Anne Raver of The New York Times takes a stroll through the gardens of Monticello, where director of gardens and grounds Peter Hatch reveals some of Thomas Jefferson’s trial-and-error (and error, and trial, and error) gardening history. The folks at Monticello restored Jefferson’s original 2-acre kitchen garden about thirty years ago, and have returned to some of the former president’s… Continue Reading Jefferson’s Gardens
Gray Whaley’s new book, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859 is part of UNC Press’s collaborative series with three other presses, First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies. In an interview with the author, the First Peoples blog begins: The mainstream narrative of the founding of Oregon has been described… Continue Reading Interview: Gray Whaley
Until very recently, the term “feminist” was used by those on the right only as a negative descriptor of someone who would invariably be a political foe. Devoted feminists have struggled to set the word free from the negative connotations and reclaim the label as a source of pride, with mixed results, especially among younger generations of independent women whose… Continue Reading Feminism and the Republican Party: Equating Female with Feminist?
Here’s the deal. I’m a dog. And I like to read and travel through time. A few weeks ago, the fine people at UNC Press gave me this nifty time machine. (They think the blue goggles will distract me from the fact that it’s made out of old UNC Press books held together with duct tape. I play along.) Since… Continue Reading See Gus Read…and Time Travel
Leonard Rogoff, author of Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina, will be reading from and signing his book tonight at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh starting at 7:30 pm. Rogoff, a historian for the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina and president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, writes about the life of Jewish people in North Carolina in… Continue Reading Discover the History of Jewish Life in North Carolina – in print, on screen, in person
In the world of U.S. foreign policy, the release of a new National Security Strategy is a big deal. This congressionally mandated exercise offers an opportunity for the executive to grapple with basic issues, and it may even herald the birth of a “doctrine” (as it did for George W. Bush in 2002). The Obama administration rolled out its NSS… Continue Reading The Obama National Security Strategy: “Mush” Ado about Nothing?
The Wall Street Journal‘s got a breezy and abbreviated history of the book all wrapped up in this entertaining six-minute video. Check it out: A fun, snappy little glimpse at a four-hundred-year history, no? But if you want the full history of books in America in all its juicy detail, you can find it in (ahem) actual book form as… Continue Reading The History of the Book: The Long and Short of It
Each month on the UNC Press homepage, we feature a handful of interviews with authors. I’d like to bring them over and share them with you blog readers because they’re so often just fun and interesting. I want to start by introducing Victoria E. Bynum, author of three books with us, including, most recently, The Long Shadow of the Civil… Continue Reading Interview: Victoria E. Bynum
“I have two comments: Number 1, if you’re going to be a writer, don’t go to school to be a writer. Get a pencil and a piece of paper and start writing. Secondly, if there’s anything in this world you can do, do it rather than be a writer. It’s the loneliest, most depressing work in the world.” – Walker… Continue Reading Happy Birthday, Walker Percy
Alan Jabbour, who authored Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians with his wife Karen Singer Jabbour, provides some insight to a grassroots ritual that led to the creation of a federal holiday. –alyssa Many rural community cemeteries in western North Carolina hold “decorations.” A decoration is a religious service in the cemetery when… Continue Reading What is Decoration Day?
We welcome a guest post today from Patrick Cullom, an archivist at Wilson Library on the UNC campus, who has a special connection to the new book by Robert Korstad and James Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America.–ellen Last month I had the pleasure of attending… Continue Reading Behind the Scenes: Archiving the Photographs of Billy Barnes
We welcome a guest post today from Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, author of Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. In her book, Sklaroff argues that New Deal cultural programs supporting notable black intellectuals, celebrities, and artists (including Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, and Richard Wright) represent a key moment in the… Continue Reading Lena Horne and the Irony of Cultural Politics
Tomorrow’s the big day: the NASCAR Hall of Fame grand opening in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Asheville Citizen-Times gives us a little taste of the place. Later this month, five legendary figures from NASCAR history will be inducted into the Hall of Fame: Dale Earnhardt, Bill France Jr., Bill France Sr., Junior Johnson, and Richard Petty. We’ve got no quarrel… Continue Reading NASCAR Hall of Fame Opens
The U.K. edition of A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives hits bookstores across the pond today — just as Britons head to the polls to elect a new Prime Minister. In a previous guest post, editor Michael H. Hunt addressed one of the more striking similarities between the Vietnam War and the current conflict… Continue Reading Victory in Vietnam: The Myth That Won’t Die But Can’t Stand Up
When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans is more than a book we’ve just published — it’s a multimedia project based on interviews with dozens of female military veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book juxtaposes 48 photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of… Continue Reading When Janey Comes Marching Home – Photo exhibit now in Arlington, Va.
It is night. A lone black woman walks through a cornfield in South Carolina. The stars wink above her. Crickets and cicadas grow quiet as she passes and then resume their orchestral humming, now punctuated by the sound of rustling leaves a little farther off. She moves toward an unpainted one-room building. When she gets there, she will have to… Continue Reading Septima Clark, Freedom’s Teacher
When we got wind of Michael Steele’s recent comments about the Republican Party continuing a “Southern Strategy” for the past 40 years, we turned to an expert on southern politics for insight into Steele’s allusion to the Nixon-era strategy of racial exclusion. Michael Perman is author of Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South, which traces the… Continue Reading The Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” Unmasked?
We write today in anticipation of Gerda Lerner’s 90th birthday, coming up Friday, April 30. Her students and colleagues and publishers who know her as the founder of her field all shout “Happy birthday!” But whether you know her by name or not, she has certainly shaped the world of ideas around you. And for that, as well as for… Continue Reading Gerda Lerner’s 90th
We welcome a guest post today from Anne E. Marshall, author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State, which we’ll publish in December 2010. The book traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925 that belied the fact that Kentucky never left the Union and that… Continue Reading Confederate History Month and the Politics of Memory
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