If you’re in the Triangle over the next week, we’ve got so many great events lined up we can keep your dance card full! Book talk & Nature Walk with David Blevins and Michael P. Schafale Wild North Carolina: Discovering the Wonders of Our State’s Natural Communities Sunday, April 3, 2011 3:00 PM North Carolina Botanical Garden Chapel Hill, NC… Continue Reading Jump into Spring! Some great events coming up
Today we remember the late B. W. Wells, plant ecologist, conservationist, and author of The Natural Gardens of North Carolina. On March 26th, Rock Cliff Farm, Wells’s place of retirement, is celebrating B.W. Wells Heritage Day, with tours, activities, giveaways, and exhibits that recall the life and work of this pioneering ecologist. His work lives on through this event and… Continue Reading Celebrating B.W. Wells
One of the goals of the Toshiko Takaezu Book Foundation, who contracted with me to act as editor for the book, was that Toshiko would be able to hold it in her hands. It pleases me to no end this was accomplished a week prior to her passing. Continue Reading Peter Held: Remembering Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011)
Marie Rudisill (1911-2006), aka The Fruitcake Lady, was born 100 years ago this Sunday. You may remember her from her appearances on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Maybe you learned about her last fall when Beth blogged about the Fruitcake Festival and announced our new edition of Rudisill’s cookbook, Fruitcake. As we head off to the weekend, we leave… Continue Reading Remembering the Fruitcake Lady on her 100th birthday
When we read about Beyoncé‘s recent photo shoot in blackface, we asked for some historical insight from W. Fitzhugh Brundage, editor of the forthcoming book Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930 (July 2011). The book includes essays from sixteen scholars who depict popular culture as a crucial arena in which African Americans struggled to… Continue Reading W. Fitzhugh Brundage: Beyoncé, Bert Williams, and the History of Blackface in America
In today’s guest post, Leon Fink, author of Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present, reflects on the recent Somali pirate attack on a group of Americans on a private yacht. With piracy on the rise off the Somali coast, the relationship between commerce, globalization, power, and security becomes problematic. Fink… Continue Reading Leon Fink: Oceanic Piracy–A War without Nations
We welcome a guest post today from David Stowe, author of the forthcoming book No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. In his cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music.… Continue Reading David Stowe: Larry Norman, the Bad Boy of Christian Rock
Whose idea was Black History Month? Who picked February to celebrate it? We welcome this brief but informative history of Black History Month from Stephen G. Hall, author of A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, as he lays out the facts and debunks the myths of the celebration’s origins.–ellen There are many misconceptions… Continue Reading Stephen G. Hall: Black History Month: Setting the Story Straight
We recently learned the great news that the LCRM Project has received funding from the Mellon Foundation for the next phase of its work. Here is the full press release. UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL February 10, 2011—The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced today that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $500,000… Continue Reading Great news: Funding renewed for Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement
Shane Maddock, author of Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present blogs for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations at SHAFR.org. In his most recent post, after the ratification of the New START treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Maddock addresses some Cold War-era myths about American nuclear hegemony that… Continue Reading Shane Maddock on the Persistent Nuclear Myths of the Cold War
We present commentary today from Michael Barkun, author of the forthcoming Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11 (April 2011). In the book, Barkun demonstrates that U.S. homeland security policy reflects significant nonrational thinking, and he offers new recommendations for effective–and rational–policymaking. In this post, he addresses changes at the Department of Homeland Security since the arrival of… Continue Reading Michael Barkun: A New Era of Rational Thinking at DHS?
We welcome a guest post today from Kimberley Brown, coauthor (with Shawn Smallman) of Introduction to International and Global Studies. Their new book is a thematic introduction to the intellectual and structural underpinnings of globalization. In this post, Brown considers recent events in Tunisia in the context of how Americans are used to thinking about threats to global security.–ellen Students… Continue Reading Kimberley Brown: Failed States, Global Security, and the Case of Tunisia
We welcome a guest post today from Gregory Downs, author of Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908, which we will publish next month. In the book, Downs argues that the Civil War created a seemingly un-American popular politics rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Faced with anarchy during the… Continue Reading Gregory Downs: Jared Lee Loughner, the Personal, and the Political
We have some exciting news to share with you. As the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed have hinted over the past couple of days, UNC Press is one of five university presses (so far) that are teaming up with online academic content provider JSTOR to make scholarly books available online in a new venture called “Books at… Continue Reading UNC Press to Publish Books Online through JSTOR
Just before our holiday hiatus we were following the story of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s comments to the Weekly Standard about how smoothly the desegregation of schools went in his hometown of Yazoo City. It was his defense of the role of the white Citizens’ Councils (which he later recanted) that prompted a lot of backlash. I was happy to… Continue Reading Civil Rights Memory: Haley Barbour and the New ‘Lost Cause’
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