Today we welcome a guest post from Benjamin T. Smith, author of The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940–1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street, just published by UNC Press. Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression.… Continue Reading Benjamin T. Smith: Por Qué, Por Qué?
Today we welcome a guest post from Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950, just published by UNC Press. In this history of the social and human sciences in Mexico and the United States, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt reveals intricate connections among the development of science, the concept of race,… Continue Reading Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt: Balancing Privacy and Archival Access
Today, we welcome a guest post from Dalia Antonia Muller, author of Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World. During the violent years of war marking Cuba’s final push for independence from Spain, over 3,000 Cuban émigrés, men and women, rich and poor, fled to Mexico. But more than a safe haven, Mexico was a key site, Dalia… Continue Reading Dalia Antonia Muller: Our America? Whose América?
Today we welcome a guest post from Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950, just published by UNC Press. In this history of the social and human sciences in Mexico and the United States, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt reveals intricate connections among the development of science, the concept of race,… Continue Reading Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt: Wakanda Mexicana
The University of North Carolina Press, the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the UNC University Libraries have just published the first title in their collaborative open-access series, Studies in Latin America. Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize by Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar and William Noel Salmon is expected to be followed up by… Continue Reading Just published: The first book in a new open-access series, Studies in Latin America
Today we welcome a guest post from Daniel Livesay, author of Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833, published by our friends at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, Children of Uncertain Fortune reinterprets the… Continue Reading Daniel Livesay: Belle’s Atlantic Community
#HaitiSyllabus Haitian Studies titles from UNC Press The University of North Carolina Press has prided itself on accumulating and disseminating books that range in field and scope. We have made it our mission to contribute to the ongoing debates and discussions within and outside of the academy. In light of President Trump’s remarks regarding Haiti, El Salvador, and various African… Continue Reading #HaitiSyllabus — Haitian Studies titles from UNC Press
Today we welcome a guest blog post from Megan Raby, author of American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science. Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth… Continue Reading Megan Raby: The Tropical Origins of the Idea of Biodiversity
Today we welcome a guest blog post from Megan Raby, author of American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science. Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth… Continue Reading Megan Raby: Ecology and U.S. Empire in the Caribbean
Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online roundtable on Devyn Spence Benson’s Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, published in 2016 by UNC Press. The roundtable begins on Monday, November 6, 2017, and concludes on Saturday, November 11, 2017. The roundtable will feature responses from Yesenia Barragan (Dartmouth College) Aisha K. Finch (UCLA; author… Continue Reading Happening this week: An online roundtable on Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution by Devyn Spence Benson
Today we welcome a guest blog post from Eve E. Buckley, author of Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil, on drought and regional development in Brazil. Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments of… Continue Reading Eve E. Buckley: The Power and Paucity of Primary Documents for Latin American Historians
Today we welcome a guest blog post from Eve E. Buckley, author of Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil, on drought and regional development in Brazil. Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments of… Continue Reading Eve E. Buckley: Science and the Challenges of Social Transformation
UNC Press is proud to host this first in a series of week-long virtual roundtables, featuring Press authors drawing on their work to address issues of contemporary concern. This week we share five short essays by leading scholars of immigration, including Elliott Young, Deirdre M. Moloney, Mireya Loza, Julie M. Weise, and Erika Lee. Continue Reading Off the Page: Roundtable 1: Immigration
In 1992, in order to contain a riot, police forces invaded the largest prison in Latin America and killed 111 prisoners. The event, known as the Carandiru Massacre, was illustrated in the Brazilian film Carandiru, directed by Hector Babenco. Episodes of sexual violence were frequent, as were violent disputes over material goods and the conquest of spaces within the prison. Another factor that defined the life inside the prison was the financial capacity of the prisoner. There were, therefore, two ways of obtaining material goods and sexual services in prison: money or physical violence. Continue Reading Karina Biondi: The Extinction of Sexual Violence in the Prisons of São Paulo, Brazil
With his arrival in Cuba yesterday, President Barack Obama has become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island nation since 1928. This three-day trip is just one step in the major shift under the Obama administration to begin to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. For insightful historical perspective on what this trip means, we check in with some UNC Press authors who are providing helpful analysis. Continue Reading Obama Lands in Cuba
As the Obama era nears its end, the politics of racial (and religious) difference seem to dominate the headlines. From the anti-Muslim violence and bigotry that have intensified following the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, to the heightening of the affirmative action debate to the festering controversies over racially-charged criminal justice issues such as policing and mass incarceration, this appears to be a particularly polarized moment in America. As I finished my book this past fall, I often thought of parallels between these current events and my own area of historical expertise: the Haitian Revolution and the counterrevolutionary project that followed. Continue Reading Graham T. Nessler: The Politics of Racial Difference: The View from Revolutionary Hispaniola
Last year Mexico became the first nation in the world to impose a surtax on sweetened soft drinks. Policymakers justified the move by pointing out that people in Mexico consume more soda per capita than anywhere else in the world, a trend they argue fosters the nation’s high rates of obesity and diet-related disease. While governments around the world have also used economic incentives–or, in this case, disincentives–as a means of bolstering public health, Mexico’s soda tax does so on a much grander scale. A year later, in July 2015, public health researchers reported that consumption of soft drinks in Mexico fell by more than five percent. Many people hope for similar measures in the United States. California and New York are considering similar policies. New York City tried something similar a few years ago, before a judge overturned it, and the Navajo Nation just passed a junk food tax.
But the great Mexican soda tax debate can be viewed in a wider context than public health policy. It is, after all, also about the politics of capitalism and global trade. Continue Reading April Merleaux: The Mexican Soda Tax Debate
In the following video, Gaffield navigates a history wrought with slavery, colonialism, racial stereotyping, and global power politics, revealing how her book answers the question: What happened after the Haitian revolution? (running time 2:19). Continue Reading Book Trailer: Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World by Julia Gaffield
Dessalines’s abilities and successes have been “silenced” in order to cast him as a bad apple in the (now) celebrated Haitian Revolution that changed the course of modern history. This oversimplified version of Dessalines as a revolutionary and state leader ignores his political achievements and reduces the Haitian Revolution to a palatable and whitewashed event during the Age of Revolution. It mirrors a reluctance to study the years after the Declaration of Independence. The revolution did not produce a democratic republic based on universalist principles of freedom and equality. Continue Reading Julia Gaffield: Dessalines Day, October 17
Last summer, to celebrate finishing the manuscript of my book, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness, I went to New York to see artist Kara Walker’s installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby in an old Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn. Walker is known for making bold art that calls on viewers to consider histories of racial violence in the United States, and A Subtlety did just that. Sugar, Walker points out, is historically tied to race in many and multiple ways. Continue Reading April Merleaux: The Subtlety of the Sugar Babies
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