I’m convinced region matters more than ever. And indeed, we need university presses more than ever to work in concert with authors, booksellers, and reading communities to build conversations that scale from the local to the global and back again. Continue Reading University Press Week 2013: Blog Tour Day 4: Mark Simpson-Vos: Remembering Region
Poverty is often seen as a personal failure, whereas success is a mark of hard work; thus economic status serves a surrogate for individual self-worth, and not an indicator of society’s structure and its limitations. Poor men and women are still often portrayed in stereotypical terms as being lazy and unmotivated. Continue Reading Interview: Mical Raz on poverty, mental health, and U.S. social policy
University Press Week Blog Tour Day 3 features posts that spotlight a specific subject area from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, University of Georgia Press, Texas A&M Press, MIT Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, and University of Toronto Press. Continue Reading University Press Week 2013: Blog Tour Day 3
Day 2 of the blog tour for University Press Week focuses on the future of scholarly communication. See posts from Harvard University Press, Stanford University Press, University of Virginia Press, University of Texas Press, Duke University Press, University of Minnesota Press, and Temple University Press. Continue Reading University Press Week 2013: Blog Tour Day 2
Today’s University Press Week Blog Tour theme is “Meet the Press,” with profiles of staff members from University Press of Colorado, University of Missouri Press, University of Hawai’i Press, McGill-Queens University Press, University of Illinois Press, Penn State University Press, and University Press of Florida. Continue Reading University Press Week 2013: Blog Tour Day 1
In my opinion, the most interesting topic for discussion is not that Cubans are finally embracing private enterprise, but rather that the new legislation will surely change the existing face of private enterprise on the island. Talk to Cubans about the new business, property, and internet reform measures and you are less likely to hear them marveling at the wonders of capitalism than to hear them debate the variety of state-imposed taxes that often leave them with only a few CUC (Cuban Convertible Pesos that carry a 1:1 exchange rate with the U.S. dollar) at the end of each month. Continue Reading Tiffany A. Sippial: Cuba’s New Economic Policies: Event Horizon or Business as Usual?
Yasser Arafat has meant many things to many people over the course of his life. To some he is a freedom fighter, and throughout the world he is often depicted in posters alongside Che Guevara. To others he is a terrorist. To the Nobel Prize Committee he is a peace-maker. Arafat has had many lives, and his reputation has been exhumed numerous times over his life and now, after his death.
What often gets overlooked about Arafat and the PLO is the impact he and his movement had on a global third-world movement in general, and on the Black freedom movement in particular. Continue Reading Alex Lubin: Exhuming Yasser Arafat
Goree Island is not the only site of slave trade remembrance on the African coast. Further south, in Ghana, there are two prominent warehouses, most often referred to as the slave castles at Cape Coast and Elmina, that are part of a thriving tourism trade catering mainly to black American travelers, many of whom are on roots journeys to “return home.” Just as Post reporter Fisher is right for asking critical questions related to Obama’s photo op at Goree Island, we can profit from asking challenging questions about a tourist trade that offers an uncomplicated reconciliation and welcome home at the same time that it traffics in horror. Continue Reading Jonathan Scott Holloway: Sincere Fictions, Real Horrors, and the Tourism Trade
More than anything else in a Core Sound fishing community, a workboat is a living social history of the people who have been connected to it. It was built by one person for another person and named after a third. This little web of names expands over time as the boat is sold to other people and renamed, is repaired, and rebuilt by others, or is relocated to another community. Fishermen seem to have little difficulty in remembering this web of connections, and so workboats function as memory banks that contain much of the social history of the community and carry it from one generation to the next. As boats disappear, it’s not clear what will happen to this history. Continue Reading Interview: Lawrence S. Earley on The Workboats of Core Sound
One of the most famous sandwiches in South America is also one of the most fun (and messy!) to eat: the Chivito Uruguayo. In Spanish, chivito means baby goat, but there’s actually no goat to be found in this sandwich. Continue Reading Sandra A. Gutierrez: Where’s the Goat?
Which UNC Press books make the best North Carolina gifts? It’s a question I’m often asked—particularly around the holidays and when people start their vacation travels and want to bring along a thoughtful gift with a connection to their home state.
I’ve narrowed the field to the following bounty of books with a Tar Heel theme, connection, or written by a North Carolina author. With this list as your guide, you can be one of those people who have most of their holiday shopping done by Thanksgiving, which also happens to be the first night of Hannukah this year. Continue Reading North Carolina Gift Books for Everyone on Your List
It is fitting that in this 80th anniversary year of the 1933 rally the North Carolina NAACP is once again in the headlines, this time for its leading role in the recent Moral Monday protests at the state legislature. Continue Reading Sarah Caroline Thuesen: The North Carolina NAACP: 80 Years at the Forefront of Struggles for Equality
The Indians fought to right the relationship they had with the North Carolina settlers and colonial government. They had been insulted, abused, enslaved, and cheated by traders. They lost land. And their complaints fell on deaf ears. Continue Reading The Tuscarora War: A Primer
This work can truly be called a paradigm shift for how we should see and understand a significant regional development of American architecture. Continue Reading The Chesapeake House honored by Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians
The elections in Virginia and New Jersey have been touted as indicators of where the Republican Party, and indeed the entire country, will head in 2014 and beyond. The North Carolina governor’s race in 1864 served a similar role. Though often overshadowed in discussions of Civil War politics by the U.S. presidential election of 1864, the North Carolina race, which pitted incumbent Zebulon Baird Vance against newspaper editor William W. Holden, tells an equally important story about shifting political winds. Continue Reading Jaime Amanda Martinez: Zeb Vance, Ken Cuccinelli, and Chris Christie: Governors as Bellwethers
According to Goldstein, the most exciting part is the “opportunity is to reach a much broader audience.” Because his class with Thorp is on innovation, teaching it as a MOOC provides a unique opportunity to marry form and content. “We’re interested in the interactive aspect because innovation and entrepreneurship aren’t passive—they’re active,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is about impact and taking innovative ideas to fruition. The key notion of MOOCs is creating a global reach with an entrepreneurial mindset that allows opportunities in those spaces between innovation and execution that is key to social change.” Continue Reading Innovating with MOOCs
I still rely on and value deeply these brick-and-mortar archives, but my research in Jim Crow Wisdom has taught me to value the archive of the imagination as well. Like any archive, the imagination is a place that is fundamentally about assemblage: a mixture of our best efforts to remember the past accurately, the eroding effects of time, and a desire for narrative clarity and poignancy. Relying on the imagination for its archival properties is central to this book and helps us develop a richer sense of memory and of history. Continue Reading Jonathan Scott Holloway: Where Does a Historian Find the Truth?
Milan Lewis of Atlantic said that he had joined the Navy during the Second World War. “I didn’t go in because I was patriotic,” he said. “I went in because I was digging clams for 40 cents a bushel, and I thought the Navy would be better, which was a mistake. The clamming was better.” Continue Reading Lawrence S. Earley: The Stories I Heard
You must be logged in to post a comment.