The following is a guest blog post by Sarah Abel, author of Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body after the Genome. Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a… Continue Reading Marked by the Past
The following is a guest blog post by Christopher Norment, author of Relicts of a Beautiful Sea: Survival, Extinction, and Conservation in a Desert World. Along a tiny spring in a narrow canyon near Death Valley, seemingly against all odds, an Inyo Mountain slender salamander makes its home. “The desert,” writes conservation biologist Christopher Norment, “is defined by the absence… Continue Reading The Song Remains (Mostly) the Same: Relicts of a Beautiful Sea, Eight Years Later
The following is a guest blog post from Jennifer Jensen Wallach, author of Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America. Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of “soul food” as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions… Continue Reading How Searching for Chex Mix during the Pandemic Heightened my Appreciation for Food Studies
The following is a guest blog post from Alan McPherson, author of Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice. On September 21, 1976, a car bomb killed Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean ambassador to the United States, along with his colleague Ronni Moffitt. The murder shocked the world, especially because of its setting–Sheridan… Continue Reading Letelier, Boric, and Social Justice in Chile
Reblogged with permission from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice Newsletter Robert T. Chase is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY). He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC, 2020). He is also the editor of Caging… Continue Reading Critical Book Spotlight: Dr. Robert Chase
The following is a guest blog post from Alan McPherson, author of Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice. On September 21, 1976, a car bomb killed Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean ambassador to the United States, along with his colleague Ronni Moffitt. The murder shocked the world, especially because of its setting–Sheridan… Continue Reading The Letelier Assassination and the Power of Non-State Actors
The following is a guest blog post from Lane Demas, author of Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf. This groundbreaking history of African Americans and golf explores the role of race, class, and public space in golf course development, the stories of individual black golfers during the age of segregation, the legal battle to integrate public golf… Continue Reading How Martin Luther King Jr. Mastered the Masters
The following is a guest blog post from Jennifer Jensen Wallach, author of Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America. Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of “soul food” as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions… Continue Reading The Hidden Histories of American Food Reform
The following is a guest blog post from Georgann Eubanks, author of Saving The Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction. The American South is famous for its astonishingly rich biodiversity. In this book, Georgann Eubanks takes a wondrous trek from Alabama to North Carolina to search out native plants that are endangered and wavering on the… Continue Reading Author Book Events in the Time of Covid
The following is a guest blog post by Hannah Farber, author of Omohundro Institute & UNC Press published Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding. Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled… Continue Reading What Insurance Wants You To See
The following is a guest blog post by Anima Adjepong, author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra. Beyond simplistic binaries of “the dark continent” or “Africa rising,” Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects–cultural, political,… Continue Reading How Institutionalized Homophobia Silences Dissent in Ghana and What We Can Do About It
The following is a guest blog post by Jonathan Todd Hancock, author of Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. Through varied peoples’ efforts to come to grips with the New Madrid earthquakes, Hancock reframes early nineteenth-century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions amid prophecies, political reinventions, and… Continue Reading An Unexpected Mechanism of Native Dispossession
Guest blog post by Jonathan Todd Hancock, author of Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America In December 1811, a volcano erupted in Asheville. An eyewitness named John Edwards reported the disturbing details to the Raleigh newspaper The Star. After an unusual earthquake, a mountain burned “with great violence,” and cooling lava had dammed up the French Broad River. The din… Continue Reading A Volcano in Asheville
Happy National Barbecue Month! We’re here with a guest blog post from Adrian Miller, author of Ferris and Ferris book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. In this post, Adrian gives us some insight into the life of a black woman pitmaster from nineteenth-century Arkansas named Marie Jean. Don’t miss Adrian’s next virtual event this Sunday,… Continue Reading In The Smoke With Marie Jean: A Barbecue Woman Who Built a Freedom Fund
Guest post by Allyson P. Brantley, author of Justice, Power and Politics series book Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism Boycotts seem to be everywhere these days. Most recently, the April 2021 passage of Georgia’s new, restrictive voting law sparked significant backlash and boycotts – ranging from Major League Baseball’s decision to move the All-Star… Continue Reading Do Boycotts Work?
Guest post by Amy B. Voorhees, author of A New Christian Identity: Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture The reason I wrote this book is because I was intrigued by the distance between differing definitions of Christian Science within academics. Over the decades, these have had varying degrees of alignment with one another and with key primary sources, and I wanted to know how this variation arose. Scholars today agree on some core things about the Christian Science religion. For example,… Continue Reading How A New Christian Identity Came About
Reblogged with permission by ANZASA Online; by Kevin Waite, author of West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire I was born and raised in California, but it wasn’t until I moved to Pennsylvania to begin my PhD that I learned about the history of slavery in my native state. The subject never came up when I was a student… Continue Reading West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire
Guest post by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, whose groundbreaking and critically acclaimed book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century was published one year ago this week. The year since the publication date of our UNC Press book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (FHTE),… Continue Reading Reflecting on the Past Year Since the Publication of From Here to Equality
Happy Earth Week and #EHW2021! Guest blog post by Jason Vuic, author of The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream (available now for preorder, and on sale June 2021) In early April 2021, to honor the U.S. Senate’s “Small Business of the Week,” Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) was in Tampa… Continue Reading Florida’s Environmental Issues and the Price of Unchecked Development
Guest blog post by Pamela Grundy, author of Color & Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality, and Tom Hanchett, author of Sorting Out the New South City, Second Edition: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 Fifty years ago, on April 20, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Swann v. Charlotte… Continue Reading Swann at 50
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