In this video, southern scholars William Ferris and Marcie Cohen Ferris talk about the importance of living where they work. Continue Reading Video: William Ferris and Marcie Cohen Ferris on living and working in Chapel Hill
Between about 1660 and 1760, French colonists and their Native allies enslaved thousands of Indians, keeping them in the towns and villages of New France or shipping them to the French Caribbean. Over time, a vast network of slave raiders, traders, and owners emerged, ensnaring both colonists and Indians in the violence that generated slaves and kept them under French control. Continue Reading Excerpt: Bonds of Alliance, by Brett Rushforth
We start our series with icon number 1: the Blue Ridge Parkway. Our State Magazine says, “Travel any one of the Parkway’s 252 North Carolina miles and you’re guaranteed a beautiful drive.” We have three different books that will help you explore the Blue Ridge Parkway in three different ways. Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Blue Ridge Parkway
During the post-WWII period in the United States, a new generation of pollutants proved especially mobile and persistent. Overriding a widespread segregation of neighborhoods by class as well as race, these pollutants proved capable of pervading entire suburban metropolises. Americans, especially around our largest cities, were forced to confront just how shared the burden of pollution had become. Continue Reading Interview: Christopher C. Sellers on the origins of American environmentalism
In The Color of Christ, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey discuss America’s perceptions of the race of Jesus Christ. To observe some popular opinions, an interviewer and a camera went to Comic-Con, where they asked attendees about their views of Jesus. From questions about who would win in a fight, Jesus or the Joker? to popular perceptions of Jesus’ race, see the colorful answers from the even more colorful Comic-Con goers. Continue Reading Video: Jesus Christ at Comic-Con
The current scholarly consensus holds that no single individual created baseball; rather, it evolved incrementally from various forms of bat-and-ball folk games, including British rounders. This cultural form of transatlantic hybrid pedigree grew into a modern team sport in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York in the early nineteenth century, with each of these burgeoning northeastern American cities developing its distinctive formats of the game. Continue Reading Excerpt: Transpacific Field of Dreams, by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
This Omnibus Ebook brings together the first three books into a collection of Woodwright classics. Designed for both woodworking novices and for more seasoned woodworkers looking for enjoyable projects, these books feature step-by-step instructions, complete with easy-to-follow photographs and measured drawings. Continue Reading New Omnibus E-Book: Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s Shop Classic Collection
We walked toward the west end of the island and turned around to set up Sto’s scope with the sun at our backs, and from that vantage point we saw a rookery just seething with birds, not only the ibises but every heron and egret imaginable, including the elusive night herons. Continue Reading Excerpt: The Armchair Birder Goes Coastal by John Yow
Like Marye Dahnke, dozens of home economists carved out spaces for themselves in the consumer products industries in the early 1920s. While home economists in business struggled to win legitimacy within the American Home Economics Association (AHEA), they also faced challenges convincing corporate executives and managers that their expertise was necessary to effective consumer-oriented production and marketing. Continue Reading Excerpt: Creating Consumers, by Carolyn M. Goldstein
What Andy Griffith and The Andy Griffith Show did for our family—and many others like ours—what brought us all together was how he showed that North Carolina could be a place to be proud of, and not a place always belittled on TV. Continue Reading Notes from Mayberry, North Carolina
For this month’s Free Book Friday, we’re giving away a copy of Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue by John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed with William McKinney, along with a matching Holy Smoke chef’s apron! Continue Reading Free Book Friday: Holy Smoke edition
African Americans now had both more freedom to move about and more reason to believe they could begin to live the lives they had previously only imagined. For many, this meant reuniting with family, so they urgently attempted to get to the places where they thought their loved ones might be. Sometimes they found them there; other times the people were gone. Continue Reading Excerpt: Help Me to Find My People, by Heather Andrea Williams
When we think of the Abolition movement, a common history textbook answer is that the Abolition movement began when William Lloyd Garrison started publishing his Liberator in 1831, but the roots of American abolitionism are fairly long. Continue Reading Video: Manisha Sinha on the Origins of Abolitionism
Today, 70 years after those first African Americans joined the Marines, Montford Point veterans are being formally honored with the Congressional Gold Medal. Continue Reading First African American Marines Honored with Congressional Gold Medal
We are very happy to share the news that UNC Press director of contracts and subsidiary rights Vicky Wells was presented with the AAUP 2012 Constituency Award at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses last week in Chicago. The AAUP, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, is comprised of 134 nonprofit scholarly presses. The award… Continue Reading Vicky Wells receives 2012 AAUP Constituency Award
Mays’s own life took him from the nadir of Jim Crow in the Deep South, to the long march of civil rights agitation and education, to the culmination of the Black Freedom struggle in the late 1960s. Long before King began his ministry in Montgomery, Mays had advocated that black churches become centers of civil rights activism, and he was delighted when they nurtured a democratic movement that brought down the walls of racial segregation in the United States. Continue Reading Excerpt: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement, by Randal Maurice Jelks
Doubting the capacity of the law to distinguish between legitimate militancy and subversive radicalism, labor conservatives disapproved of legislation outlawing sedition. Instead they pursued a voluntarist program of evangelizing about the evils of Communism and excluding Communists from AFL unions. In the aftermath of the first Red Scare, labor conservatives formed a crucial backstop against reaction. In the late 1930s, the situation changed. Alienated from the New Deal order and at odds with liberal union leaders in the competing Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), labor conservatives abandoned commonsense anticommunism for calculated red-baiting. Continue Reading Excerpt: Commonsense Anticommunism by Jennifer Luff
“Because the Civil War, by chance, began right at the beginning of an administration, that part of the Constitution that gave the president a four-year term and made the president the commander-in-chief was extremely important. That meant that, barring impeachment or assassination, there would be a determined Republican in the White House fighting the South until March of 1865.”—Mark E. Neely Jr. Continue Reading Video: Mark E. Neely Jr. on the advantage of the U.S. Constitution during the Civil War
In the United States, even from Bunner’s time, what nourished the nature love of the more and less scientifically qualified alike was a shared suburban experience. It was one not so much of home buying as home owning. Nor was it reducible to suburban dwellers’ relationship with “the land,” however fraught. What finally secured the breadth of environmentalism’s appeal was how nature love itself had become ever more suffused with anxieties about human health. Continue Reading Excerpt: Crabgrass Crucible, by Christopher C. Sellers
For all his genius as a political theorist (we remember him as “the Father of the Constitution”) and despite remarkable success as a politician (he lost only one election in a public career spanning forty years) James Madison has never been ranked among the greatest of presidents. The War of 1812 permanently stained his reputation. Yet Madison’s wartime leadership deserves a second look. Continue Reading Jeff Broadwater: James Madison, the Constitution, and the War of 1812
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