residents of the village.  When the incident became public knowledge in the following year, it spread outrage around the world and significantly increased U.S. opposition to involvement in Vietnam.  As you may know, William Calley, the only soldier held legally accountable for the event, made his first public apology in August of last year, to a Kiwanis Club in Georgia.  He said, “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai.” Click here to read the New York Times article on his apology.

To mark today, I’d like to offer some UNC Press books that may help more fully understand, think about, and recontextualize our involvement in Vietnam and its continuing presence in our consciousness.  So today I offer you the opportunity that good books always give—the chance to read, rethink, and build greater understandings, to build new meaning from the potentially meaningless tragedy.

–beth

In Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War, Ron Milam examines the lives and actions of the much-maligned junior officer. Conventional wisdom holds that the junior officer in Vietnam was a no-talent, poorly trained, unmotivated soldier typified by Lt. William Calley. Drawing on oral histories, after-action reports, diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Ron Milam debunks this view, demonstrating that most of the lieutenants who served in combat performed their duties well and effectively, serving with great skill, dedication, and commitment to the men they led. Milam’s narrative provides a vivid, on-the-ground portrait of what the platoon leader faced: training his men, keeping racial tensions at bay, and preventing alcohol and drug abuse, all in a war without fronts. Yet despite these obstacles, junior officers performed admirably, as documented by field reports and evaluations of their superior officers. Read Milam’s guest post on the Calley apology (from August 2009).

The materials gathered by Michael Hunt in A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives remind readers that the conflict touched the lives of many people in a wide range of social and political situations and spanned a good deal more time than the decade of direct U.S. combat. Indeed, the U.S. war was but one phase in a string of conflicts that varied significantly in character and geography. Michael Hunt brings together the views of the conflict’s disparate players–from Communist leaders, Vietnamese peasants, Saigon loyalists, and North Vietnamese soldiers to U.S. policymakers, soldiers, and critics of the war. By allowing the participants to speak, this volume encourages readers to formulate their own historically grounded understanding of the events in Vietnam.

A few more about the Vietnam conflict, our thinking about war in the 20^th century, and war’s lasting effects on us all:

Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Michael J. Allen

Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era by Patricia Appelbaum

The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era by Andrew Huebner

Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War by Michael S. Foley

Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 by Mark Philip Bradley

Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War by Edwin E. Moïse

From People’s War to People’s Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam by Timothy J. Lomperis

Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam by Christian G. Appy

We are happy as clams—and horses and chickens and goats and all creatures, really—to announce that today, at the American Society for Environmental History’s annual meeting in Portland, our author Carolyn Merchant, receives the Distinguished Scholar Award for her significant contribution to environmental history scholarship. Professor Merchant has focused, throughout her career, on human interactions with the natural environment—how we are changed by our environment, and how, conversely, it changes us.

This award comes in the year we re-issue her 1989 landmark book, Ecological Revolutions. In this classic and much-loved study, Merchant shows how social changes have reshaped the land as she analyzes two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860.  The first was the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, when Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England’s industrial production brought on the second–a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region.

Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, First Edition

In the telling, Merchant explores how ideas about nature are socially constructed and argues that major cultural and economic changes not only result in changes to the landscape but also to the basic fabric of how people conceive of and relate to the natural world.  As she writes, “an ecological transformation in the deepest sense entails changes in ecology, production, reproduction, and forms of consciousness.”  Changing the way we think about our relationship to the environment comes first, and understanding how we have related to it, over the course of history, is the precursor to this shift.  And what has been occurring in the field—and in the minds of Americans—in the twenty years since this book first appeared, is just such a shift in thinking.

And so, Professor Merchant’s book becomes increasingly relevant as the issues she explores continue influence our environment.  The new edition will address ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, as well as a new epilogue situating New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future.

So today we send a big congrats over the ether to Professor Merchant for all the work she’s done to help students, scholars—and all us creatures—more fully understand how our predecessors interacted with and shaped the world in which we live, as well as how we continue to do just that.

Hip hip hooray!

–beth

Today we celebrate the birthday of Lillian Wald (1867-1940), founder of Henry Street Settlement on New York’s Lower East Side as well as the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Wald was a second-generation German Jewish immigrant who developed close associations with Jewish New York even as she consistently dismissed claims that her work emerged from a fundamentally Jewish calling.

In her book, Lillian Wald: A Biography, Marjorie Feld examines the crucial and complex significance of Wald’s ethnicity to her life’s work. In addition, by studying the Jewish community’s response to Wald throughout her public career from 1893 to 1933, Feld explores the changing landscape of identity politics in the first half of the twentieth century.

To mark Wald’s birthday, as well as her own, Feld writes about her study of Wald’s complex life, as well as the ways in which their lives have–and have not–become intertwined in the process of her academic study.

Below we link to Feld’s post at the blog of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Enjoy!–beth

I remember precisely where I was in the Glenn G. Bartle library—what part of the stacks, which corner, what bench—when I realized that Lillian Wald and I shared the same birthday, on March 10^th.   I was a junior at State University of New York at Binghamton, enrolled in a U.S. women’s history course that was gradually changing the direction of my life.  It was here that I discovered Lillian Wald, a Jewish woman who was deeply involved in American Progressives’ campaigns for immigrant, women’s, and civil rights, for public health and world peace.

Read the full post at Jewesses with Attitude, the blog of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

We love it when new UNC Press books seem to be in conversation with other books of the moment.  Take Patti Smith’s acclaimed new memoir, Just Kids (HarperCollins 2010), which offers an inside look at the punk pioneer’s artistic influences and collaborations, including Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Springsteen, Sam Shepard, and Fred “Sonic” Smith–all men.

However, right there on page 10, Smith points to reading Little Women as a turning point in her development into the rocker, poet, and artist that she was to become.

“I drew comfort from my books. Oddly enough, it was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny. . . . [Jo March] gave me the courage of a new goal, and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister. From that time on, I cherished the idea that one day I would write a book.”

We asked Barbara Sicherman, author of Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (UNC Press 2010), whose book takes a close look at Little Women’s Jo March and how she served as a youthful model of independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for her take on Smith’s quote.

“Patti Smith. I am surprised. But I shouldn’t be. Jo March has been inspiring girls since she first appeared on the literary landscape nearly a century and a half ago. I am convinced that a major reason for the novel’s staying power is Jo’s success as a published author. She was a new kind of heroine to Alcott’s first readers who were thrilled to encounter a feisty literary tomboy and bookworm in print; some of them even kept journals in Jo’s name.

But what is truly amazing, given how much the world has changed since then, is that Jo remained the exemplar of female ambition well into the twentieth century–for writers as different as Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Petry, and Cynthia Ozick. And now Patti Smith, whose account of crafting stories and spinning yarns for her siblings after reading Alcott’s classic is in the same tradition.”

So, without Jo March and Little Women there may not have been a Patti Smith Group, one of the few rock bands with a woman leader and lyricist. And without Louisa May Alcott, Smith might not have created the body of work for which she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2005.

Read a full interview with Barbara Sicherman on the transformative power of reading in women’s lives see at the UNC Press website.

–Gina

Have you heard? Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has sponsored a bill to replace U.S. Grant on the $50 bill with Ronald Reagan. In an op-ed for the LA Times, Grant biographer Joan Waugh offers a brief history lesson in defense of the Union general and 18th President of the United States and cautions against further erosion of Grant’s legacy. An excerpt:

There was a time when Republicans did celebrate Grant. In a speech delivered in 1900, for example, Theodore Roosevelt maintained that among the past presidents, the trio emerging as the “mightiest among the mighty [were] the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln and Grant.” Roosevelt’s deeply appreciative comments reflected the widespread respect of his generation for Grant, and for good reason.

Yes, Grant’s administration was marred by corruption and controversy. But Grant himself remained steadfast in his belief that the goals of the war — unity and freedom — should be preserved even as the country’s enthusiasm for biracial reconstruction of the South faded away.

He proudly signed off on the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, describing the law enabling black suffrage as “a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.”

Grant’s final task as president hearkened back to his first and perhaps most important achievement: to ensure a stable transition, this time in the disputed election of 1876. He succeeded, and the country reconciled for good.

Read the full text of Waugh’s full piece: Ulysses S. Grant earned his $50 bill.

Today brings us a guest post from Raúl Ramos, author of Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861. In his book, Ramos introduces a new model for the transnational history of the United States as he focuses on Mexican-Texan, or Tejano, society in a period of political transition beginning with the year of Mexican independence. Ramos explores the factors that helped shape the ethnic identity of the Tejano population, including cross-cultural contacts between Bexareños, indigenous groups, and Anglo-Americans, as they negotiated the contingencies and pressures on the frontier of competing empires.

In this post Ramos marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo,  addresses the decisions now being made about how this history will be taught to the state’s children, and explores both how these decisions arise from Texan culture and how they help shape it. –beth

This Saturday marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, the battle that ended the 13-day siege on the fort by the Mexican Army.  The date carries added meaning this year as the Texas State Board of Education decides on the social studies standards affecting the education of the state’s public school children.  Debates over the standards have garnered national attention especially since they impact how textbooks will be written for the nation’s largest market.  It was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story.  When it comes to Texas history, few if any events carry the emotional weight of the Alamo.  The governor even invokes the memory of Texas Independence to score political points with the anti-Washington crowd.

It seems like, 174 years later, battles over the Alamo’s meaning and significance rage on, reflecting contemporary debates as much as commenting on the past.  This has been the backdrop for writing my book, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861.  The book reframes events during the period from the perspective of Mexican people in San Antonio.  In a sense, the book serves as a narrative intervention into the immensely strong dominant narrative that places the Battle of the Alamo at the center of the region’s history.

The Alamo story itself shines so dominates the historical landscape that any broader context for understanding these events is practically wiped out.  I often use what I call the “postcard” image of the Alamo as a metaphor to illustrate this point.  The image of the Alamo is often presented without people or surrounding buildings.  The icon has become timeless in more than one sense.  Reinserting this context meant shifting the focus away from the battle and recasting events and people. Read more »

If you are familiar with the UNC Press Blog, you probably know that we know a thing or two about celebrating. If it has a national celebration day, week, or month, we probably have it marked on our calendars well in advance. Why else would we have a 1000-word post on the merits of National Chili Day, like we did a little over a week ago?

For March, we’re celebrating National Women’s History Month at the Press, and I’ll be highlighting some fantastic new books we’re publishing that focus on women in America. We have titles spanning this history of women in the United States, from before the Revolution through a book profiling women of the past decade.

Women at War

Today’s post centers on two new books from UNC Press that focus on women at war in America. Published in September, Judith Giesberg’s Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front explores how both black and white women assumed increased social and political roles in the Union while their husbands and fathers fought the Confederacy. Giesberg includes striking details about how even with the return of the soldiers, these new gender roles remained.

150 years after the stories found in Giesberg’s Army at Home, Laura Browder and Sascha Pflaeging have put together this arresting new collecting of images and oral histories of women returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, titled When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans. Along with 48 of Pflaeging’s portraits, Browder presents the oral histories that run across the emotional spectrum, providing the reader with a sense of just what it means to be a woman on the front lines of both a physical war and culture war.

Check back here for more posts in March about the great coverage of women’s history we have at UNC Press. Next week, I’ll provide a post on two new titles about the role of books in the lives of American women.

–matt

Elaine Maisner is a senior editor at UNC Press. Over a recent winter break, she asked her daughter, Zina—a wonderful baker—to make Cornmeal Vanilla Bean Shortbreads, from Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker’s American Desserts. Here’s their step-by-step guide to making these delicious cookies.–ellen

I thought it would be fun to take pictures of Zina making these cookies, especially to show people who want to bake–and aren’t sure they know how–that it really is easy. All the basic moves are here in this recipe: getting that sugar and butter together, using a real vanilla bean, adding the flour, rolling, baking. Just take your butter out an hour or two before you start–you’ll want it to be at room temperature for this recipe–and then you’ll see the easy magic that you and a wooden spoon can make. (You really don’t need an electric mixer.) These shortbreads are always welcome, munched with hot coffee or cold milk, or propped alongside a ball of ice cream. Karen gives some great serving tips at the end of the recipe, below. The cornmeal gives the shortbread a little southern touch. And remember: the more butter in a cookie, the shorter it is. Thanks, Zina and Karen.

Cornmeal Vanilla Bean Shortbreads

from Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker’s American Desserts

Makes 32 2-inch cutouts or 16 wedges

Every baker has a favorite recipe for shortbread cookies, and here is mine. The addition of fresh vanilla bean and the slight crunch of cornmeal make these buttery treats irresistible. You can customize their shape, depending upon your mood and the occasion. Try cutout stars for Christmas or the Fourth of July, hearts for Valentine’s Day, or Scottish-style wedges for tea.

INGREDIENTS

16 tablespoons (8 ounces) butter, at room temperature

seeds of 1 vanilla bean

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

½ cup + 1 tablespoon sugar

1 ½ cups flour

¼ cup cornstarch

½ cup stoneground yellow cornmeal

Here’s how to get those vanilla bean seeds:

Read more »

We welcome a guest post today from S. Scott Rohrer, author of Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. Popular literature and frontier studies stress that Americans moved west to farm or to seek a new beginning. In Wandering Souls, Rohrer argues that Protestant migrants in early America relocated in search of salvation, Christian community, reform, or all three. In this post, he discusses how reception of his new book helped draw him back to his own family’s religious migration story.–ellen

In the corner of our living room sits a stately 213-year-old secretary made of walnut, complete with secret compartments, cubbyholes, and four drawers massive enough to store the contents of a modern office. As a child, the desk’s craftsmanship, solidity, and age fascinated me. But it also intrigued me for another reason: it is a tangible part of our family’s history. My grandfather Josiah Rohrer, who lived in Germantown, outside of Philadelphia, would gather us around the desk and, in reverential tones, tell us about the desk’s history. My brothers and I listened carefully, stroking the old wood as he spoke. A Mennonite craftsman by the name of John Rohrer, who was Josiah’s great-grandfather, built the desk in 1797 when he was 17 and coming of age in Lancaster County, Pa. Since then the desk has been passed down from father to son, until it ended up in my hands in the late 1980s while I was living in Salisbury, N.C. I learned the desk’s history from my grandfather and from the wrinkled old piece of paper squirreled away in a cubbyhole that lists the names of the desk’s owners and the year they were born.

Lure and lore—both are part of family history’s irresistible attractions. For profound and deep-seated reasons, humans have long wanted to discover who their ancestors were and where they came from. The lure of family history can easily be seen by glancing at the burgeoning number of websites and organizations devoted to genealogy. County libraries routinely hold seminars on researching family history. Indeed, the legions of genealogists are growing by the day, spurred on by the Internet and the ease with which one can now read courthouse records and family documents online. The lore involves family stories passed down from generation to generation. When friends and colleagues learn that I am a social historian whose first book was on the Moravians, and that I am a descendant of German Mennonites, they enjoy telling me about their family histories and their efforts to uncover their family’s past. These investigations are almost always journeys of love.

As a “professional” historian, however, I have always kept my research interests separate from family ones. The usual academic considerations led to my second book—Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. I wanted to understand how Protestantism influenced the movements of ordinary Americans in an earlier age.

It took a chance encounter with a genealogy site to bring me back to my roots, so to speak. Read more »