Language is in its potency a trap—in this case an inducement to action even when careful consideration warns of potentially dire consequences. Put differently, the axioms handed down from earlier policy practice have demonstrated their capacity to overrule prudent calculation. That insight leaves us with a set of genuine questions. Continue Reading Michael H. Hunt: Obama and Syria: Trapped in a Web of Words
I like the discipline of history, especially the requirements that I support what I say with evidence and that I not ignore inconvenient evidence. But I wanted to write a book with emotional as well as intellectual depth. And so, borrowing elements of form and tone from fictional personal histories, I attempted a narrative of a love affair informed by the sensibility of a novelist. Continue Reading Andrew Cayton: History, Romance, and Conversations with Dead People
Red wolves are shy, elusive, and misunderstood predators. Until the 1800s, they were common in the longleaf pine savannas and deciduous forests of the southeastern United States. However, habitat degradation, persecution, and interbreeding with the coyote nearly annihilated them. Today, reintroduced red wolves are found only in peninsular northeastern North Carolina within less than 1 percent of their former range. In The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf, nature writer T. DeLene Beeland shadows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s pioneering recovery program over the course of a year to craft an intimate portrait of the red wolf, its history, and its restoration. Continue Reading Interview: T. DeLene Beeland, author of The Secret World of Red Wolves
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently announced UNC Press author Sheila Kay Adams as a 2013 NEA National Heritage Fellow. Adams is a seventh generation-ballad singer and has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over thirty years. Continue Reading Sheila Kay Adams named 2013 NEA National Heritage Fellow
Hadler explains how this The Citizen Patient fits into his series on health-care and how he ultimately hopes to teach readers how to be proactive in their medical care and enter into a more balanced conversation when dealing with medical professionals. Continue Reading Video: Dr. Nortin Hadler on NC Bookwatch
Therefore, even as Petrona included some explicitly nationalistic recipes, such as a cake with an Argentine national flag, along with some typical criollo cuisine, like empanadas, she presented French, Spanish, and Italian dishes as equally important for Argentine amas de casa to master. Continue Reading Excerpt: Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina, by Rebekah E. Pite
As Sherman points out, whether gaming can be a viable means of asserting and defending tribal sovereignty in the long term remains under debate. What does seem clear, however, is that Mashantucket Pequots’ recognition by the federal government produced new political, cultural, and economic dilemmas as well as important new possibilities for revitalizing and sustaining the tribal nation. Continue Reading Excerpt: Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States
The National Weather Service is in the middle of their National Hurricane Preparedness Week, running from May 26–June 1. The website provides a helpful Tropical Cyclone Preparedness Guide with meteorological information on hurricanes, the many hazards that occur both during and after the storm, and a checklist precautions to take to ensure your safety through the six-month hurricane season. Continue Reading Here Comes Hurricane Season 2013
Reading the address delivered 23 May at the National Defense University surprised me not just because it went well beyond the drone issue to address the conduct of the war on terror. More than that, Obama took some significant steps toward dealing with the war in terms of classical realism. Continue Reading Michael H. Hunt: Obama and the War on Terror: Toward Greater Realism
Our State describes the variety of the region: “Southern Pines is the horse capital of N.C., Pinehurst is the golf capital, and Candor is the peach capital.” Stretching into South Carolina and Georgia, the Sandhills are also known for a dry climate, sandy soils (hence the success of peaches), and vast Longleaf Pine forests that support threatened and endangered species like the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Sandhills
Abolitionists, fed on the fictional fare of the tragic mulatto, expected New Orleans to be filled with “white” slaves catering to the sexual appetites of immoral men. Other visitors to the city, informed by sensationalized travelers’ accounts, hoped for a glimpse of one of its renowned kept women of color, and perhaps contemplated engaging one for themselves. Continue Reading Excerpt: The Strange History of the American Quadroon, by Emily Clark
Much like Marshall and Leimenstoll’s book, Dubrow describes the Smithsonian’s exhibit as, “doubly intriguing—combining his startlingly unique cabinets, bureaus, chairs, even a child’s Gothic-Classical style ‘commode’ (potty), architectural designs, with his extraordinary career.” Continue Reading Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery Hosts Thomas Day Exhibit
Rethinking how the representation of indigenous needs and interests works in local, national, and international politics, and reconfiguring the problematic relationship between indigeneity and dominant sovereignty, means more than Native peoples’ being inserted, or even inserting themselves, into existing political structures and institutions—however crucial and challenging that feat continues to be. At the very least, it must also mean rethinking sovereignty in collaboration with indigenous peoples and not for them. Continue Reading Excerpt: Native and National in Brazil, by Tracy Devine Guzman
Newly published this spring at UNC Press, Philip Gerard’s Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina is the perfect compliment for any trip out to the Cape Fear River. Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Cape Fear River
Atlanta’s white boosters embraced a new narrative about the city’s past which wiped clean the slaveholding past and adopted a message of openness to investment by northern capitalists Continue Reading William A. Link: Atlanta Rising After Sherman
Josephus Daniels was a progressive, a warm-hearted family man, a man who genuinely cared about the country’s less-fortunate and down-trodden, at least as he defined them. Yet at the same time, he was a white supremacist, who used the coercive powers of the state to keep blacks in a socially and economically inferior state for generations. Continue Reading Interview: Lee A. Craig on Josephus Daniels
It was 150 years ago, on April 28, 1863 in Columbia, South Carolina, that nearly seventy delegates from six Confederate states met to form the South’s first and only national teachers’ organization, The Educational Association of the Confederate States of America. Continue Reading Michael T. Bernath: Confederate Teachers United in a War of Their Own
It was not just careers that came to an end in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington. African Americans also lost a claim to their legitimacy as American citizens and participants in the national state. Marked as corrupt and untrustworthy, black Americans have struggled ever since to clear their names as honest and trust-worthy citizens, a struggle that continues into our own time. Continue Reading Eric S. Yellin: Woodrow Wilson’s Inauguration a Disheartening Anniversary
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