Language is potent, a truth confirmed by President Obama’s recent, reluctant decision to escalate the U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war. The President has given every sign of wanting to give priority to “nation building at home.” Important to popular welfare, this course is arguably also indispensable to shoring up the sagging foundation on which U.S. global influence rests. An electorate pinched economically and a federal government living beyond its means is going to impose international constraints. Obama is right to consider popular discontent and national insolvency big deals that deserve urgent attention.

Despite this carefully calculated commitment to national recuperation and international restraint, Obama has fallen prey to the old familiar axioms with their continuing power to shape thinking in Washington and the terms of policy debate. Read the arguments of the interventionists determined to see the Assad regime ousted. They speak of “resolve” that U.S. leaders have to demonstrate to a watching world. They point to a “responsibility” that the United States has to live up to. They invoke “interests” that demand protection. They talk of “credibility” at stake.

Each of these vaporous notions is advanced with great certitude. Each draws its strength from a foreign policy discourse that has over some seven decades served as the natural language of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Free of any detailed demonstration of the truths they encapsulate, these magic words depend on notions ingrained in the nationalist imagination to carry the day. Precisely because of its ritualistic quality and its association with nationalist and policy orthodoxy, the appeal to resolve, responsibility, interest, and credibility do not invite discussion or scrutiny. The mere pronouncement suffices. Thanks to this gossamer stuff, those clamoring for more decisive U.S. action in Syria have entangled Obama.

Yet the world in which this vocabulary gained currency has changed. This is the point that critics of deeper involvement in the Syrian crisis have made in a variety of ways. The Middle East which the interventionists with their heads filled with old truisms seek to manage is in the grip of new regional sentiments and under the sway of rising regional powers. No less important, the shape of the international community has changed with the rise of new powers impatient with U.S. dictation and uncomprehending in the face of ritual language coming out of Washington. Finally, the domestic world in which old catchwords are supposed to mobilize support is more recalcitrant. A U.S. population polarized and pinched has problems enough at home. Any attempt to decisively sway the outcome of the fighting in Syria would deepen the disarray.

Language is in its potency a trap—in this case an inducement to action even when careful consideration warns of potentially dire consequences. Put differently, the axioms handed down from earlier policy practice have demonstrated their capacity to overrule prudent calculation.

That insight leaves us with a set of genuine questions:

• Do proponents of intervention not recognize a world transformed—or do they see changes but think they can ignore or reverse them? Do they really think the imagined glory days of the World War II and the Cold War when the magical words became orthodoxy can really be restored?

• How long do the consequences of costly and even counterproductive decisions have to pile up before the justificatory language is discredited? Or does the accumulating damage to U.S. standing and material conditions make the comforting familiarity of the old language even more attractive?

These questions by their very nature suggest the United States is in the throes of transition, and the answers, if only we knew them, would tell us how long and difficult that transition will be.

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Michael H. Hunt is Emerson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author or editor of eleven books, including Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (with Steven I. Levine), The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance, and A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives. Read his other guest posts on this blog or visit his website.

Today we welcome a guest post from Andrew Cayton, author of

In the following guest post, Cayton describes how his intrigue in the personal letters of prominent nineteenth century figures, and the complex psychologies within, inspired a book that is historical in content but borrows from romantic narratives in form and tone.

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Love in the Time of Revolution is in part a response to a long simmering dissatisfaction with the antiseptic neatness of my own scholarship. More than three decades ago, doing research for a dissertation on political culture in early Ohio, I went through the papers of a prominent figure in nineteenth-century Cincinnati. It quickly became obvious that I was not going to find much about politics. Most of the letters were from the man to the fiancée he had left behind in Rhode Island. Their topics were personal and quotidian. I should have moved on to the next collection. But I couldn’t.

Two dead people were suddenly no longer dead. They were a young woman and a young man in love: flirting, quarreling, and imagining possibilities. When she joined him in Cincinnati and the letters abruptly stopped, I was disappointed and seriously frustrated. No longer privy to their conversations, I would never know what happened to them. Factual details I could find: when their children were born, where they lived, when they died. But as living people, they had ceased to exist. I know no longer knew them.

The pleasure the perusal of this correspondence afforded me did not entirely assuage my feelings of guilt about indulging in a frivolous diversion from real work. You’re a historian, I reminded myself. If you want to write about a love affair, write a novel. It took a long time to realize just how mistaken I was. Innovative studies of women, gender, sexuality, family, literature, and history itself persuaded me that romantic love was an important subject of historical inquiry. But while scholars taught me a lot about the structures of thought and emotion, they did not teach me much about the process of thinking and feeling. The problem was as much a question of form and tone as content.

My most useful conversations about this rhetorical challenge were with the people who became the central characters of Love in the Time of Revolution: Mary Wollstonecraft, Gilbert Imlay, William Godwin, Fanny Imlay Godwin, Mary Hays, and Mary Godwin Shelley, among others. I made their acquaintance in desultory fashion. I started reading books published in North America and Great Britain between 1754 and 1815 looking for women and men who would resist, maybe defy, and certainly subvert my scholarly inclination to drain them of life in order to categorize them. I wanted to know them as something more psychologically complex, more unfinished, less defined than disembodied figures quoted in support of an argument. If I could, I would follow them embracing the radical possibilities of self-government, enduring the consequences of their choices, and striving to make sense of them.

Meeting these people as interlocutors more than as subjects, I learned how much they had to teach me. Like I, they were less interested in what individuals did than in how and why they behaved as they did and, as important, in the highly contingent stories they told about themselves in retrospect. They preferred to explore these questions within the still relatively new genre of novels, or personal histories. Relating the entangled lives of imagined women and men, they confronted the limits of human power, human comprehension, and human liberty. They emphasized mistakes, misunderstandings, and mutual confusion, narrating experience as a fluid, erratic, and frequently contradictory mixture of personal and public moments, expectations and regrets. Above all, they suggested that individuals who spurned social commerce under the illusion that they could manage on their own were doomed to misery and failure.

Conversations with these friends—or more precisely, engagement with their writing—led me to rethink my assumptions about the relationship between history and literature. I had no interest in creating fiction. I like the discipline of history, especially the requirements that I support what I say with evidence and that I not ignore inconvenient evidence. But I wanted to write a book with emotional as well as intellectual depth. And so, borrowing elements of form and tone from fictional personal histories, I attempted a narrative of a love affair informed by the sensibility of a novelist.

I hope readers will find in Love in the Time of Revolution a history of the relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and the American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, two strangers falling in and out of love, and of the ironic and often painful impact of their choices on a host of people, including us. If I’m lucky, readers will encounter a history of women and men working their way through lives shaped not just by war, revolution, capitalism, and politics, but by hope, love, anger, melancholy, fear, grief, remorse, and hope again, all within the rapidly shifting language, conventions, and assumptions of English-speaking people around the North Atlantic at the turn of the nineteenth century.

But for me, the book always has been and always will be a personal history, as I like to imagine the women and men whose choices and reflections fill its pages would have wanted it to be. I miss them, these people with whom I have conversed for much of the last decade of my life, if only because they would understand better than anyone why the process of writing Love in the Time of Revolution was ultimately more satisfying than seeing it fixed forever in print.

Andrew Cayton, University Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University, is author of Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818, and co-author, with Fred Anderson, of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000.

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Q: At the broadest level, what is this book about?

A: This is the story of the red wolf, its flirtation with extinction, and its restoration to the wild. The red wolf is smaller than a gray wolf but has a huge story, and I think it is more fascinating than any other wolf I’ve come across. The book is a history of the species, as best we understand it, but it’s also a story about the people who have worked to recover the red wolf—those who have helped coax it from the brink of extinction into one of the earliest, if not the first, Fish and Wildlife Service first captive-breeding programs of a carnivore in the U.S. It’s also a story about those who are helping today to reintroduce it to a portion of its former historic range. It’s a story about nature, wildlife management, conservation science, and people coexisting with a major reintroduction program for an imperiled, and not always liked, carnivore. I like to think it’s the most complete story ever written of the red wolf as a species and the trajectory of its intersection with humans, who have both hurt and helped this native southeastern predator.

Q: Who was this book written for?

A: First and foremost, it was written for people who love to learn about our nation’s wildlife. When I began learning about the red wolf I searched long and hard for a current book to read so I could learn more about Canis rufus—but I couldn’t find a single current book that addressed the breadth of the animal’s history, the scientific research on its origins, and the history of the recovery program. That’s when I realized that I’d have to write the book I wanted to read. Ultimately, it’s written in a way that breathes fresh air into the older parts of the red wolf’s history, while bringing a first-person cinematic narrative approach to the more modern parts of its story. I think anyone with a love for nature, wildlife conservation, the natural history of endangered species, or the scientific and day-to-day work of animal reintroduction programs will appreciate this book.

Q: Why do you refer to the red wolf as North America’s other wolf?

A: Most Americans are aware of the iconic gray wolf, Canis lupus, and its reintroduction to the Northern Rocky Mountains, even if they aren’t wildlife lovers, conservationists, or affected ranchers; yet even many devoted wildlife lovers are completely unaware that there is a separate species of wolf in North America called the red wolf, Canis rufus. And even fewer people are aware that the red wolf evolved solely in North America, unlike the gray wolf, which colonized our continent from a source population that arose in Eurasia. Historically, red wolves likely ranged from central Pennsylvania south to Florida and west to central Texas and southern Illinois; they covered most of the south and central East. Ecologically, red wolves live and function similar to other wolves: they live in extended family units; the breeding pair bond and produce young over many breeding seasons, often spending their entire adult lives together; and they eat medium- to small-sized prey, from white-tailed deer to nutria and rabbits. So, here is a wolf that represents the first wolf to be reintroduced in the U.S. and yet the public remains largely unaware it even exists! I find that so strange! This lack of awareness, and the lack of conservationists supporting the red wolf, intrigued me from the very first time I learned of this species.

Q: Are red wolves really red?

A: One of my favorite quotes from the book is when a red wolf advocate says she first expected the wolves to have “I Love Lucy red hair.” But they don’t. I describe it as a forest red, like the reddish hue of dried pine straw lit by a golden summer sunset. The red of their coats is really a cinnamon or umber dusting on the backs of their ears and running down their shoulders and legs. But red wolves are mostly tawny with brownish and black guard hairs, whitish fur lining their lips, and lighter fur on their undersides. The name “red wolf” was a common name used locally in central Texas that later became popularized over the animal’s entire southeastern range.

Q: What happened the first time you saw a wild red wolf?

A: My perception of what red wolves are was challenged the first time I saw one. I was shadowing a red wolf biologist at Sandy Ridge, a facility within the Red Wolf Recovery Area in northeastern North Carolina, where wolves from the captive breeding program are housed and wild wolves are kept temporarily for medical treatment or recovery. When we walked into the pen of a wild female recovering from severe mange, we saw deer bones littering the ground and smelled rotting flesh. She was resting in a small metal box that functions like a den, and when the biologist lifted the lid and we peeked inside, she was surprisingly meek. Our faces were only a body length away! It was obvious that she was intensely uncomfortable having us stare at her, but I would have thought a wild wolf would growl, or leap at us, or make some show of ferociousness. Apparently some do, but
this one simply snuck sidelong glances at us and then quickly turned her gaze away. In fact, she was so scared that she pooped. It forced me to ponder if red wolves were less fierce than gray wolves, or at least less fierce than what the wolf archetype would have us believe. It was very revealing.

Q: What piqued your interest to explore the red wolf’s story?

A: The extreme nature of the red wolf’s plight caught my attention from the beginning. I have a soft spot for endangered species in general. In my view, they truly are the least among us and lack voices to speak for themselves. In many ways, the red wolf’s story is one that has been around for several decades, since they first were identified as going extinct; perhaps their story is old enough that it has faded from public awareness. During the research, I was surprised to learn that red wolves were the first species for which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designed a captive breeding program as a component of a recovery effort with the intention of reintroducing the captive-bred animals to a portion of their historic range. Other endangered species captive breeding and reintroduction programs, like those for the black-footed ferret, California condor, and Mexican gray wolf, have benefited from lessons learned from the pioneering red wolf reintroduction program. In many ways, the red wolf program created a recovery road map for many other imperiled species.

Q: How many red wolves are left and what is their greatest threat?

A: In the wild, there are about 100–120 red wolves. In captivity, there are roughly 200 spread throughout forty-one breeding facilities across the nation.

In the mid-1970s, the Fish and Wildlife Service could find only seventeen individuals that they believed to be true, unhybridized red wolves left in the wilds of extreme southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. Of these, only fourteen were able to breed and contribute to the current restored population, so the species faced an extreme genetic bottleneck just four to five decades ago. Some would say their greatest threat is genetic swamping through hybridization with coyotes, but I disagree. The Fish and Wildlife Service has shown that they have the tools to manage the species in the wild against hybridization with coyotes, and I go into great detail in the book as to how they do this.

So if you accept that the red wolf’s future will never be unmanaged, hybridization is not its greatest threat. Rather, I think the biggest threat is climate change, which threatens its current coastal habitat, nearly one-third of which could be swamped if the coast of North Carolina experiences a one-meter rise in sea level.

Additional reintroduction sites are needed in order to ensure their future presence in the wild. However, the landscape of the red wolf’s former historic range has changed fundamentally in the past fifty years, and this poses problems for finding suitable sites where they might thrive today.

Q: You took a first-person approach for the writing and shadowed several Fish and Wildlife Service biologists over the course of a season to write about the modern recovery efforts. What are some of the experiences that most stand out in your mind?

A: There are two very vivid experiences that get at vital aspects of the modern management of the red wolf. First, I was lucky enough to not only witness but participate in a puppy fostering event. This is where the biologists place zoo-born red wolf puppies into wild dens. It’s a way of transferring genes from the captive breeding program into the wild population without having to release “naive” zoo-raised wolves, and it’s also a way of augmenting the wild population’s numbers. On the summer day when I participated, I was able to place one of the zoo-born puppies into the wild den—a small pocket dug out of moist earth and well hidden beneath thick myrtle bushes. My heart was pounding. It was really transformative to know that that particular puppy had been born in the Lincoln Park Zoo but would be nurtured and raised in the Albemarle Peninsula by a wild red wolf pair.

The second experience was not nearly so warm and fuzzy, but was important nonetheless. I was shadowing a biologist one winter as he set and monitored leg-hold traps in the recovery area to capture certain juvenile red wolves so that they could be fitted with radio collars, which are a key component of the management program. The collars help biologists to prevent the wolves from hybridizing with coyotes. It’s very difficult to entice a wild wolf to step on a two-inch round pan and get caught in a trap, especially given how large an area they range over! But on this particular morning, the biologist had caught two wolves—one he was targeting, but the other, an older sibling, had already been caught and collared. He didn’t need to recatch the older sibling, but there she was, and she’d nearly chewed off two of her toes in the time she’d been stuck in the trap. Her injury was a bitter pill for both of us to swallow, and the biologist was deeply upset. It was difficult to see her injury, and to balance that with the knowledge that the trapping has to occur. Trapping and collaring the wild red wolves is the best way to keep tabs on them and prevent them from pairing with coyotes. As cruel as it may seem, this is the core management aspect, combined with other techniques, for safeguarding the species from being genetically swamped by coyote genes. When you look at the big picture, two wolf toes seems a small price to pay. Still, it was a gut-wrenching and uncommon event to witness.

Q: Some people think red wolves and coyotes are the same thing, or at least similar animals. Are they?

A: No, red wolves are a different species. This question is really asking, What is a red wolf? It also points to how red wolves and coyotes are related. We know that coyotes split from the Canis lineage leading to gray wolves by about 1.8 million years ago. The fossil record and other studies at the molecular level agree on that quite nicely. But a burning question has been, Where did the red wolf come from? A few years after the first red wolves were reintroduced in 1987, a science paper concluded based on genetics that coyotes and gray wolves had mated and produced what we now call the red wolf. In other words, the paper indicated that red wolves arose as a recent hybrid of coyotes and gray wolves. If this were true, then red wolves may not qualify for endangered species protections, so this caused a big stir.

More recent genetic research, however, has pointed to a starkly different answer to the origins question. The current line of thought—and the one I embrace in the book—is that red wolves branched off from an ancestral coyote lineage tens of thousands of years ago. In this scenario, they do not have a hybrid origin at all; instead, they evolved into a distinct species. But they were then displaced and disrupted by the early European settlers of the eastern United States. There is a close genetic relationship between red wolves and coyotes because of their shared ancestry. This explains why modern red wolves and coyotes interbreed so easily. Many people don’t understand that this kind of process is relatively common among species that are geologically young—that is, species that are only tens of thousands of years old as compared to millions of years old.

Q: A conservation effort like the one to save red wolves is really a global one. What are some of the ways this story carried you beyond the red wolf’s wild range into those national and international networks?

A: Dozens of zoos across the United States have participated in the captive breeding program to safeguard the red wolf from extinction. I traveled to Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, clear across the country from the wild red wolf population, to interview the director of the Red Wolf Species Survival Program. The SSP would not exist without the broad network and cooperation of the zoos, wildlife parks, and breeding facilities that participate voluntarily in the red wolf’s captive breeding program. In a way, the captive breeding program is the flip side of the reintroduction program, kind of like the underbelly that is not often exposed. It was eye-opening to learn about the measures they took to care for individual wolves in the hopes that they would breed and produce offspring in order to increase the red wolf’s collective genetic diversity. In the book, I write about observing a procedure on a female red wolf’s uterus, and about efforts to cryopreserve red wolf sperm for artificial insemination experiments. So while the book takes a very close and in-depth look at the wild red wolf population in northeastern North Carolina, and the people working to restore red wolves to the wild, I also dial out to the bigger perspective of the national network of professionals working in zoos and other facilities to conserve and expand the captive population of red wolves.

Internationally, the red wolf’s origin science bleeds into a third species of wolf present in North America around the northern and eastern reaches of the Great Lakes in Canada. So when I was researching the leading red wolf origin theories, I found myself learning about the eastern Canadian wolf and interviewing several Canadian researchers about this other cryptic wolf, Canis lycaon. Wolves are wide-ranging creatures so it’s not surprising that the story of the diminutive wolf traditionally known from the southeastern forests actually stretches up into Canada. And wolves and their related wild canids range all across the planet, so when you dial out to the broadest perspective it’s easy to make comparisons between the red wolf’s story and that of other small, isolated, and misunderstood wolf populations such as the wolves of Italy, those of the Iberian peninsula in Spain, the geographically isolated Ethiopian wolf, and even the imperiled dingo of Australia, which is threatened with extinction through hybridization with common dogs.

The red wolf’s story is very much the broader story of many wolves and wild canids globally that have been misunderstood and persecuted until their populations shrank to near extinction, but that were then revived or stabilized with modern conservation efforts. The question, of course, is what trajectory these wolves will take from here.

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T. DeLene Beeland is a nature and science writer living in Asheville, N.C. Her work has appeared in the Charlotte Observer and Wildlife in North Carolina, among other publications. You can follow her on Twitter @tdelene.

Sheila Kay Adams, author of Come Go Home with Me (photo by Garius Hill, courtesy of www.nea.gov)

It is a great honor to share the news that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently announced UNC Press author Sheila Kay Adams as a 2013 NEA National Heritage Fellow.  A native of Sodom Laurel community in Madison County, North Carolina, Adams was introduced to the tale-telling tradition by her great-aunt “Granny,” well-known balladeer Dellie Chandler Norton. Adams is a seventh-generation ballad singer and has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over thirty years. In a letter of support for her initial nomination to the NEA,  the director of performing arts at the North Carolina Museum of Art, George Holt,  says:

Sheila Kay Adams is the key figure in carrying forward to this day the tradition of unaccompanied ballad singing that has enriched her community for more than two centuries, promoting its beauty throughout our country and beyond, and insuring that it will be perpetuated by younger generations of singers well into the 21st century.

A former Public school teacher, Adams currently lives in western North Carolina and now pursues a career of sharing the music, stories, and heritage of her mountain culture. In this video, Adams sings her rendition of “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” but beforehand she tells a short story about her mother and emphasizes the importance of holding onto cultural heritage.

The National Heritage Awards were established in 1982 by Bess Lomax Hawes, then director of the Folk Arts Program at the NEA. It is a lifetime achievement honor modeled after Japan’s “National Living Treasures” and seeks to highlight folk artists and their continued contributions to the nation’s diverse cultural background. The NEA selects approximately ten to fifteen fellows annually and on their website provides biographies of all current and previous honorees.

For more on Sheila Kay Adams and the community she grew up in, UNC Press has two books that might be of interest:

Come Go Home with Me is a collection of stories from Sheila Kay Adams that provides a rare portrait of a distinctive mountain community and charts the development of an artist’s unique voice. The tales range from stories of heroic, sometimes fierce, mountain settlers to the comic adventures of local drifters and tricksters, from magical childhood encounters to adult rites of passage. We meet Bertha and the snake handlers, local preacher Manassey Fender (who “looked like a pencil with a burr haircut, in a suit”), and Adams’s beloved grandfather Breaddaddy, who taught her about life and death with an enchanting graveyard dance. But perhaps the most powerful character depicted here is “Granny,” whom Adams calls “the most exciting person I have ever known and the best teacher I would ever have.” By weaving these remembrances into her stories, Adams both preserves and extends a rich artistic heritage.

When photographer Rob Amberg first met Dellie Norton and her adopted son, Junior, in 1975, Norton was seventy-six years old and had lived most of her life in the small mountain community of Sodom Laurel, North Carolina, surrounded by close kin, tobacco fields, and the rugged wilderness of the southern Appalachians. Sodom Laurel Album traces the growing relationship between Norton and Amberg across the next two decades, years marked by the seasons of raising and harvesting food and tobacco and by the gatherings of family and friends for conversation, storytelling, and music.

Richly evocative images are interlaced with stories of the people of Sodom Laurel and with Amberg’s own candid journals, which reveal his gradually growing understanding of this world he entered as a stranger. The book also includes a CD featuring Dellie Norton, Doug Wallin, and other singers of traditional Appalachian music. Through words, photographs, oral histories, and songs, Sodom Laurel Album tells the moving story of a once-isolated community on the brink of change, the people who live there, and the music that binds them together.

In an interview with North Carolina Bookwatch host D. G. Martin, Hadler discusses his motivations and goals for writing The Citizen Patient. Hadler explains how this new book fits into his series on health-care and how he ultimately hopes to teach readers to be proactive in their medical care and enter into a more balanced conversation when dealing with medical professionals.

Nortin M. Hadler, M.D., M.A.C.P., M.A.C.R., F.A.C.O.E.M., is professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attending rheumatologist at UNC Hospitals. He is author of Rethinking Aging: Growing Old and Living Well in an Overtreated Society, among other books.

This interview originally aired on UNC-TV on May 9, 2013. For more interviews with UNC Press authors and others visit  NC Bookwatch.

Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo (c. 1896-1992) reigned as Argentina’s preeminent domestic and culinary expert from the 1930s through the 1980s. An enduring culinary icon thanks to her magazine columns, radio programs, and television shows, she was likely second only to Eva Peron in terms of the fame she enjoyed and the adulation she received. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including her own interviews with Doña Petrona’s inner circle and with everyday women and men, Rebekah E. Pite’s

In the following excerpt (pp. 71-74), Pite explains how the release of Petrona’s illustrated cookbook El Libro de Doña Petrona combined the techniques and ingredients from the nation’s diverse immigrant demographics. By mixing French, Spanish, and Italian styles of cooking with the traditional criollo home cooking, Petrona’s cookbook was able to represent the immersion of transnational identity in Argentina during the twentieth century.

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The expectations of both the author of this cookbook and the journalist who reviewed it were shaped by the specificity of women’s roles in Argentina, especially in the capital. Young urban women’s lifestyles were changing as they spent more time studying and socializing and less time doing domestic chores at home. Their increasing education, literacy, and employment meant that they often lacked, or, perhaps even more important, felt they lacked, the knowledge to run a home and be a “good” homemaker. At the same time, Argentine women’s relatively high levels of literacy and education meant that they were capable of learning these kinds of skills through reading about them. In contrast to many other Latin American nations at this time, free primary education in Argentina had by 1930 drawn two-thirds of children into public school classes. Almost all second-generation immigrants residing in Buenos Aires by the mid-1930s were literate, even though their parents sometimes were not.^[1]

But what kinds of culinary education would an ama de casa in 1930s Argentina benefit from? In addition to knowing how to set and serve an elegant table, Petrona suggested she should know how to cook, present, and serve food in a modern way. She preached a recipe-and-measurement type of cooking and implied by contrast the inferiority of previous cooking methods, which relied principally on approximations and received experience. In addition to providing a chart for converting common measurements in cups and tablespoons to grams, she enjoined her reader to use exact quantities and quality ingredients and to follow the baking instructions to “the letter.”^[2]

While such instructions emphasized a more “scientific” approach to cooking, the recipes and the illustrations often celebrated the art of presentation. Petrona encouraged readers to shape, mold, and decorate dishes to make them more appealing.^[3] As with the sundae recipe for El Hogar that opens this chapter, she emphasized the importance of decorative flourishes that women could create. Thumbing through her cookbook, one is struck by the hand-drawn color illustrations that depict piped potato roses, hard-boiled eggs fashioned into bunnies, fruit pyramids, and cakes built to resemble houses, soccer fields, and churches. Several people I spoke with recalled how they would flip through these illustrations as children as if they were looking through a picture book. By visually demonstrating the aesthetic appeal of stylized food, Petrona incorporated the artistry for which she had become famous as a demonstrator for Primitiva. Championing the contemporary notion that the human transformation of natural things could improve them, she emphasized the artistry of the modern woman who prepared such creations.^[4]

Petrona applied this modern culinary artistry to a wide range of dishes and recommended that her readers do the same. Reflecting Argentina’s history and her own background, Petrona’s recipes crossed class, ethnic, national, and regional boundaries—ranging from French haute cuisine to Italian and Spanish fare to criollo home cooking. Therefore, even as Petrona included some explicitly nationalistic recipes, such as a cake with an Argentine national flag, along with some typical criollo cuisine, like empanadas, she presented French, Spanish, and Italian dishes as equally important for Argentine amas de casa to master.^[5] Such variety is evidenced by just one page of illustrations of dishes from her cookbook. French vol-au-vents shared the page with Italian-style pizza, two dishes with local fowl (Pichones Rellenos a la Cacerola, a stuffed young partridge in a stylized casserole, and Martinetas en Bella Vista, a roasted bird indigenous to the region), and two versions of empanadas (one from her native province of Santiago del Estero and the other popular in Buenos Aires). In this way, El libro de Doña Petrona was less self-consciously nationalistic than other contemporary cookbooks published in places with longer-standing shared culinary traditions like France, India, and Mexico.^[6]

Petrona’s eclectic approach reflected the transnational complexity of national identity in Argentina during this time. In fact, the combination of recipes in this cookbook expressed the self-conscious internationalism of elites in Buenos Aires, who often sought to define Argentina as a cosmopolitan nation of European immigrants. Her inclusion of criollo dishes, as well as the creolization of many foreign preparations, mirrored the ways in which European foods and identities were transformed in Argentines’ daily lives. El libro de Doña Petrona did not simply assemble French, Spanish, and Italian recipes but rather tailored them to the local environment. For example, Doña Petrona added dulce de leche (South American milk caramel) to the Spanish flan and filled one version of her Italian cannelloni with humita, a traditional creamed corn eaten regularly in northwestern Argentina. Given such culinary mixing, Argentine cuisine (like that of the United States) is best understood as a combination of immigrant and regional specialties, as opposed to a singular cuisine of its “own.”^[7]

Nevertheless, if Argentina did lay claim to a unique culinary tradition, it would stem from the preponderance of beef in the diet. Petrona did include a substantial number of recipes with red meat–sixty-four in all. However, she actually underrepresented beef in her cookbook in comparison to its availability and its ubiquity on Argentine tables.^[8] In contrast, she provided some ninety recipes for chicken and fish, two foods that were often quite expensive or difficult to obtain.^[9] There are several possible explanations, including her interest in emulating European preferences for fish and fowl and the Argentine preference for simple preparations of beef.^[10] The most celebrated dish, asado, consists of beef ribs that men have traditionally cooked outdoors over an open fire or a grill. Petrona did not include a recipe for an outdoor asado in her cookbook, despite the tremendous status and popularity of this preparation. Instead, she elected to include a recipe, Asado al Horno, which is a version of this dish made in the oven. By moving the cooking process indoors, Petrona adapted a traditional dish to the new technology of the gas stove that she promoted for Primitiva. At the same time, she reinforced men’s expertise and authority over the classic way of making this celebratory meal outside and asserted women’s expertise and authority with this dish (and others) in the kitchen.

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From Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Pterona, Women, and Food by Rebekah E. Pite. Copyright © 2013 by The University of North Carolina Press.

1. ^[1] Torado, Historia de la familia, 194-99. ↩
2. ^[2] Gandulfo, prologue to El libro de Doña Petrona, 1st ed. (1934). ↩
3. ^[3] Caldo, “De mujer a mujeres.” ↩
4. ^[4] Ibid. ↩
5. ^[5] As discussed in chapter 5, only in the 1970s would a self-consciously nationalistic criollo cuisine emerge in Argentina. ↩
6. ^[6] See Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine”; and Revel, Culture and Cuisine. ↩
7. ^[7] This is not to suggest that these other places, like France, have entirely bounded cuisines, but rather that they often have deeper and more consistent (if still quite region-specific) shared culinary roots. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat. ↩
8. ^[8] Caldo, “De mujer a mujeres.” ↩
9. ^[9] Gandulfo, El libro de Doña Petrona, 1st ed. (1934). ↩
10. ^[10] Caldo points to the first explanation and Tobin to the second. Caldo, “De mujer a mujeres”; Tobin, “Manly Acts,” 53-54. ↩

[This article is crossposted at firspeoplesnewdirections.org.]

In Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, scholars Amy Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien have edited a critical new collection of essays that shed light on the complex issues surrounding federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. In this excerpt from the introduction, the editors examine the multifaceted benefits, critiques, and challenges that have accompanied federal recognition for the Mashantucket Pequot, especially after their construction of the world’s largest casino complex. Like other contributions to this collection, the Mashantucket Pequot example demonstrates the complex issues that accompany federal recognition, especially when situated in the broader legal, economic, and racialized terrain of the United States.

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In New England [ . . . ] the myth of Indian disappearance that was generated in the colonial period was reinvigorated in the late twentieth century as tribal nations seeking acknowledgment from the U.S. federal government garnered unprecedented media attention, as did several newly recognized tribal nations that launched hugely successful gaming operations after their federal recognition was secured. Then, as now, the native peoples of New England have faced the charge that they are not “real Indians” and are thus undeserving of recognition by the U.S. government.^[1]

As explained by Renee Ann Cramer, a leading scholar on federal acknowledgment and racialized reactions to it, the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation’s federal recognition by an act of Congress in 1983 and their creation of what is now the largest casino complex in the world, Foxwoods Resort Casino, elicited “intense scrutiny and controversy.” Not only has their casino “been a political hot potato” since the mid-1990s, but their identity as Indian people has been subjected to relentless assaults as well.^[2]

Fomenting in public reactions to the Mashantuckets’ casino and in the context of rancorous debates that erupted over other tribal acknowledgment cases in Connecticut at the time, the racist stereotype of the “casino Indian” took hold in the region and has had an increasingly negative impact on public attitudes toward federal recognition.^[3] As Cramer argues in a recent essay, a new anti-Indian racism that is “fueled by casino success” has transformed “Pequot” into “a trope for everything a ‘real’ Indian is not,” and the backlash against the Mashantuckets’ economic success—and against Indian gaming more generally—”has turned into a backlash against tribal recognition.”^[4]

Thus, the “Connecticut effect” offers an important introductory example of the complexity and contentiousness of recognition and of the way in which it is enmeshed with wider U.S. economic and sociopolitical concerns. Racism and its impact on the rights and futures of indigenous peoples is certainly one of those wider concerns. In the Mashantucket Pequot case, we are compelled to consider how racial assumptions about Indian identity have shaped public assessments of the right to federal recognition.^[5] Likewise, we must question how the anti-Indian racism Cramer describes has hampered possibilities for expanding public knowledge of the specific histories of the native peoples in Connecticut, deflecting questions about the historical foundation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century federal acknowledgment efforts and the long history of tribal-state relationships.^[6]

In spite of what Mark Edwin Miller aptly terms the “deluge of press coverage” that has rendered the Mashantucket Pequots “the dominant face of recently acknowledged Indian tribes in the United States,” what does the public know about the Mashantuckets’ pre-twentieth-century history as a state-recognized tribal nation?^[7] Or about the state recognition of other tribal nations in Connecticut? A recent Connecticut Post editorial, “As Wealth Looms, Recognition Fades,” makes a point rarely addressed in the local media: Despite all the public attention to the issue of tribal gaming in the state and the uproar over the federal recognition efforts of the Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, and Golden Hill Paugussett tribal nations, Connecticut’s long relationship with the indigenous peoples within its borders—evidenced in its own statutes and laws dating back to the colonial period—appears to be ignored. “You could look it up,” the editorial chides.^[8]

More than just tribal nations’ historical relationships with the state have been obscured in the anti-Indian/anticasino discourse that has flourished in the region since the opening of the Mashantucket Pequot casino. Also overlooked is a central question that would help a public audience better understand what is at stake for tribal nations and communities that seek recognition: What choices are available for native peoples in the United States today as they contend with problems of unemployment and lack of adequate access to health care, housing, and education?

As Algonquin scholar Paula Sherman has phrased it in a recent analysis of the Mashantuckets’ struggle for sovereignty and the political and social costs of gaming, “What is required to make sustainable Native communities in the twenty-first century?” Casinos, Sherman contends, have become “the most important tool Native people have today for national renewal”: Mashantucket Pequot “dreams of community revitalization only happened through the adoption of gaming.”^[9] Nonetheless, Sherman emphasizes that native people have serious concerns and disagreements about whether gaming is an economically sustainable and culturally appropriate means of indigenous nation building.^[10] And as anthropologist Jessica R. Cattelino has argued, a persisting colonial mentality in the United States expects “real Indians” to be poor and casts the economic successes of tribal nations that operate casinos as historical anomalies proving that they have “lost” their “genuine” Indian culture.^[11]

Just as federally acknowledged tribal nations seeking to develop viable economies through gaming have been pummeled by racial notions and myths to which they are expected to adhere, so too are they subjected to federal and state legal controls. Federal regulations imposed on Indian gaming in 1988 compel tribal nations to enter into financial agreements with states to operate casinos with slot machines. Gaming thus has created a new way for states to appropriate tribal nations’ resources and potentially to undermine their sovereignty.

After their federal acknowledgment, Mashantucket Pequot tribal leaders agreed to a compact with the State of Connecticut that allowed for the establishment of their casino. The compact requires that the Mashantuckets pay the state 25 percent of their gross annual revenues from casino slot machines. The Mohegan tribe’s government did likewise after it became federally acknowledged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1994, and it also pays the state 25 percent of slot revenues each year. As of 2011, the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribal nations have paid the state a combined total of more than 5 billion dollars since the signing of their compacts with the state in 1991 and 1994, respectively.^[12]

The enormity of the state’s financial gain as a result of tribal gaming must not be overlooked. As the former dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law, Nell Jessup Newton, remarked during a public forum on federal acknowledgment held in Hartford in 2005, Connecticut “could not balance its budget” without the payments it receives from these two tribal nations.^[13] Yet today the Mashantucket Pequots’ tribal government faces a major financial crisis, “struggling under a mountain of 2.3 billion in debt,” as a Connecticut newspaper reports, while dealing internally with concerns about tribal leadership on matters of fiscal policy.^[14]

As Sherman points out, whether gaming can be a viable means of asserting and defending tribal sovereignty in the long term remains under debate. What does seem clear, however, is that Mashantucket Pequots’ recognition by the federal government produced new political, cultural, and economic dilemmas as well as important new possibilities for revitalizing and sustaining the tribal nation.

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From Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook, edited by Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien. Copyright © 2013 by The University of North Carolina Press.

1. ^[1] See, e.g., Cramer, “Cash, Color, and Colonialism in Connecticut,” in Cash, Color, and Colonialism, 137-62; Amy E. Den Ouden, “‘Race’ and the Denial of Local Histories,” in Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 181-208; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Laurence M. Hauptman, “There Are No Indians East of the Mississippi,” in Tribes and Tribulations: Misconception about American Indians and Their Histories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 93-108. ↩
2. ^[2] Cramer, Cash, Color, and Colonialism, 137. ↩
3. ^[3] Seneca legal scholar Robert Porter has argued that the emergence of the rich casino Indian stereotype may elicit “more openly predatory” attitudes toward native peoples from nonnatives in the United States, intensifying what he describes as the “new termination era” of federal Indian policy. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, he contends, is a cornerstone of the U.S. government’s late twentieth-century efforts to undermine tribal sovereignty by giving excessive powers to individual states to appropriate native wealth, with the new justification being that all Indians may now be labeled as rich casino Indians. See Robert Odawi Porter, “American Indians and the New Termination Era,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 16 (2007): 474-75. ↩
4. ^[4] Renee Ann Cramer, “The Common Sense of Anti-Indian Racism: Reactions to Mashantucket Pequot Success in Gaming and Acknowledgment,” Law and Social Inquiry 31 (2006): 325-26. ↩
5. ^[5] The stigma associated with the Euro-American racial category “black Indian” and its application as a term intended to denigrate the Indian identity of particular native communities has had a significant impact on the way in which the public assesses (or is instructed to assess) the history and rights of tribal nations in Connecticut whose membership includes individuals of both Native American and African American ancestry. Golden Hill Paugussetts, for example, were subjected to viciously racist ridicule in a 1993 editorial cartoon in a major Connecticut newspaper, the Hartford Courant, which depicted Paugussetts as frauds and swindlers whose supposed devious character was conveyed as “obvious” in their “black” appearance (see Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest, 201-7). That the long and complex history of relations between Native and African American peoples in the United States remains largely misunderstood or disparaged as wholly destructive of “authentic” Indian identity is a matter taken up in Gabrielle Tayac, ed. IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2009), which documents the impact of entrenched notions of racial purity and the racist practices and governmental policies that have denied the legitimacy of kinship and shared histories of struggle among Native and African American peoples. As Angela A. Gonzales explains, for example, racial categories imposed and normalized by the U.S. Census in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “pigeonholed [Native Americans and African Americans] into official governmental divisions” that maintained white supremacy and facilitated control of people whose complex and interwoven histories defied the established racial hierarchy in the United States (“Racial Legibility: The Federal Census and the (Trans)Formation of ‘Black’ and ‘Indian’ Identity, 1790-1920,” in IndiVisible, ed. Tayac, 67). ↩
6. ^[6] State recognition of the Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, Eastern or Paucatuck Pequot, Schaghticoke, and Golden Hill Paugussett tribal nations has been described as the “unique legal status” of “five indigenous tribes” whose direct relationships with Connecticut began in the colonial period (Stephen L. Pevar, The Rights of Indians and Tribes [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002], 292). However, as Koenig and Stein discuss in detail in this volume, state recognition is also a political and legal status that has emerged in more recent negotiations between tribal nations and individual states. Legal scholar Matthew L. M. Fletcher argues that “a new and dynamic relationship between states and Indian tribes is growing”: “Many states now recognize Indian tribes as de facto political sovereigns, often in the form of a statement of policy whereby the state agrees to engage Indian tribes in a government-to-government relationship mirroring federal policy” (“Retiring the ‘Deadliest Enemies’ Model of Tribal-State Relations,” Tulsa Law Review 43 [2007]: 75). There is also concern that agreements between tribal nations and individual states may undermine indigenous sovereignty and subordinate it to the sovereignty claimed by states. See, e.g., Jeff Armstrong, “Deadly Embrace: From State Sovereignty to Cooperative Agreements in a Public Law-280 State,” Indigenous Policy Journal 19 (2008), http://indigenouspolicy.org/Articles/VolXIXNo2/DeadlyEmbrace/tabid/154/Default.aspx. ↩
7. ^[7] Mark Edwin Miller, Forgotten Tribes, 2. ↩
8. ^[8] “As Wealth Looms, Recognition Fades,” Connecticut Post, October 15, 2011. ↩
9. ^[9] Paula Sherman, “Gaming and IGRA: A Tool for Self-Determination or Elimination?” Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development 2 (2002): 80-83. ↩
10. ^[10]

    See, e.g., Robert B. Porter, who argues that gaming constitutes “auto-colonizing behavior”: “The gaming phenomenon demonstrates just how deeply the Immigrant nation’s economic values have been assimilated by Indigenous peoples. This aggressive pursuit of excess wealth reflects an incorporation of the values underlying the colonizing nation’s economic system” (“Pursuing the Path of Indigenization in the Era of Emergent International Law Governing the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Yale Human Rights and Development Journal 5 [2002]: 149). ↩

11. ^[11] Jessica R. Cattelino, “The Double Bind of American Indian Need-Based Sovereignty,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2010): 248. ↩
12. ^[12] This current total amount of revenues accrued from the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos by the state of Connecticut is reported by the New England Gaming Summit (www.newenglandsummit.com). The gaming compacts, along with details regarding casino revenues paid to the state, may be viewed at the website of the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, Gaming Division (www.ct.gov/dcp/cwp/view.asp?a=4107&q=480854). A January 2010 report of the Senate Republican Office, “Where Does All the Casino Money Go?,” lends insight into state legislators’ sense of entitlement to the enormous sums extracted from the Mashantuckets and Mohegans since their compacts were signed. Republicans and Democrats squabble over control and allocation of “casino money,” which seems not to be enough to satisfy the state: In 2009 alone, “the state received nearly $378 million in revenue from the casinos. While this is indeed a lot of money it is down considerably from the over $430 million the state received in 2007, certainly a sign of these troubled economic times” (www.senaterepublicans.ct.gov/press/witkos/2010/012010.html). ↩
13. ^[13] “Federal Recognition or Flawed System: Pride, Politics, and Connecticut’s Native American Tribes,” public forum hosted by the Connecticut Historical Society and WNPR/Connecticut Public Radio, March 15, 2005. The forum featured presentations by Nell Jessup Newton and three other speakers: Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal; Chief Richard Velky of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation of Kent, Connecticut; and Nicholas Bellantoni, Connecticut state archaeologist. The forum attracted a large audience and took place at the height of public controversy over the federal acknowledgment of the Eastern Pequot and Schaghticoke tribal nations in 2002 and 2004, respectively. For further discussion of the Eastern Pequot and Schaghticoke federal acknowledgment cases, see the essays in this volume by Torres and Den Ouden (both of whom attended the March 2005 forum). ↩
14. ^[14] “Poor Choice for Mashantucket,” New London Day, October 6, 2011. The editorial also notes that both the Mashantuckets’ and Mohegans’ casinos “have suffered losses and been forced to lay off workers in recent years in large part because of a global economic downturn.” ↩

The time to batten down the hatches is quickly approaching for folks in North Carolina. The National Weather Service is in the middle of their National Hurricane Preparedness Week, running from May 26–June 1. Their website provides a helpful Tropical Cyclone Preparedness Guide with meteorological information on hurricanes, the many hazards that occur both during and after the storm, and a checklist of precautions to ensure your safety through the six-month hurricane season. Hurricane season in the Pacific officially began May 15, while hurricane season for the Atlantic runs June 1 through November 30.

The list of storm names for the 2013 hurricane season was also announced by the National Hurricane Center this month.  You can see the full list of names of storms for the next five years at the National Hurricane Center website. (They even provide a helpful pronunciation guide.) The lists are recycled every six years, but if a storm one year is especially devastating, that storm name will be retired from the recycled list. So we won’t be seeing another Sandy, or Floyd, or Andrew—in name, at least.

Hurricane season is serious business in North Carolina, partly because our coastline sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean beyond neighboring states. The Outer Banks serve as a protective barrier to the inland, but those islands often take a beating from ocean storms. Hurricane Hazel in 1954 stills stands as a benchmark of destruction for many in North Carolina, but in recent years hurricanes are annually showing their force in our state. This summer, UNC Press is publishing North Carolina’s Hurricane History: Fourth Edition, Updated with a Decade of New Storms from Isabel to Sandy, by hurricane expert Jay Barnes. This newest edition charts the more than fifty great storms that have battered the Tar Heel State from the colonial era through Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, two of the costliest hurricanes on record. Drawing on news reports, National Weather Service records, and eyewitness descriptions, Barnes emphasizes the importance of learning from this extraordinary history as North Carolina prepares for the inevitable disastrous storms to come.

Jay Barnes is director of development for the North Carolina Aquarium Society and lives in Atlantic Beach, N.C. He is also the author of Florida’s Hurricane History and co-author of Faces from the Flood: Hurricane Floyd Remembered. Barnes often appears on media outlets such as The Weather Channel, NBC Nightly News, and The Discovery Channel, and can be followed on his website and blog.

I’ve been a regular consumer of Barack Obama’s public statements, looking for a window into his mind. To be sure, it’s a risky business. Speech writers always to some degree get in the way, and the statements themselves can be more responses to political exigencies than expressions of faith. But those statements are by default some of the best evidence we have on the president’s perspective. (We don’t get fairly full declassification of pertinent records until some three or four decades after the event.) Moreover, my experience over the years suggests that presidential speeches often line up reasonably well with internal discussions as revealed in later declassified documents.

I confess approaching with low expectations what was advertised as a speech on the controversial drone strikes. Most of Obama’s speeches on international issues have struck me as stale and vacuous, reflecting none of the subtlety and insight that he has shown himself occasionally capable in other areas of public concern.

Reading the address delivered 23 May at the National Defense University surprised me not just because it went well beyond the drone issue to address the conduct of the war on terror. More than that, Obama took some significant steps toward dealing with the war in terms of classical realism.

Responding to one realist proposition, Obama sought to carefully balance cost and benefit. The costs included notably the sacrifices made by members of the armed services and a massive diversion of material resources badly needed at home. Having rejected out of hand an open-ended prosecution of the war, he suggested that the lives, money, and effort invested so far had achieved significant results but had reached the point of diminishing value. Time to rebalance the commitment.

Responding to a second realist notion, Obama raised the relationship between ends and means—between U.S. goals and the methods used to realize those goals. The struggle to defend the homeland could undermine and distort vaunted American values. Practices such as detention, surveillance, and summary execution of citizens collided with ultimate U.S. goals. Similarly, while drones no less than special forces operations were attractive ways of striking at this particular enemy, the effect on the policies of states in the region and on public opinion could damage U.S. standing and prolong rather than shorten the conflict.

Alas, Obama’s realism has badly failed him on one major, difficult point—the very nature of the conflict that Americans call the war on terror. What a realist examination might suggest is, first of all, the current conflict that Obama along with most Americans conventionally imagine beginning on 9/11 is rooted in a long history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Any modern history of the region will trace in detail the pervasive pattern of U.S. intervention not to mention the resulting opposition. Read the words of Qutb and Khomeini onward to bin Laden on the close connection between U.S. actions and the resentment that has in turn bred resistance.

That resentment persists, fed by continued U.S. meddling in all sorts of ways in countries across the region. Obama’s speech leaves no doubt that the meddling must continue. The region has to work out its destiny not on its own terms but with U.S. guidance ranging from diplomacy to political, social, and cultural development and under the shadow of an extensively deployed U.S. armed forces. “Moderates” in particular need backing against “extremist elements” and “violent extremists” in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, while Washington should help “modernize economies, upgrade education, and encourage entrepreneurship” in an echo of the old and troubled faith in nation building.

Obama, who may think his war is winding down, has failed as as realist in another way. He does not take the perspective and intentions of the enemy seriously. It may be comforting but not smart to write off the other side as a collection of deranged minds delighting in terror. This dismissive view does not alter the fact that the foe has resorted to resistance that military jargon describes as asymmetrical and that social sciences label as “the weapons of the weak.” Fighting the United States conventionally is a lost cause (ask Saddam Hussein), but random violence visited on the enemy population can be hard to counter.

Nor does stereotyping supply a good sense of the enemy’s commitment. The determination and sense of righteousness that matters in this war has come from various politicized forms of Islam. They have helped to inspire the dedication, solidarity, and sacrifice indispensable to sustained confrontation. Obama’s speech works hard to keep this insight at bay. It issues the usual denials that the Americans are at war with Islam and makes the predictable distinction between good Muslims who reject an ideology of violence and those led astray by the mistaken conviction “that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West.” Those on the wrong side of this imagined divide are hostile not because they have reason but because they are the product of “deep-rooted problems like poverty and sectarian hatred.”

Obama the realist can get only so far before lapsing into familiar clichés. Perhaps his imagination has constrained him or the politically loaded popular images of the enemy have intimidated him. Nonetheless he deserves credit for making significant progress toward a policy couched in more sensible terms. Let’s hope in time he and other policymakers will move toward a more realistic public assessment of the other side of the “global war on terror.” The first step might be to find another name for this conflict.

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Michael H. Hunt is Emerson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author or editor of eleven books, including Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (with Steven I. Levine), The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance, and A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives. Read his other guest posts on this blog or visit his website.

In his conversation with David Thomson, Link discusses events in Civil War Atlanta and important figures in the rebuilding of the city. He also talks about his approach to teaching the Civil War. (running time: 16:36)

If interested in hiking the trails, Bruce A. Sorrie’s A Filed Guide to Wildflowers of the Sandhills Region: North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia will help you to identify the the beautiful flora of the area. Meanwhile, Kelly Alexander’s Peaches: a SAVOR THE SOUTH cookbook^TM will give you the perfect recipes for the region’s plethora of peaches.

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Featuring over 600 wildflowers, flowering shrubs, and vines, this user-friendly field guide is the first to focus on the rare, fragile lands and species of the Sandhills region of the Carolinas and Georgia. Characterized by longleaf pine forests, rolling hills, abundant blackwater streams, several major rivers, and porous sandy soils, the Sandhills region stretches from Fayetteville, North Carolina, southwest to Columbus, Georgia, and represents the farthest advance of the Atlantic Ocean some 2 million years ago.

Wildflowers of the Sandhills Region is arranged by habitat, with color tabs to facilitate easy browsing of the nine different natural communities whose plants are described here. Bruce A. Sorrie, a botanist with over 30 years of experience, includes common plants, region-specific endemics, and local rarities, each with its own species description, and over 540 color photos for easy identification. The field guide’s opening section includes an introduction to the Sandhills region’s geology, soil types, and special relationship to fire ecology; an overview of rare species and present conservation efforts; a glossary and key to flower and leaf structures; and a listing of gardens, preserves, and parklands in the Sandhills region and nearby where wildflowers can be seen and appreciated. Wildflower enthusiasts and professional naturalists alike will find this comprehensive guide extremely useful.

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Whether you swear by peaches from Georgia or from South Carolina, there’s no doubt that the fruit is sacred to southerners. From the moment the first mouthwatering Elberta variety was grafted in the 1870s, the peach has been an icon of summertime and a powerful symbol of the South’s bounty. Peaches showcases the sweet richness of this signature fruit. Native Atlantan and award-winning food writer Kelly Alexander explores the fruit’s history, offers advice for selecting, storing, and cooking, and reflects on the place of peaches in southern identity.

Peaches includes forty-five recipes ranging from classic desserts to internationally inspired preparations. In this book, the desserts come first, and all the recipes—from The Best Peach Ice Cream and Roasted Peach-Basil Chicken to Pickled Peaches and Peach Clafoutis—will leave us certain that we should all dare to eat a peach, as often as we’re able.

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Check back at our NC Icons series to find great reads for other state icons.

In the following excerpt from The Strange History of the American Quadroon (pp. 146-149), Clark shows how fiction associated the trope of the tragic mulatto with New Orleans, while sensationalized travel writing generated the myth of the plaçage complex, suggesting that mixed-race women entered relationships as concubines.  

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By the 1850s the foreign qualities that designated New Orleans the natural habitat of the American quadroon were understood without the botanical and sartorial signifiers that accompanied the figure in its earlier appearances. The distinguishing physical markers of the orientalized quadroon herself, however, assumed a canonical quality. The “masses of glossy black hair, waving along the brows and falling over the shoulders in curling clusters,” of Mayne Reid’s 1856 quadroon heroine, Aurore, could have belonged to Ingraham’s Azèlie. And Reid’s depiction of Aurore’s eyes upheld the convention that made them the centerpiece of a quadroon’s distinction. “The eye I fancied, or remembered well—better than aught else,” Reid’s white lover relates. “It was large, rounded, and of dark brown colour; but its peculiarity consisted in a certain expression, strange but lovely. Its brilliance was extreme, but it neither flashed nor sparkled. It was more like a gorgeous gem viewed by the spectator while at rest. Its light did not blaze—it seemed rather to burn.”^[1] Marie St. Vallé, the quadroon mother in James Peacocke’s Creole Orphans, conformed to the model set by Ingraham’s Azèlie. “Her form was of that voluptuous, flowing mould, whose every action is grace,” and her eyes, of course, “were large and dazzling, as ebon as her hair.” And Marie shared one other signature trait of her literary forebears. “As she entered the room, a smile illuminated her beautiful face and showed her pearly teeth.”^[2]

Mayne Reid’s Aurore served as the prototype for the most famous tragic mulatto of them all, Zoe, in Dion Boucicault’s melodrama, “The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana.” The play opened in New York in 1859 to immediate notoriety North and South and has been frequently revived, including an Off-Broadway spinoff staged in 2010.^[3] Zoe is the daughter of a quadroon slave and a white father who has freed her. She and a young white man, George Peyton, are in love with one another, and the wealthy belle of a neighboring plantation, Dora Sunnyside, is in love with George. The evil overseer, Jacob M’Closky, desires Zoe for himself and uncovers an obscure obligation of her father’s that not only renders her a slave but requires that she be auctioned to settle the debt. Zoe is taken to the New Orleans slave market, where M’Closky bids for her against Dora, who has nobly sold her own plantation so that George’s beloved will not be sold into sexual slavery. After Zoe is sold to M’Closky for the outrageous sum of $25,000, she commits suicide with poison. The scene of the apparently white Zoe on the auction block was the dramatic highpoint of the play, and with each restaging of the play New Orleans grew more powerfully linked to the figure of the tragic mulatto.^[4]

Through the medium of the fictional quadroon, New Orleans was imaginatively construed as a place apart in the American polity, the only place in the nation where the strange fruit bred of slavery and white desire grew and met its inevitable, tragic destiny. Tragic mulattos did occasionally turn up in other locales. Richard Hildreth’s novel The Slave (1840) and Emily Preston’s Cousin Franck’s Household (1853) were set in Virginia, and John Townsend’s Neighbor Jackwood in Vermont.^[5] The majority, however, were situated in New Orleans, giving the impression, to the antislavery reading public at least, that this was the place within the United States that was most, if not exclusively, tainted by the most odious features of slavery. In New Orleans, fathers sold their daughters into slavery, saw them auctioned off to settle debts, or died before they could free their children, condemning them to lives of misery in the fields or worse. New Orleans, with its population of beautiful quadroons, became the place to buy and sell women who, except for the “remarkable and undefinable expression of the eyes, which always betrays their remote Ethiopian descent,” appeared to be white. New Orleans was the only place in the United States where a man could purchase the makings of his own harem.^[6]

Fictional quadroon heroines were all either enslaved or faced the threat of being sold into slavery. Even Ingraham’s Moroccan princess Azèlie, though born free and noble, grew up believing that she was not free, dreading being peddled by her mother to the highest bidder for sex.^[7] The living quadroons described by journalists and visitors to New Orleans, however, were understood to be free women of color who chose to ally themselves with white men in an arrangement that Ingraham described as “a system of concubinage that has been without a parallel even in Oriental countries.”^[8] The New Orleans quadroons could not be bought as slaves against their will, but they agreed to exchange their favors on specified terms. This system came to be known in the twentieth century as plaçage. Since it is impossible to find good evidence for the use of the term plaçage by antebellum New Orleanians, the assemblage of features that defined it for twentieth-century authors is referred to here as the plaçage complex. The plaçage complex played a role as important as that of the tragic mulatto in distinguishing New Orleans and its mixed-race women. Abolitionists, fed on the fictional fare of the tragic mulatto, expected New Orleans to be filled with “white” slaves catering to the sexual appetites of immoral men. Other visitors to the city, informed by sensationalized travelers’ accounts, hoped for a glimpse of one of its renowned kept women of color, and perhaps contemplated engaging one for themselves. The literature that generated this prurient anticipation was nearly as prolific as the fictional evocations of the tragic mulatto designed to snuff it out.

The plaçage complex was delineated in nonfiction with a repertoire of standard elements. Foremost among them was a belief that New Orleans free women of color did not marry but instead formed relationships with white men on a contractual or quasi-contractual basis. The women were presumed to have chosen this way of life because law forbade their marriage to white men and they held themselves above men of their own racial background. Such a partnership was generally described as having been brokered by a woman’s parents, with terms including a house and provision for any children born of the relationship. Once the terms of the arrangements were settled, the woman was known as a placée, and it was understood that she would restrict her sexual favors to the man who supported her. The term of the engagement might be for months or years, but the common assumption was that it lasted until the white lover married a woman of his own race. New Orleans placées were often portrayed as wealthy heiresses to the fortunes of their white fathers, well educated and accomplished. Demure and proper in public, they were renowned for the pleasure they brought their lovers in private.

The origins of the plaçage complex have their roots in the figurative and literal immigration of the Dominguan mûlatresse to New Orleans, as we have seen.^[9] Subsequent accounts of it in English echo one another so consistently that it is difficult to credit any of them as original.^[10] All the same, these are the sources that not only informed travelers who visited antebellum New Orleans but have served as the basis of historical examinations of the city’s free women of color. And as we shall see in the next chapter, this literature created a circular feedback phenomenon that fed the invention and proliferation of activities in New Orleans designed to satisfy the market for encounters with quadroons aroused by the earliest accounts. The discursive construction of the quadroon and the plaçage complex in nineteenth-century travel literature may be nearly as fanciful as the tragic mulatto’s, but it was equally constitutive of the image of New Orleans free women of color that took up residence in the antebellum American mind and remained rooted there in the twentieth century.^[11]

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From The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark. Copyright © 2013 by The University of North Carolina Press.

1. ^[1] Reid, The Quadroon, 125-26. ↩
2. ^[2] Peacocke, Creole Orphans, 10. ↩
3. ^[3] “Letters from Mr. Bourcicault,” New York Times, February 9, 1860, http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/263/ (accessed January 25, 2012); “Pen Sketches for Sunday,” Daily True Delta (New Orleans), December 11, 1859, 1; “The Last of Mr. Bourcicault,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), December 24, 1859, 15; “The ‘Octoroon’ at the Winter Garden,” New York Daily Tribune, October 24, 1861, 8; “‘The Octoroon’ Director Withdraws,” New York Times, June 18, 2010, Section C, 2. ↩
4. ^[4] See Figure 11 and Chapter 6, below. ↩
5. ^[5] Hildreth, The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore; Pocahontas [Emily C. Preston], Cousin Franck’s Household; Trowbridge, Neighbor Jackwood. ↩
6. ^[6] Ingraham, The Quadroone, ix, note 2. ↩
7. ^[7] Ingraham, “The Quadroon of Orleans,” 265, suggests that many quadroons were actually enslaved, though they lived as free. ↩
8. ^[8] Ingraham, The Quadroone, ix. ↩
9. ^[9] See Chapter 2. ↩
10. ^[10] On the repetitious nature of descriptions of the plaçage complex, see Aslakson, “The ‘Quadroon-Plaçage‘ Myth. ↩
11. ^[11] Ibid. ↩