The free market in housing works for many people, especially those with access to a good education, a stable job, adequate compensation, and decent health care. But not everyone has those things, and the Depression made us understand that it was not always because of personal failings. Continue Reading James Wolfinger: Home Sweet Home: Race and Public Housing in Philadelphia
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
No sooner had I written the last blog post about representations of the South on reality television than another show made it to the air—TLC’s Bama Belles. It seems unlikely that “belle” is an appellation anyone would apply to women who don camouflage to hunt or are ready to start a bar fight. Still, the conscious decision by the show’s… Continue Reading Karen L. Cox: For Whom the Belle Tolls
Think of the Wikileaks’ release of State Department cables as one of your holiday gifts that will keep on giving . . . and giving and giving. Julian Assange and Company got generous just before Thanksgiving. A steady dribble from the quarter-million purloined documents should keep us happily diverted well into the new year and perhaps beyond. But what kind… Continue Reading Wikileaks is a gift – but what is it worth?
We welcome a guest post from Hannah Gill, author of The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State, who updates us on recent political activity regarding the Latino immigrant community in Durham, North Carolina.–ellen <br /> On November 15, 2010, Durham City adopted a resolution supporting recognition of the Matricula Consular card as a… Continue Reading Hannah Gill: Durham and the Matricula Consular
UNC Press author Karen L. Cox draws from some of my favorite not-so-guilty pleasures in a guest post about representations of the South in reality television and popular culture. Her forthcoming book, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, examines how entertainment, advertising, and the media construct a romanticized view of Southern culture that, until… Continue Reading Karen L. Cox: The South…In Reality
We welcome a guest post this Hanukkah from Marcie Cohen Ferris, author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South , which we’ve just released in paperback and which the Chicago Tribune called “fascinating reading mixed with delicious recipes.” In this post Ferris recalls her childhood as a religious minority in her Arkansas neighborhood. You can catch her… Continue Reading Marcie Cohen Ferris: A Happy Southern Hanukkah
We welcome a guest post from Marc Stein, author of Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe. Beyond examining liberal rulings that deal with birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity, Sexual Injustice also offers an in-depth account of the profoundly conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. In a guest post last month, he traced gay rights legal… Continue Reading Marc Stein: Justice Kennedy and the Future of Same-Sex Marriage
Proponents of military force learned from Vietnam that their freedom of action depended on insulating the public from the effects of war. Contractors were an ingenuous solution to the problem of a public squeamish about fighting and killing. Continue Reading Election 2010: Making the Wars Go Away
We welcome a guest post today from Carolyn de la Peña, author of Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda. In her book, de la Pena sheds light on the invention, production, marketing, regulation, and consumption of sugar substitutes such as saccharin, Sucaryl, NutraSweet, and Splenda. In this post, she describes how these “sweet cheats” have… Continue Reading Carolyn de la Pena: What’s that diet soda teaching you?
The midterm election campaign now approaching the home stretch has brought with it striking but fairly empty calls to action–from the Tea Party frenzy over fiscal virtue to a president exhorting his base with the banal promise of “moving America forward.” But this and all the other lamentable features of our democracy, it is worth stressing, are nothing new. Many… Continue Reading American Democracy and the Challenge of Globalization
As we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, we welcome a guest post from Hannah Gill, author of The Latino Migrant Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State. In the book, Gill offers North Carolinians from all walks of life a better understanding of their Latino neighbors, bringing light instead of heat to local and national debates… Continue Reading Hannah Gill: Immigrant Youth and the High Stakes of Higher Education
On Monday the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the biologist who helped develop in vitro fertilization (IVF). As a New York Times op-ed noted, the honoree is “a man who was reviled, in his time, as doing work that was considered the greatest threat to humanity since the atomic bomb.” Thirty-two years later, there are millions of healthy,… Continue Reading Karey Harwood: IVF Kids: Are They Really All Right?
As the Supreme Court opens its 2010-2011 session today, we welcome a guest post from Marc Stein, author of Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe. Focusing on six major Supreme Court cases, Sexual Injustice examines the more liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity in Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Eisenstadt, and Roe alongside a… Continue Reading Gay Rights and the Supreme Court: The Early Years
Continuing our special focus on First Amendment Day today, we welcome the following guest post from someone situated at the intersection of law and literature. Poet Katie Bowler places her own experience with book burning in the context of the history of books as weapons used in attempts to devalue the beliefs of others.–ellen The recent threat by a fringe-element… Continue Reading Katie Bowler on the Need to Respect Books That Other Cultures Value
As the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus celebrates First Amendment Day today, we welcome a guest post from legal scholar and professor William Marshall, who teaches at the UNC Law School. He reminds us that with our freedom from government intrusion comes the responsibility for public engagement.–ellen Humorist, social critic, and cartoonist Walt Kelly once famously wrote,… Continue Reading William Marshall on the Rights and Responsibilities of the First Amendment
On July 26, a mural named SERVICE was dedicated at UNC’s School of Government in the Knapp-Sanders Building. The mural depicts a gathering of African-American leaders at the counter of a diner, painted by Colin Quashie as a creative interpretation of the historical 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in. We are featuring each of the eight panels in a series, highlighting… Continue Reading A Womanist Reading of “Service: Panel 8—Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy” or “Anna Julia Cooper and Willa Player”
As we kick off Banned Books Week, we welcome a guest post today from someone committed to the freedom to read. Erica Eisdorfer is more than just a booklover, she’s a novelist and a bookseller, too, and she’s had first-hand experience on the censorship front.–ellen Banned Books Week 2010 is the 29th annual celebration of our freedom to read. The… Continue Reading Erica Eisdorfer: Reader, Writer, Bookseller, Defender of Your Freedom to Read
We welcome a guest post today from Andrew J. Kirkendall, author of Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy. In his political biography of Freire (1921-97), a native of Brazil’s impoverished northeast who developed adult literacy training techniques that remain influential today, Kirkendall gives new perspectives on the history of the Cold War, the meanings of radicalism, and… Continue Reading Paulo Freire, Lula, and the Next Step for Brazil
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