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Archive of posts filed under the Guest Bloggers category.

Islamophobia and Our Love of Shopping

We welcome a guest post today from Susan Nance, author of How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1835. Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the “East,” such as the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing [...] Read more »

The Story of SERVICE, Part 3: Music All Over the Ocean

Historian David Cecelski writes about the Beaufort, N.C., menhaden fishing fleet and chanteymen featured in Panel 3 of Colin Quashie’s SERVICE mural. Read more »

General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and General Confusion

Barack Obama’s Afghanistan commanders are something else. First, they promoted a highly debatable counter-insurgency strategy. Then, despite the numerous and cogent contemporary critiques, they got the president to buy into their particular brand of wishful thinking, and they got from him the additional troops supposedly needed for success. They have since failed to deliver. There [...] Read more »

Faith, Fact, and Religious Relics

We welcome a guest post today from Bernadette McNary-Zak, coeditor of Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The James Ossuary Controversy and the Quest for Religious Relics, a collection of essays exploring the circumstances of an archaeological hoax in which a box of skeletal remains was passed off as belonging to James, the brother of Jesus. [...] Read more »

Vietnam War Lessons: Never Too Late to Learn

Developments over the last month or so have put the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan under a dark cloud. The McChrystal affair and the WikiLeaks revelations are symptomatic of deeper troubles: the rapid bankruptcy of counterinsurgency, a surge in U.S. casualties, the persistently problematic role of Pakistan, the continued immobility of the Karzai regime, the sluggish [...] Read more »

“We Are Standing on Beautiful History”

Today we welcome a guest post from Tiya Miles, author of The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Last weekend she attended a gathering to celebrate the historic plantation home and held a signing event for her new book. Over the course of her day, past and present were juxtaposed in an experience [...] Read more »

Obama’s HIV/AIDS Strategy: Real Change or Pocket Change?

We welcome a guest post today from Jennifer Brier, author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. When the Obama administration announced a new HIV/AIDS strategy, we asked Brier to unpack the news and help give historical perspective to the new plan.–ellen Reading President Obama’s new HIV/AIDS strategy, released on July 13, [...] Read more »

The McChrystal Affair: Pity the Poor Historian

There is good reason to pity the poor historian, who has been tested especially severely during the recent McChrystal-Obama imbroglio as the eruption of historical parallels and lessons have ranged from the wrong-headed to the off-kilter. Read more »

The Obama National Security Strategy: “Mush” Ado about Nothing?

In the world of U.S. foreign policy, the release of a new National Security Strategy is a big deal. This congressionally mandated exercise offers an opportunity for the executive to grapple with basic issues, and it may even herald the birth of a “doctrine” (as it did for George W. Bush in 2002). The Obama [...] Read more »

What is Decoration Day?

Alan Jabbour, who authored Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians with his wife Karen Singer Jabbour, provides some insight to a grassroots ritual that led to the creation of a federal holiday. –alyssa Many rural community cemeteries in western North Carolina hold “decorations.” A decoration is a religious [...] Read more »

Behind the Scenes: Archiving the Photographs of Billy Barnes

We welcome a guest post today from Patrick Cullom, an archivist at Wilson Library on the UNC campus, who has a special connection to the new book by Robert Korstad and James Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America.–ellen Last month I [...] Read more »

Lena Horne and the Irony of Cultural Politics

We welcome a guest post today from Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, author of Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. In her book, Sklaroff argues that New Deal cultural programs supporting notable black intellectuals, celebrities, and artists (including Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, and Richard Wright) represent [...] Read more »

Victory in Vietnam: The Myth That Won’t Die But Can’t Stand Up

The U.K. edition of A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives hits bookstores across the pond today — just as Britons head to the polls to elect a new Prime Minister. In a previous guest post, editor Michael H. Hunt addressed one of the more striking similarities between the Vietnam [...] Read more »

The Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” Unmasked?

When we got wind of Michael Steele’s recent comments about the Republican Party continuing a “Southern Strategy” for the past 40 years, we turned to an expert on southern politics for insight into Steele’s allusion to the Nixon-era strategy of racial exclusion. Michael Perman is author of Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the [...] Read more »

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: Fate and Behavior

We welcome a guest post today from Stan Ulanski, author of The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic. After the deadly explosion on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana last week, thousands of gallons of oil started pouring into the waters of [...]

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