We welcome a guest post today from Joshua M. Dunn, author of Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins. Dunn’s book explores the 1987 case that became the federal court’s most expensive attempt at school desegregation: Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure… Continue Reading Up to Date in Kansas City
The cover story for this week’s Independent Weekly (on newsstands in the Triangle from 3/24/10 to 3/30/10), discusses the victims of North Carolina’s 20th-century eugenics program and the current campaign for reparations to people (mostly poor black women) who were forcibly sterilized. As of March 1, 2010, the state has established an organization to finally bring justice for surviving victims.… Continue Reading The legacy of North Carolina’s eugenics program
As a continuation of our series of posts on National Women’s History Month, today’s post will be about an event from 99 years ago today–the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. While horrific–146 workers, mostly poor Italian, German, and Jewish women between the ages of eight and twenty perished–the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist holds an important place in… Continue Reading The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: March 25, 1911
Over the last few decades, the radio documentary has developed into a strikingly vibrant form of creative expression. Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound celebrates today’s best audio documentary work by bringing together some of the most influential and innovative practitioners from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. In these 19 essays, documentary artists tell relate how they… Continue Reading Reality Radio: the song!
Two weeks ago, I blogged here about National Women’s History Month, making the first in a series of posts about new and recent books available from UNC Press focusing on the lives of women. That entry featured books that looked at the lives of American women in the Civil War and women returning from tours of Afghanistan and Iraq in… Continue Reading National Women’s History Month: By the Book
William J. Bauer Jr. (Wailacki and Concow, and an enrolled member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes) is author of the new book We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941. The federally recognized Round Valley Indian Tribes are a small, confederated people whose members today come from twelve indigenous California… Continue Reading William Bauer on writing American Indian history from home
Today is the 42nd anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, certainly not a happy memory—in fact , the opposite of that—but one well worth stopping to ponder. On this day in 1968, during the Vietnam War, the massacre was carried out by United States troops. Under the direction of Lt. William L. Calley Jr., a unit of the army tortured,… Continue Reading Remembering My Lai in the year of Calley’s apology
We are happy as clams—and horses and chickens and goats and all creatures, really—to announce that today, at the American Society for Environmental History’s annual meeting in Portland, our author Carolyn Merchant, receives the Distinguished Scholar Award for her significant contribution to environmental history scholarship. Professor Merchant has focused, throughout her career, on human interactions with the natural environment—how we… Continue Reading Congrats to Carolyn Merchant, winner of ASEH’s Distinguished Scholar Award
Today we celebrate the birthday of Lillian Wald (1867-1940), founder of Henry Street Settlement on New York’s Lower East Side as well as the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Wald was a second-generation German Jewish immigrant who developed close associations with Jewish New York even as she consistently dismissed claims that her work emerged from a fundamentally Jewish calling.… Continue Reading Happy birthday, Lillian Wald
We love it when new UNC Press books seem to be in conversation with other books of the moment. Take Patti Smith’s acclaimed new memoir, Just Kids (HarperCollins 2010), which offers an inside look at the punk pioneer’s artistic influences and collaborations, including Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Springsteen, Sam Shepard, and Fred “Sonic” Smith–all men. However, right there on… Continue Reading Louisa May Alcott and the Godmother of Punk
Have you heard? Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has sponsored a bill to replace U.S. Grant on the $50 bill with Ronald Reagan. In an op-ed for the LA Times, Grant biographer Joan Waugh offers a brief history lesson in defense of the Union general and 18th President of the United States and cautions against further erosion of Grant’s legacy. An… Continue Reading Joan Waugh on Grant v. Reagan (yes, as in Ulysses S. and Ronald)
Today brings us a guest post from Raúl Ramos, author of Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861. In his book, Ramos introduces a new model for the transnational history of the United States as he focuses on Mexican-Texan, or Tejano, society in a period of political transition beginning with the year of Mexican independence. Ramos explores… Continue Reading Battle Without End: Raúl Ramos on the politics of Texas history
If you are familiar with the UNC Press Blog, you probably know that we know a thing or two about celebrating. If it has a national celebration day, week, or month, we probably have it marked on our calendars well in advance. Why else would we have a 1000-word post on the merits of National Chili Day, like we did… Continue Reading National Women’s History Month: Women at War
Elaine Maisner is a senior editor at UNC Press. Over a recent winter break, she asked her daughter, Zina—a wonderful baker—to make Cornmeal Vanilla Bean Shortbreads, from Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker’s American Desserts. Here’s their step-by-step guide to making these delicious cookies.–ellen I thought it would be fun to take pictures of Zina making these cookies, especially to show people… Continue Reading What’s Cooking? Karen Barker’s Cornmeal Vanilla Bean Shortbreads!
We welcome a guest post today from S. Scott Rohrer, author of Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. Popular literature and frontier studies stress that Americans moved west to farm or to seek a new beginning. In Wandering Souls, Rohrer argues that Protestant migrants in early America relocated in search of salvation, Christian community, reform, or all three. In… Continue Reading Scott Rohrer on Ancestral Migrations
So, it’s finally here, the day that comes only once a year. . . UNC Press’s Chili Night. And this year it falls on a chilly night indeed. But why should you care? Well, I’d say, because what’s better on a cold, windy night than warm chili? Isn’t that reason enough? If you need another reason—if you’re like that—you need… Continue Reading How are you celebrating National Chili Day?
The first few books from UNC Press’ Spring|Summer 2010 catalog made it to bookshelves this month, and many more will be debuting in the coming months. One of the books we’re excited to publish, in partnership with Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement, is Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis’ To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and… Continue Reading To Right These Wrongs: A Groundbreaking Project
This is the question Susan Reverby considers in a post over at Wonders & Marvels. The author of, most recently, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy writes: In my most recent book, I had to explain: why did the doctors do it? Sometimes it is easy to answer this: all the men were black and poor, and… Continue Reading How do you Explain the Seemingly Unexplainable?
This week is the very good time to talk about Graham Hodges’ new book David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City–for at least two reasons. The first of these is that Hodges was interviewed by Eric Foner (DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University) as part of the Lincoln Series at the… Continue Reading David Ruggles, Abolitionist and Mentor to Abolitionists
Early 1861 marked the only time in our nation’s history that it had two presidents, both calling for a return to the republic born in the American Revolution. On February 18, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the President of the Confederate States of America; on March 4, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President of the United States of… Continue Reading Two Inaugural Addresses–two weeks apart
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