Hello all and happy weekend! Before we head off into the literal and very beautiful fall sunset today, we want to remind you about Pauli Murray’s 100th birthday celebration on Sunday. We do hope you’ll attend, or click around the interwebs in her honor if you can’t be there in person. This Sunday, from 3 to 5, there will be… Continue Reading Celebrate Pauli Murray this Sunday in Durham
I know, I know, in my last post I was praising the transition into autumn, so why the rush to spring all of a sudden? Ellen, why so fickle? you must be thinking. Well, our spring 2011 catalogs have arrived, that’s why. You don’t have to open it if you’re not ready. I understand. One season at a time. That’s… Continue Reading Take a peek at Spring 2011
There are about 35 million acres of beautiful mountains that extend from northern Virginia down to north Georgia. They’ve been going through a glorious transformation of color over the last few weeks. If you’ve never visited the Appalachians in fall, you’re missing out on a breathtaking treat from nature. In Mountain Nature: A Seasonal Natural History of the Southern Appalachians,… Continue Reading Interview: Jennifer Frick-Ruppert on Appalachian ecology
That’s right. Uh-huh. It’s a sale. Starting now. Save on a fantastic selection of gift books, just in time for the holidays. We’ve hand-picked some longstanding greats and some brand new favorites in travel, sports, North Caroliniana, cooking, nature, Civil War, craft, and literature. We’ve even put together some special bundles, including a double shot of Carolina basketball history from… Continue Reading Get Your Gift On! SALE on gift books begins today!
Sing along with me . . . there’s a party going on right here . . . Read on to discover the missing link between dollbaby carriages, Truman Capote, Jay Leno, fruitcake, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dark rum, and Harper Lee. The website for the Fruitcake Festival in Monroeville, Alabama proclaims, “It’s Fruitcake Weather!” and it is, indeed. It’s the time… Continue Reading Celebrate fruitcake! Come on!
Taking place this week and next week in Chapel Hill and Durham is the NC Latin American Film Festival, put on by the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke. Tomorrow night features a screening of director Sebastián Bednarik’s Cachila: un hombre, una familia y el legado del Candombe/Cachila: a man, a family and the… Continue Reading Candombe, Cachila, and Afro-Uruguay
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
Here comes Tar Heel basketball! Tonight the Tar Heels hit the court in a pre-season exhibition game against Barton College. To get you warmed up, we’re sharing a conversation we had with Adam Lucas, publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and Tar Heels Today and a columnist on TarHeelBlue.com. He is author of six books on Carolina Basketball, the most recent… Continue Reading Interview: Adam Lucas Reflects on a Century of Tar Heel Basketball
One of the strengths of UNC Press is our commitment to publishing first-rate books about the region in which we live. From college hoops to environmental history, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, from the coast to the hills, our books about the South educate and entertain readers within the region and beyond. We’ve recently updated our… Continue Reading Southern Gateways: The best in southern reading from UNC Press
A couple years ago some colorful and inspiring murals started popping up in Durham, NC, where I live. On Foster Street, down by the YMCA and the Farmers’ Market. On Chapel Hill Street, on the side of the Durham Food Co-op building. Three more within a stone’s throw of each other on Chapel Hill Road, along the exterior walls of… Continue Reading Let the Month of Murray Begin
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
David Ruggles (1810-1849) was one of the most heroic–and has been one of the most often overlooked–figures of the early abolitionist movement in America. Graham Russell Gao Hodges provides the first biography of this African American activist, writer, and publisher who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, including Frederick Douglass. Hodges’s portrait of Ruggles establishes the… Continue Reading Interview: Graham Russell Gao Hodges
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 the University of North Carolina’s 217th anniversary on this University Day, chancellor Holden Thorp introduces a new project called “Innovate@Carolina: Important Ideas for a Better World” to lead the university forward. This three-year roadmap, described in detail at innovation.unc.edu, is designed to “build a culture of innovation that permeates every corner of campus, from the chemist in… Continue Reading The University Day Challenge: Innovate!
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
Congratulations to Michael Walden, author of North Carolina in the Connected Age: Challenges and Opportunities in a Globalizing Economy, who has just been awarded the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Public Service. The award is intended “to encourage, identify, recognize, and reward distinguished public service and outreach by faculty across the University.” So what has Walden done… Continue Reading UNC system honors Mike Walden for helping make economics easier for the rest of us to understand
Earlier this week we posted lots of links to headlines about Susan Reverby’s discovery of U.S. medical experiments on nonconsenting Guatemalans in the 1940s. Today, she wrote in more detail about the discovery of this horrific medical history over at the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum: What might have been buried in an historical journal, however, took another step. To make… Continue Reading Reverby recalls discovery, Hadler puts Guatemala case in context
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?
You’ve probably already heard: last Friday President Obama called President Alvaro Colom of Guatemala to apologize for a public health outrage committed 64 years ago. In 1946, American doctors, with the support of the Public Health Service, conducted experiments on prisoners, the insane, soldiers, and prostitutes, who were initially used to infect the prisoners. Though the institutions and governments involved… Continue Reading Susan Reverby Uncovers History of U.S. Medical Testing on Guatemalans
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