Atlanta’s white boosters embraced a new narrative about the city’s past which wiped clean the slaveholding past and adopted a message of openness to investment by northern capitalists Continue Reading William A. Link: Atlanta Rising After Sherman
It was not just careers that came to an end in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington. African Americans also lost a claim to their legitimacy as American citizens and participants in the national state. Marked as corrupt and untrustworthy, black Americans have struggled ever since to clear their names as honest and trust-worthy citizens, a struggle that continues into our own time. Continue Reading Eric S. Yellin: Woodrow Wilson’s Inauguration a Disheartening Anniversary
King’s letter scribbled on the edges of a newspaper is a democratic critique and draws attention to public aspect of faith traditions. In a democracy, faiths must always be self-critical and publicly criticized. Continue Reading Randal Maurice Jelks: Remembering “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Only during the Poor People’s Campaign did activists of so many different backgrounds—from veterans of the labor and southern civil rights movements to Chicano, American Indian, antiwar, and welfare rights activists—attempt to construct a physical and spiritual community that addressed poverty and broader issues of social justice for longer than a one-day rally. Continue Reading Gordon K. Mantler: Remembering that Other March on Washington
Politically active and largely urban, the so-called New Negroes of the 1910s through 1930s confronted dilemmas of the modern age when it came to marriage. Evolving ideas about sexuality and gender roles made ideal marriages a moving target. The old politics of respectability confronted a new frankness in matters of sexual expression and new claims of women on personal and economic autonomy. Continue Reading Anastasia C. Curwood: National Black Marriage Day and the New Negro Era’s Legacy
Produced with the cooperation of libraries and archives, the enhanced e-book features twenty letters, photographs, first-person narratives, and other documents, each embedded in the text where it will be most meaningful. Continue Reading New Enhanced E-book: Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens
The argument that an endorsement of immigration reform by the GOP—or, for that matter, by many Democrats—will miraculously translate into more votes by Latinos reflects a simplistic understanding of their experience and history. Continue Reading Gordon K. Mantler: For Latinos, It’s Not All about Immigration
We are honored and delighted to share the news of some of our most recent award-winning books. Hope you’ll join us in congratulating these fine authors. And you may want to consider using some of these books in your classroom or kitchen. Click the cover images or book titles to go to the book page on the UNC Press website,… Continue Reading Award-winning books from UNC Press (updated)
The political influence of black Chicago emerged decades before Obama announced his first candidacy for president, during the years of the Great Migration when tens of thousands of southern blacks relocated to northern cities. Continue Reading Lisa Materson: African American Women, the Great Migration, and the Obama Presidency
Jesus has had a long, exciting, funny, and painful life in America. From the slave ships of the Atlantic Ocean to the Hollywood sets along the Golden Coast, from the visions out of Indian country to the artwork of children, from the firing of bullets to the construction of billboards, Jesus has been born, crucified, and resurrected in America’s racial sagas. Those of the twenty-first century laugh because there is so much to cry over. Continue Reading Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey: Jesus Jokes and Racial Pain
In an excerpt from Bland Simpson’s nonfiction novel Two Captains from Carolina, we get a glimpse of Moses Grandy’s early career as a boatman—the freedom he felt on the water and the opportunities that lay ahead. Continue Reading Excerpt: Two Captains from Carolina, by Bland Simpson
In this video, Bland Simpson reads from his epic tale of race and war, “Two Captains from Carolina,” at UNC’s Bull’s Head Bookshop, November 13, 2012. Continue Reading Video: Bland Simpson reads from “Two Captains from Carolina”
In years to come, he would gain a wider reputation as a moving, eloquent speaker and a fierce debater. But at no time of his life was he a more effective orator than in those first months of freedom on the North Carolina coast. The prodigal ex-slave was always at his best among other former slaves. Continue Reading Excerpt: The Fire of Freedom, by David S. Cecelski
Spielberg based more than 40 of his characters on historical figures; included in this group is Elizabeth Keckley, an enslaved woman whose 1868 book (Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House) UNC Press and the UNC Library republished last year through the DocSouth Books program. Continue Reading Elizabeth Keckley in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”
We are happy to announce UNC Press author James Sweet, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Continue Reading Congratulations to James Sweet, winner of the 2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize
In this video, Sallie Ann Robinson is interviewed about her experience as Pat Conroy’s student on Daufuskie Island and how her life has been changed since then. She says, “I got up every morning just wanting to go to school because this man was here with all this fun stuff to offer.” Continue Reading Video: Sallie Ann Robinson on being Pat Conroy’s student on Daufuskie Island
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