Trending This Month: May

See what’s trending at UNC Press with this list of the most viewed books on our website this month.

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A New History of the American South edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Laura F. Edwards and Jon Sensbach, associate editors.

“An important book for anyone interested in Southern history. . . . The book’s contributors brilliantly integrate the contents of their separate chapters, each on a distinct era, into a taut, analytical narrative. Throughout, their voices and styles cohere in striking fashion. . . . To learn of the South’s past as it is viewed today by leading historians, this is the book to read.”—Kirkus Reviews(STARRED review)

“A multifaceted narrative of the Southern United States, from histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous Americans to cultural, economic and environmental trends.”—New York Times Book Review

Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation by Cecilia Márquez (September 2023)

“Marquez’s field-changing history of the US South is the first to show us why racial diversity within categories such as ‘Mexican’ or ‘Latino’ matters for the region’s past and future.”—Julie Weise, University of Oregon

Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution by Marlene L. Daut (October 2023)

“By exposing the intellectual contributions of nineteenth-century Haitian scholars and leaders to our modern understanding of freedom and equality, Daut shows the ongoing racism of current intellectual genealogies and offers a new way of thinking about the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies.”—Julia Gaffield, author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution

“This powerful and necessary book challenges us to think differently about the global history of thought.”—Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America by Mbaye Lo, Carl W. Ernst (August 2023)

“Lo and Ernst unshackle new insights and complex truths hidden inside the life and agency of Omar ibn Said. Inshallah, may his free spirit return to his two rivers.”–Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

“This fresh and insightful look at the texts and contexts of Omar ibn Said debunks gross misinterpretations of Omar’s biography and thoughtfully juxtaposes his ‘unfreedom writings’ against the literary genre of formerly enslaved people’s freedom narratives.”—Rudolph T. Ware III, University of California, Santa Barbara

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

2019 Eugene Feit Award for Excellence in Civil War Studies, New York Military Affairs Symposium

“Excellent. . . . a bracing corrective, a slender yet vital volume in the growing library of texts dedicated to dispelling white supremacist talking points.”—New Republic

“Levin’s timely and telling account should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the uses and abuses of history and the power and dangers of mythmaking.”—Library Journal, starred review