A few years ago I visited Italy with my family, sightseeing at the typical tourist destinations. The food scene was straight out of a movie: open air cafes lining the streets and fresh markets on every corner. When we traveled to a smaller town in the north, we noticed something we hadn’t seen in the metropolises: supermarkets. The stores could… Continue Reading Happy birthday, Supermarkets!
A mural painted by Colin Quashie is on display at the Knapp-Sanders Building on UNC’s campus and was officially dedicated in a ceremony on July 26. The mural, called SERVICE, shows a gathering of influential African Americans from throughout North Carolina’s history at the counter of a diner. From the School of Government’s website: A creative interpretation of the Greensboro,… Continue Reading The Story of SERVICE, Part 1
Today we welcome a guest post from Tiya Miles, author of The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Last weekend she attended a gathering to celebrate the historic plantation home and held a signing event for her new book. Over the course of her day, past and present were juxtaposed in an experience that truly gave life to… Continue Reading “We Are Standing on Beautiful History”
The “Page 99 Test” takes its name and inspiration from Ford Madox Ford, who said,”Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” As part of the Campaign for the American Reader, Marshal Zeringue has built a blog based on the idea, asking authors to turn to page 99 of… Continue Reading Loveman’s ‘No Higher Law’ gets the page 99 test
We welcome a guest post today from Jennifer Brier, author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. When the Obama administration announced a new HIV/AIDS strategy, we asked Brier to unpack the news and help give historical perspective to the new plan.–ellen Reading President Obama’s new HIV/AIDS strategy, released on July 13, 2010, was alternately exciting and… Continue Reading Obama’s HIV/AIDS Strategy: Real Change or Pocket Change?
Earlier this month the 12th annual Harlem Book Fair hosted a panel that included UNC Press authors Frank A. Guridy and Stephen Gillroy Hall. A video of the discussion, called “Can We Tell the Truth About the Black Past?”, is available through C-SPAN’s Book TV, which can be viewed here. Guridy is the author of Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African… Continue Reading WATCH: Harlem Book Fair Panel – “Can We Tell the Truth about the Black Past?”
I once went on an epic camping trip to a state park with my extended family. On this trip, my cousin “accidentally” bumped into me while I was kneeling beside our campfire. “Luckily,” I caught myself on the hot coals around the perimeter. Then, this same cousin–we’ll call him Teddy (cough…Michael)–“accidentally” ran into my brother with the twig he’d been… Continue Reading Celebrate North Carolina State Parks…and Watch Out for My Cousin Teddy
What happened to the NAACP? It’s odd to think that the venerable and historic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been reduced to a talking point in the national media cycle this week. They received national attention in June when the Los Angeles chapter lodged a protest against a Hallmark card with a recorded message that they… Continue Reading To Forge a Better NAACP
As Elvis Costello said about describing sound with written word, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” While we don’t think it’s stupid, we certainly recognize the difficulty of the task (on a side note, if anyone wants to dance about architecture, please YouTube it for us!). However, John Biewen,… Continue Reading Behind the Scenes of Reality Radio
Startling statistics from a study done by the University of Memphis and USA Swimming have been reported: about 68.9 percent of African American children are unable to adequately swim, compared to 40 percent of white children with low swimming skills. While the disproportionate rates of swimming skills can be traced to early 20th-century segregation, the question of why this disparity… Continue Reading Racial Disparities in Swimming Rates: History Informs the Present
Last week we watched with interest as a significant story unfolded with the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team. As they attempted to travel to the UK for international competition, they were entangled in a visa dispute. Although the team traveled internationally just a couple years ago using their Iroquois passports, British authorities refused to admit them to the UK this time… Continue Reading On the Iroquois Lacrosse Team, Sovereignty, and Sport
Whether you have a sweet tooth or a mouth full of sweet teeth, Foy Edelman has a recipe to satisfy that guilty pleasure. With more than 220 recipes in Sweet Carolina, the native North Carolinian offers a wide variety of goodies from kitchens all across the state. You can meet the contributing cooks and listen to them talk about their… Continue Reading Interview: Meet Foy Edelman…and other cooks from across North Carolina
I have been frustrated by this week’s back-and-forth between the Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert and civil rights veteran Jesse Jackson. Don’t get me wrong; Dan Gilbert’s letter smacked of grating paternalism; he spoke of James like a petulant child, rather than a man who had more than fulfilled his seven-year contract. His tone was inappropriate and disrespectful. Such a… Continue Reading Slavery and the NBA?
Doctors Nortin M. Hadler and Mark E. Williams recently authored a piece about the changing dynamics of healthcare after retirement, a system dating to the 1960s. They say the modern notion of Americans spend the last years of life has become incredibly sterilized since the influx of for-profit nursing homes. With increasing lifespans and complexity of treatment, what was good… Continue Reading Changing the Nursing Care Model
Though North Carolina has welcomed the recent arrival of a certain Scandinavian furniture mecca, the state has a rich history as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Patricia Phillips Marshall, coauthor of Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color, provides an entry in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina that gives a brief account of the furniture boom and… Continue Reading WATCH: Furniture Making slideshow
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation is one of the inaugural books in the multi-press collaborative series First Peoples, New Directions in Indigenous Studies. In a guest post for the First Peoples blog, author Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) writes about how she continues to navigate the effects of colonialism in her… Continue Reading Malinda Maynor Lowery: Troubles Decolonizing a Colonial History
We know, we know. Winning isn’t everything, but we have to admit, it sure does feel good! Author Daniel Sutherland was awarded the first ever Tom Watson Brown Book Award, a $50,000 prize, by the Society of Civil War Historians, for his book A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. The Watson Brown prize “is awarded… Continue Reading Sutherland Wins Inaugural Tom Watson Brown Book Award
There is good reason to pity the poor historian, who has been tested especially severely during the recent McChrystal-Obama imbroglio as the eruption of historical parallels and lessons have ranged from the wrong-headed to the off-kilter. Continue Reading The McChrystal Affair: Pity the Poor Historian
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
If you love a book, you probably love a library. Do something to help keep public libraries around. Today more than a thousand librarians and library advocates headed to Washington, D.C., for their annual library lobby day. On the agenda for their discussions with their representatives is the request for funding the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) at $300… Continue Reading Virtual Library Advocacy Day
You must be logged in to post a comment.