UNC Press Blog - Page 58 of 128 -

Andrew Denson: Apologizing for Indian Removal in the Civil Rights Era South

In the spring of 1962, legislators in Georgia voted unanimously to repeal a set of anti-Indian laws from the 1820s and 1830s. These laws had sparked the political crisis that led to the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” the removal of the majority of Cherokees from the Southeast to Indian Territory. Starting in 1828, Georgia had extended its jurisdiction over Cherokee territory, outlawed the Cherokee government, and nullified Cherokee laws in an effort to force tribal leaders to negotiate a removal agreement with the United States. Continue Reading Andrew Denson: Apologizing for Indian Removal in the Civil Rights Era South

American Studies/Native Amer./Indigenous Studies

Kristina M. Jacobsen: In Memoriam: Shirley Bowman (1949-2017)

Shirley Bowman: Navajo language and culture teacher, world traveler, mother, grandmother, Navajo Nation citizen, professor, fellow “foodie” and tamale maker extraordinaire. These are some of the things that come to mind when I remember my teacher, mentor, friend and “mom,” Shirley Ann Bowman (1949-2017), who passed away last week on March 7th. I met Shirley in the fall of 2008 in Crownpoint, when I began my research on Diné country western bands (“rez bands”) and was looking for a Navajo language teacher. She embraced me fully, immersing me not only in the Navajo language but what in it meant to be a woman in Diné society, my expected social roles, and how—as a non-Native, Anglo woman—to conduct myself accordingly. Continue Reading Kristina M. Jacobsen: In Memoriam: Shirley Bowman (1949-2017)

American Studies/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/Native Amer./Indigenous Studies

Jessica M. Frazier: Networks, News, and Activism

Many also found friendship, understanding, and compassion in their Vietnamese counterparts. Following face-to-face interactions, American and Vietnamese women maintained contact with one another through the exchange of letters, telegrams, and newsletters. Indeed, Vietnamese and American women formed part of a people’s diplomatic network that provided alternative interpretations of the war. Continue Reading Jessica M. Frazier: Networks, News, and Activism

Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/History/Women's Studies

Darrin Pratt: Mission Possible

Our value proposition, however, gets even better if you consider expanding beyond the definition of monograph employed by the study authors. The study defined monographs as “books which are written by scholars and researchers and which are intended primarily for other scholars and researchers” (using John Thompson’s definition in Books in the Digital Age),[ref]John Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 103[/ref] but excluded books that are “collections of essays, even if the essays are all by a single author.” In certain fields, particularly emerging fields and subfields, edited collections of essays that constitute original scholarship are quite common. If we use Thompson’s original definition, without excluding edited collections, my own press’s 2009–2013 output of original scholarly works as a percentage of the total jumps from 42% to 67% (from data returned to University Press of Colorado by Esposito and Barch). Continue Reading Darrin Pratt: Mission Possible

Guest Bloggers/The Book Biz

Jonathan W. White: A Shadow Over My Heart: The Transformation of a Northern Woman’s Dream Life during the Civil War

Sitting at home, alone, many women in the North and South were overcome by feelings of fear and grief as their husbands fought on faraway battlefields. For all too many, nighttime only exacerbated their concerns. Nightmares of blood and gore tortured countless wives. And yet over time, some women gradually overcame such fearful feelings—even in their dreams. Continue Reading Jonathan W. White: A Shadow Over My Heart: The Transformation of a Northern Woman’s Dream Life during the Civil War

American History/American Studies/Author blog entry/Civil War/Guest Bloggers

Kristina M. Jacobsen: “Won’t You Be With Me Tonight (After the Ace’s Wild Dance)”?: Navajo Country Bands, Stage Patter, and Rodeo Announcers

Twenty years later, dances remain an important part of reservation social life, where live bands play up-tempo songs and couples mostly dance the two-step, a partner dance moving in a counter-clockwise direction. Dance bands play four-hour sets, typically 9 pm to 1 am, and take one break in the middle. The “sweet spot” for these dances is between 12 and 1: this is when the band is really warmed up, the dancers are relaxed, and dancers come out in large numbers onto the dance floor. It’s a short-lived space, nestled between lots of starts and stops and logistical glitches, but catching it is well worth the wait. For me, it’s a bit of time-capsuled, Navajo reservation magic. Continue Reading Kristina M. Jacobsen: “Won’t You Be With Me Tonight (After the Ace’s Wild Dance)”?: Navajo Country Bands, Stage Patter, and Rodeo Announcers

Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/Music/Native Amer./Indigenous Studies

Nicole Eustace: Borders, Culture, and Nationhood in Early-Nineteenth-Century America

As the United States leaders of 2017 contemplate dividing families and decimating workforces with new rules strictly limiting travel and immigration, they might do well to contemplate the human costs and historical errors inherent in such attempts. If American inhabitants were “warring for America” in the era of 1812, the struggle itself has never truly ceased. Continue Reading Nicole Eustace: Borders, Culture, and Nationhood in Early-Nineteenth-Century America

American History/American Studies/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers

Interview: Adrian Miller on The President’s Kitchen Cabinet

These chefs were simultaneously culinary artists, family confidantes and civil rights advocates. The most important contribution aside from their food is that they gave our presidents a window on black life that they would not otherwise have had. Only a handful of presidents chose to open that window, but it was there nonetheless. Continue Reading Interview: Adrian Miller on The President’s Kitchen Cabinet

African American History/African American Studies/American History/Cooking / Food/History/Interviews

Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts: Thinking About Southern Identity on the Way to Work

While the reasons for identity may vary across people, we find that southern identity is heightened when individuals are forced to contrast the South with other regions, and people. In writing this book, we had many people tell us that they became most aware of their southern identity when they moved away from the South for the first time. They recalled stories where someone questioned their accent, criticized their home region, or asked them if they spent their free time watching reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard. Continue Reading Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts: Thinking About Southern Identity on the Way to Work

Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/Political Science/Southern Studies

February 27, 2017

Jonathan W. White: 8 Simple Rules for Prospective Graduate Students in History

During my first semester of college I told a professor that I wanted to go to graduate school to become a professor. He very wisely replied, “Jon, get a real job and do history on the weekends.” As a senior, another professor told me, “Don’t get a PhD in history unless you can’t see yourself doing anything else.” Both offered sound advice, and I hope they will forgive me for not taking it.

Now, as a tenured faculty member, I often find myself giving advice about graduate school to my students. I usually give them similar advice to that which I received when I was in college because they need to be aware of the risks involved in graduate study. The reality is that too many people are getting PhDs in the humanities, and there just are not enough jobs for them (I was on a search committee earlier this year that had 174 applicants for one job). Graduate students in certain fields therefore run the risk of lost potential income over a series of years, only to come out either unqualified or overqualified for most jobs, and ultimately unemployed or stuck in the adjunct circuit. Continue Reading Jonathan W. White: 8 Simple Rules for Prospective Graduate Students in History

Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/History

February 24, 2017

Marc Stein: Immigration is a Queer Issue: From Fleuti to Trump

In Trump v. Washington, the Ninth Circuit panel has used a decision in a “gay rights” case as a precedent for a decision in a “Muslim rights” one. Continue Reading Marc Stein: Immigration is a Queer Issue: From Fleuti to Trump

American History/Author blog entry/Gay / Lesbian Studies/Guest Bloggers/History

February 22, 2017

Kristina M. Jacobsen: The Gallup Flea Market and Navajo Cultural Sovereignty

What struck me this time after many months away overseas is the subtle ways that Diné cultural sovereignty is practiced in this informal economy, where unemployment on the Navajo Nation currently hovers above 50%, and where tribal citizens are incredibly creative about ways to make ends meet in order to live on or close to their ancestral homeland (a statement about sovereignty and connection to homeland in its own right). Although not an explicitly “political” space, Diné citizens express their attachments to being Diné through what they choose—or refuse—to sell in this public space. Continue Reading Kristina M. Jacobsen: The Gallup Flea Market and Navajo Cultural Sovereignty

Anthropology/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/Music/Native Amer./Indigenous Studies

February 20, 2017

Andrew Denson: The DAR Squabble: Possessing Cherokee History in the Southeast

In the spring of 1935, an odd dispute erupted between rival groups of heritage workers in Tennessee and Georgia over the right to commemorate the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” That year, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Georgia decided to erect a small monument commemorating Red Clay, a site along the Tennessee border where the government of the Cherokee Nation met in the years just prior to removal. Continue Reading Andrew Denson: The DAR Squabble: Possessing Cherokee History in the Southeast

American History/American Studies/History/Native Amer./Indigenous Studies

February 15, 2017

Judy Kutulas: How Mary Tyler Moore Helped 1970s America Imagine a New Future

Fictional Mary worked at a television station in Minneapolis even she knew was second rate. Yet it was also so beyond how she imagined her future unfolding that she embraced it with a mixture of gusto and relatable fear. So many of us were in that predicament in the 1970s, jarred out of what was supposed to be our future by the revolutions of the 1960s. Americans identified with Mary far more personally than most previous characters. As someone who studies sitcoms, I could explain to you the structural set-up that facilitated that bonding, but the outcome is what’s more relevant here: that Americans regarded fictional Minnesotan Mary Richards as a real person. They sent letters to the Minneapolis post office addressed to her and made so many pilgrimages to knock on the door of the house featured in the opening credits that they exhausted and angered the actual owners of the house. Real people showed up in the series playing themselves, including first lady Betty Ford, who loved Mary as much as the rest of us. Continue Reading Judy Kutulas: How Mary Tyler Moore Helped 1970s America Imagine a New Future

American Studies/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/Women's Studies

February 13, 2017

New Books for Spring and Summer 2017

A new season means, of course, new books! Here we have provided an interactive catalog that you can browse through to see what’s in store for spring and summer 2017. You can visit our website to see what’s already available in the subject areas that interest you. The easiest way to stay up to date is to sign up for our… Continue Reading New Books for Spring and Summer 2017

UNC Press News

February 6, 2017

Lisa A. Lindsay: The “Truth” Behind Our Ancestors

Forty years ago CBS aired the miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s 1976 bestseller in which he traced his own ancestors back to West Africa, followed them to the United States as slaves, and took them forward into freedom. For the first time, a massive audience—roughly half the country’s population—confronted slavery and its legacies through an African American perspective. Roots prompted Americans to search out their own ancestors, particularly in subsequent years as digitization and personal computing brought resources to searchers’ fingertips.Now genealogy’s popularity—attested by the success of ancestry.com and the television show Who Do You Think You Are—makes it tempting to forget that we often shape our ancestors ourselves, even at the expense of historical evidence. Professional historians, in fact, were quick to point out fictions within Roots, a charge Haley accepted by originally calling his book a work of “faction.” I (re)learned this lesson about historical memory myself when it almost derailed the project that became my book, Atlantic Bonds. Continue Reading Lisa A. Lindsay: The “Truth” Behind Our Ancestors

Africa & African Diaspora/African American History/African American Studies/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/History/Southern Studies

February 1, 2017

Stephen Cushman: Stephen Crane, Historical Researcher

The reason that we in the twenty-first century need to develop these complementary sensibilities is that the Civil War erupted against a standard of literacy different from our own, one with increasingly unfamiliar conventions of reading and writing. Because most of us know what we know about the war primarily through the medium of writing, understanding the war we read about depends to a large extent on our understanding as many historical and aesthetic layers of its writings as possible. Continue Reading Stephen Cushman: Stephen Crane, Historical Researcher

Author blog entry/Civil War/Guest Bloggers/History/Literature

January 30, 2017

UNC Press Distributing the North Carolina Office of Archives and History’s Historical Publications

The University of North Carolina Press is now distributing the North Carolina Office of Archives and History’s Historical Publications—more than 150 books about the state’s history, people, and culture. Housed within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and Parks, the Office of Archives and History has earned a reputation for offering well-researched and affordably-priced works of nonfiction… Continue Reading UNC Press Distributing the North Carolina Office of Archives and History’s Historical Publications

UNC Press News

January 19, 2017

David S. Brown: America’s Sunbelt Politics: The Story of Three Centuries

Historians and social scientists such as Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell first began to use the term “Radical Right” in the 1950s as something of a reaction to McCarthyism. A decade later, with the unexpected presidential candidacy of the Republican Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater accompanied by the growth in wealth, population, and thus political power of many southern states, the term “Sunbelt Right” came into vogue. Continue Reading David S. Brown: America’s Sunbelt Politics: The Story of Three Centuries

American History/Author blog entry/Guest Bloggers/History/Politics