UNC Libraries’ Off The Shelf Author Talk with Warren E. Milteer Jr.

Happy tenth anniversary to University Press Week! This year’s Association of University Presses annual celebration, running from November 8-12, “welcomes all to ‘Keep UP’ with a decade of excellence and innovation.” 

For UP Week’s annual blog tour, today’s specific theme, Listicle, today’s bloggers list what 10 publications best represent their Press during the past decade. 
We encourage you to visit these fellow UP press blogs today to read all about it: Temple University Press, University Press of Florida, University of Chicago Press, University of Cicinnati Press, University of Alberta Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, UBC Press, Central European University Press, Harvard University Press, Fordham University Press, University of Washington Press, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, University of Illinois Press, University of Manitoba Press, University of Georgia Press, University Press of Kentucky

Last month, Warren E. Miller Jr., author of Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South, was featured on UNC Libraries’ Off the Shelf series. Off the Shelf is a collaboration between the University Libraries and UNC Press to present new works on racial and social justice in our history and our world.

On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery’s Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” or simply “free people of color” in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses.

Warren E. Milteer Jr. is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885.