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January 21, 2015

Brian K. Feltman: Blurred Lines: Prisoners of War, Deserters, and Bowe Bergdahl

Accusations of desertion prompted many of Bergdahl’s supporters to reconsider their positions and left several congressmen scrambling to delete early tweets that praised his service. While many Americans may be surprised by the heated controversy surrounding Bergdahl’s capture, the Bergdahl affair is only the most recent example of the hazy line separating deserters and prisoners of war. Continue Reading Brian K. Feltman: Blurred Lines: Prisoners of War, Deserters, and Bowe Bergdahl

Categories Author blog entry/Current Events/Guest Bloggers/History/Military History/Military Studies
January 14, 2015

Christina D. Abreu: In Honor of Professor Juan Flores

Criticism and embrace of identity terms like “Hispanic” and “Latino/a” have been longstanding in the field of Latino/a Studies. Puerto Ricans, Flores argued, share more in common with African Americans than with other Latino/a groups. He contended that Puerto Ricans and African Americans experience similar forms of racial and ethnic subordination in the United States because of parallels in their location in urban areas, their socioeconomic status, and their position as colonized subjects of the same nation-state. Continue Reading Christina D. Abreu: In Honor of Professor Juan Flores

Categories Author blog entry/Cuba/Cultural Studies/Current Events/Guest Bloggers/History/Latin American/Caribbean Hist./Latino Studies/Music
January 9, 2015

Christopher C. Sellers: How a Mid-Century LA Environmentalist Got Beyond John Muir

A century out from Muir’s death, humanity’s mounting influence on the planet, and what we now know about that influence, have made a truly pristine nature ever more difficult, even impossible, to find. No place on earth stays untouched by a phenomenon like climate change. To be sure, we still need our Yosemites, not least for the transcendent encounters that Muir and his descendants have helped us to find in them. Yet in a time when human impacts have turned planetary in scale, the project of protecting our wildest places has become far more bound up with what we do in our cities, suburbs, and factories than Muir ever imagined Continue Reading Christopher C. Sellers: How a Mid-Century LA Environmentalist Got Beyond John Muir

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers
December 23, 2014

Glenn David Brasher’s Civil War Top 10 from 2014

Do we have a new annual tradition on our hands? Last year over on our CivilWar150 blog, Glenn David Brasher gave us a great roundup of Civil War-related highlights from throughout the year. He’s back at it again with 2014’s big news in Civil War history. You’ll find elections, debates, satire, sincerity, and more. Continue Reading Glenn David Brasher’s Civil War Top 10 from 2014

Categories African American Studies/Civil War/History/Video
December 22, 2014

Excerpt: Alcohol: A History, by Rod Phillips

One of the earliest printed books on aqua vitae, in this case brandy, was published in Germany in 1476 and recommended a half-spoonful every morning to prevent conditions as varied as arthritis and bad breath. Other physicians wrote of the beneficial effects of brandy for physical ailments (it cured headaches, heart disease, gout, and deafness); as an aid to appearance (it improved the bust and stopped hair graying); and as therapy for emotional and other problems (it banished melancholy and forgetfulness). The inclusion of conditions commonly associated with aging (such as deafness, forgetfulness, and graying) reflects the claims that drinking brandy prolonged youth and thus life itself. Continue Reading Excerpt: Alcohol: A History, by Rod Phillips

Categories Cooking / Food/Excerpts/History
December 19, 2014

Essential Background Reading on Cuba from UNC Press

In light of the sea change in U.S.-Cuban relations, I am delighted to recommend two books to anyone who wants to get up to speed: On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, by Louis A. Pérez Jr., and Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana, by William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh. Continue Reading Essential Background Reading on Cuba from UNC Press

Categories Cuba/Current Events/Latin American/Caribbean Hist./Politics
December 11, 2014

Video: Celebrating 75 Years of ‘These Are Our Lives’

Contemporary documentary projects such as StoryCorps and Humans of New York thrive today in a spirit similar to that which led the vision of the Federal Writers’ Project and These Are Our Lives. They remind us that every life has a story, and every story matters. Continue Reading Video: Celebrating 75 Years of ‘These Are Our Lives’

Categories African American Studies/American History/American Studies/History/Labor Studies/Literature/Sociology/Southern Studies/UNC Press News
December 9, 2014

Lisa Wilson: Cinderella and Her Still Evil Stepmother

Looking at the history of the evil stepmother stereotype I think explains some of the staying power of these familiar tales. Although stepmother characterizations have been negative since as far back as ancient Greece, in Western culture the need for evil stepmothers became more urgent in the United States in response to a new idea of the proper family in Enlightenment Europe. Sentimental families, as they were called, became the ideal for the rising middle class in Western Europe. Continue Reading Lisa Wilson: Cinderella and Her Still Evil Stepmother

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers
November 14, 2014

Christopher C. Sellers: Beyond Environmentalism: Marching toward Climatism

Over the last decade around New York, a host of more localized concerns and groups have mobilized around a new bevvy of “green” causes: banding together to rebuild after Sandy, campaigning for locally grown and organic food, and fighting against fracking. At the People’s Climate March, they found welcome and common cause with those pushing for divestiture from fossil fuels, as well as those from more far flung locales, those rebuilding on the Gulf Coast after Katrina, those from island nations and from other communities on the “front line” of environmental change. In an earlier era, “the environment” had gained traction because of how it linked so many issues long considered separate, from pollution to wilderness preservation. Now “climate” may have proven itself sufficiently capacious to serve as an entire movement’s umbrella. Continue Reading Christopher C. Sellers: Beyond Environmentalism: Marching toward Climatism

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Environmental Studies/Guest Bloggers
November 12, 2014

Doug Orr: The Profound African American Influence on Appalachian Music

It is generally known that the American banjo’s origins trace back to West Africa and a gourd-like instrument the gnomi, among other names. However, the plantations were something of an incubator for music of the African American slaves in a variety of forms: the fiddle, learned at the plantation house; the call-and-response work songs from the toil of the plantation fields; spirituals stemming from church worship—often clandestine services or camp meetings with hidden messages of freedom’s call; and the hush lullabies sung by mammies to their babies, and sung with irony to the children of the plantation overlords. Continue Reading Doug Orr: The Profound African American Influence on Appalachian Music

Categories African American History/Appalachian Studies/Author blog entry/Music/Southern Studies
November 6, 2014

Interview: Rod Phillips and the world history of alcohol

Brewsters were female brewers. They were important because during the Middle Ages (and later in the American colonies) women brewed the beer their families needed. Brewing was seen as a woman’s task, like baking. Beer was liquid bread, and very nutritious. But as brewing became more commercialized, women were pushed out. The world of big business was seen as no place for women, and women didn’t have access to the financing needed for a commercial brewery. So brewing became a male occupation, and it’s really only with the rise of craft breweries in the last decade or two that women have started to re-enter the industry. Continue Reading Interview: Rod Phillips and the world history of alcohol

Categories Cooking / Food/History/Interviews
October 28, 2014

Lisa Wilson: Stepfamilies Are “Traditional” American Families

What is a traditional American family? In a recent article in AARP Magazine, “The New American Family: Meet 6 clans who embody our country’s changing ideas about what kinship is,” Brennan Jensen, citing high divorce rates, argues that modern families now include “a tumble of step- and half-siblings.” I applaud Jensen’s effort to complicate what we think of as a “real” American family, but I would suggest that the “new” American family is actually the “old” American family—at least in terms of the presence of stepfamilies. Continue Reading Lisa Wilson: Stepfamilies Are “Traditional” American Families

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers
October 23, 2014

Luther Adams: W. E. B. Du Bois’ One Charge

“Black-on-black crime” is not real. It only exists to suggest being black is the true crime, and to deflect attention away from the fact of ongoing inequality. What many have termed “black-on-black crime” tells us more about white supremacy, and the devaluation of black life, than it does about crime. Connecting crime and blackness is central to racial control, as is the link between guns and white supremacy. The true crime is that black lives have less value to society and to even to other black people. Continue Reading Luther Adams: W. E. B. Du Bois’ One Charge

Categories African American History/African American Studies/American History/Author blog entry/Current Events/Guest Bloggers/History/Video
October 21, 2014

Interview: Marcie Cohen Ferris on The Edible South

Southern cuisine was a key component in historic preservation efforts in the early twentieth century to promote and sell the South and its racial mores to both tourists and locals. Through constructed memories of southern food from the plantation to the mountain South, sophisticated campaigns were launched to promote the “taste” of the Old South in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Lowcountry flavors of Savannah and Charleston, the fashionable Creole cuisine of New Orleans, and the “authentic” “hillbilly” and “Highlands” foods of the mountain South. Continue Reading Interview: Marcie Cohen Ferris on The Edible South

Categories American History/American Studies/Cooking / Food/folklore/Interviews/Southern Studies
October 17, 2014

Graham T. Dozier on Letters from the Battle of Cedar Creek

Two days later, when Tom took the time to send Susan a letter, he was still stunned. “In the morning [the Confederates] were lions, in the evening lambs. Such facts are incredible to one who has not witnessed them but they are unfortunately too true.”
In the same letter, dated October 21, Carter offered a simple opinion as to why the battle had been lost. “The Yankee discipline,” he asserted, “is immeasurably superior to ours.” In a rare moment of frustration, he lashed out at the behavior of his army’s leaders. Continue Reading Graham T. Dozier on Letters from the Battle of Cedar Creek

Categories American History/Biography / Autobiography/Civil War/History/Military History
October 16, 2014

Raúl Necochea López: When Historians’ Sources Get Demanding

The way in which bullfighters put themselves repeatedly on the path of a half-ton of rage, shifting at the last moment, is shocking. I am especially awed by the tribute of the bits of their own flesh left on those horns. It makes me wonder what we historians are increasingly giving up by finding our sources in air-conditioned rooms with lockers and vending machines, where the only tribute we pay is a cordial email to a helpful archivist, who then gets a credit in the standard acknowledgements page. Remotely accessible digitized collections are already making some of our work possible from the convenience of coffee shops with Wi-Fi. Continue Reading Raúl Necochea López: When Historians’ Sources Get Demanding

Categories Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/Health / Medicine/Latin American/Caribbean Hist./Women's Studies
October 9, 2014

Save 40% on ‘A History of the Book in America’ 5-volume set

The 5-volume set of ‘A History of the Book in America’ is now available in paperback at a special discounted price. Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer. Buy the set and save big! Continue Reading Save 40% on ‘A History of the Book in America’ 5-volume set

Categories American History/American Studies/Business/Literature/Sale/UNC Press News
October 7, 2014

Meet the Families Represented in ‘Tobe’: A 75th Anniversary Event

To celebrate Tobe’s seventy-fifth anniversary, historian Benjamin Filene, director of public history at UNC Greensboro, will moderate a panel called “Voices of Tobe,” featuring special guest appearances by several individuals from Tobe, their descendants, and members of their community. Continue Reading Meet the Families Represented in ‘Tobe’: A 75th Anniversary Event

Categories African American History/African American Studies/Fiction/Juvenile/Literature/North Carolina/Photography/Southern Studies/UNC Press Authors
October 1, 2014

Nathaniel Cadle: Central American Refugees and the “Traditional” Immigrant Narrative

The recent debate over the exact status of the tens of thousands of Central American children attempting to cross the U.S. border reminds us that there is often a very fine line dividing an immigrant from a refugee. It turns out that, according to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a majority of Americans—regardless of age or political or religious affiliation—view these children as refugees rather than as illegal immigrants. Of course, the term “refugee” designates a special legal status that carries a wide range of political and bureaucratic implications. Continue Reading Nathaniel Cadle: Central American Refugees and the “Traditional” Immigrant Narrative

Categories American History/Author blog entry/Current Events/Guest Bloggers/Latino Studies
September 26, 2014

What Ken Burns’s ‘The Roosevelts’ doesn’t tell us (but viewers should know) about Josephus Daniels

Lee A. Craig, author of Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times, talks to Publicity Director Gina Mahalek about his reaction to the portrayal of Josephus Daniels (who was, at the time, one of the most influential men in the world) in the latest Ken Burns PBS documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Continue Reading What Ken Burns’s ‘The Roosevelts’ doesn’t tell us (but viewers should know) about Josephus Daniels

Categories American History/Biography / Autobiography/Film/History/Interviews/Video