New This Month: April

Happy April! We have a bunch of new books publishing this month. You can find the full list, including a bunch of new in paperbacks, on our Hot Off the Press page. Plus, if you want updates in your inbox every month about new titles and what’s happening at UNC Press you can sign up for our monthly eNews.


Oconaluftee: The History of a Smoky Mountain Valley by Elizabeth Giddens

“A deep dive into one valley of the mountain borderlands of the antebellum South, the Civil War, and industrialization. Giddens makes this amazing place come alive by connecting the stories of prosperous and less prosperous people from vastly different walks of life.”—Margaret Lynn Brown, Brevard College

“An engaging exploration of how people lived their lives in the face of historical change and how they fought, shared, and endured. In the struggles of valley residents, readers may see their own struggles and be reminded just how far the stereotypes of Appalachia differ from the realities and complexities lived out in the Oconaluftee Valley.”—Tom Lee, East Tennessee State University

Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South by Sarah McNamara

Ybor City is poised to make valuable contributions to women’s history, labor history, urban history, and Latinx history. Through McNamara’s focus on Cuban women laborers and organizers at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, we learn valuable lessons about three generations of Americans in a southern city.”—Perla M. Gurrero, University of Maryland

Ybor City will become a benchmark work in Latino history, labor studies, and the U.S. South.”—Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine

Making Moral Citizens: How Faith-Based Organizers Use Vocation for Public Action by Jack Delehanty

“An immersive, thoughtful study on the context and practices of progressive religious organizing for social justice. Grounded in outstanding qualitative research, Delehanty’s book delivers fresh insight into the relationship between religion and politics.” —Gerardo Martí, author of American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency

“Delehanty emerges here as an important new voice on the religious and cultural underpinnings of social movements—and perhaps the scholar best positioned to bridge conversations between faith-based organizers and their secular counterparts.”—Richard L. Wood, University of New Mexico

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States by Stephen Kantrowitz

“A much-needed intervention into the Indigenous history of North America and the history of the early American republic. For most people, Native history east of the Mississippi ends with removal, but Kantrowitz centers Indigenous people and nations within the story of westward expansion of the United States and reframes that expansion as a brutal struggle for control of Indigenous lands and a protracted contest to define the terms of inclusion and exclusion for Native peoples, white settlers, and free and enslaved Black people.”—Michael Witgen, author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia by Tamika Y. Nunley

“This brave, important study poses haunting questions about the legal system during slavery. Through detail that is both rich and harrowing, Tamika Nunley uses the capital cases of enslaved Black women and girls to show how their alleged crimes challenged immoral laws and exposed the fictitious nature of justice in America. It will profoundly shape future histories of race, gender, and carceral regimes.”—Kali Gross, author of Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso and co-author of A Black Women’s History of the United States

“Each of the stories Nunley tells stuns and horrifies in its own particular way.”—Rebecca Anne Goetz, New York University

Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism by Margaret M. Power

“This fascinating story often decenters the party’s history from Pedro Albizu Campos and illuminates lesser-known and unknown characters while also decentering the history of the party from a strictly Puerto Rican setting. A fine read!”—Kirwin Shaffer, Penn State University–Berks College

“Breaks important new ground in the study of twentieth-century Puerto Rican politics. Powers’s evidentiary base is strikingly broad, reaching from newspapers in multiple countries to oral history interviews to documents obtained via archives on no fewer than three continents.”—Michael Staudenmaier, Manchester University

Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State by Kathryn Walkiewicz

“Walkiewicz draws on an impressive range of sources and scholarship to consider Indigenous and Black agency, conflict, alliance, and contestation against white supremacist ideologies behind state formation. This work is an intellectually and ethically compelling contribution to vital conversations in and between Indigenous studies, African American studies, and settler-colonial studies.”—Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), University of British Columbia

Reading Territory is a rigorous examination of how Black and Native dispossession were carried out not simply at the level of nation but rather at more granular scales of state formation, law, and policy.”—Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Brutal Campaign: How the 1988 Election Set the Stage for Twenty-First-Century American Politics by Robert L. Fleegler

“A welcomed and refreshing corrective to the current historiography. This is good old-fashioned political history.”—Steven M. Gillon, University of Oklahoma

“In a skillfully plotted blow-by-blow account of the well- and lesser-known facets of the 1988 presidential race, Fleegler contextualizes the election’s infamous gaffes and ignominious events to reveal what they portended about the political dynamics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”—Lily Geismer, Claremont McKenna College

White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship, and Political Wayfaring in Haiti by Grace Sanders Johnson

“Sanders Johnson has written an innovative and much-needed history of Haitian women’s political thought and organizing across national borders, challenging readers to rethink twentieth-century Haitian history and expand their understanding of Black feminisms, Black nationalisms, and Black women’s role in defining what is socially and politically possible.”—Brandon Byrd, Vanderbilt University

“Sanders Johnson’s meticulous research, attentive reading, and beautiful prose take readers on a journey through the political thought and activism of the Haitian women who sought to carve spaces for themselves within and beyond the nation.”—Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Duke University

Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman, Second Edition by Mary Jane Treacy

The second edition of Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman transports students into the bohemian section of New York City known as an epicenter of rebels, artists, and seekers of personal transformation. Assuming roles as residents of “the Village,” students gather at Polly’s restaurant to re-create discussions about feminism, marriage, family, work, and community. A faction of students in suffragist roles seek the community’s support for extending the franchise to women, while others in roles as labor organizers appeal to the community for help raising funds to support an ongoing strike.

Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh by Jessica D. Klanderud

“A compelling history of Black Pittsburgh communities that focuses on African Americans’ engagements with, and class politics–infused conflicts around, the streets.”—Clarence Lang, author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75

“This fascinating and historically rich read offers a significant contribution to African American history generally and African American urban history specifically.”—Earl Lewis, author of In Their Own Interests: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia

Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America by Ava Purkiss

Fit Citizens arrives at a moment when historians are asking new questions about Black women’s beauty culture, activism, and intra-racial class politics. Purkiss provides a sophisticated analysis of Black women’s citizenship and body politics that makes for an exciting, deeply researched, and important book.”—Erica L. Ball, author of Madam C.J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon

“This is a smart, compelling, and imaginative book that illuminates the meaning of fitness in the lives of everyday African American women, both historically and in the contemporary moment.”—Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession

Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America by Felicia Arriaga

Behind Crimmigration is a deep dive into the messy local politics of immigration policy in the United States today.”—César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Ohio State University, and author of Migrating to Prison and Crimmigration Law.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for scholars and students to have access to the story Felicia Arriaga tells us about local immigration law enforcement in North Carolina. Based on a wealth of data and field research, Arriaga’s arguments about racialized social control add to the conversations surrounding immigration enforcement and tell a powerful story at the same time.”—Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism