Who we are Our website address is: https://uncpressblog.com. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called… Continue Reading Privacy Policy
Today we welcome a guest post from Anne Balay, author of Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers, just published this month by UNC Press. Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral… Continue Reading Anne Balay: If your feminism isn’t intersectional, it isn’t feminism
Today, we welcome a guest post from Thomas J. Brown, author of Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina, just published in paperback by UNC Press. In this expansive history of South Carolina’s commemoration of the Civil War era, Thomas J. Brown uses the lens of place to examine the ways that landmarks of Confederate memory have… Continue Reading Thomas J. Brown: Statue and Statute
Today we welcome a guest post from Ira Dworkin, author of Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State. In Congo Love Song, Ira Dworkin examines black Americans’ long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and… Continue Reading Ira Dworkin: Remembering Etienne Tshisekedi, One Year After
University Press Week wraps up today with the blog tour day 5’s theme of Libraries and Librarians helping us all #LookItUP. Today’s posts: Friday, November 10, 2017: Libraries and Librarians helping us all #LookItUP University of Georgia Press University of Missouri Press University of Nebraska Press University Press of Florida Be sure to read up on this week’s earlier… Continue Reading University Press Week 2017: Blog Tour Day 5
Elaine Maisner is Executive Editor at UNC Press. A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, is available now in both print and e-book editions. ### As the UNC Press editor responsible for our list in religious studies, I am delighted to announce that Rachel McBride Lindsey’s book, A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America,… Continue Reading Elaine Maisner: Announcing a Multimedia Collaboration between UNC Press and Mavcor on Material Religion
Scholarly Publishers Select Theme Resonating in Time of Fake News — #LookItUP: Knowledge Matters is Theme of University Press Week, November 6-11 In a time when the public’s trust in facts and knowledge is waning, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has chosen “#LookItUP: Knowledge Matters” as the theme for this year’s University Press Week. University Press Week (UP… Continue Reading University Press Week 2017: Blog Tour Day 1
Today we welcome a guest post from Douglas Hunter, author of The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past, on the contested history of Dighton Rock and it’s petroglyphs. Claimed by many to be the most frequently documented artifact in American archeology, Dighton Rock is a forty-ton boulder covered in petroglyphs in southern Massachusetts. First… Continue Reading Douglas Hunter: Dighton Rock, Leif Eriksson, and the Origins of Scientific Racism
Today we welcome a guest blog post from Andrew C. McKevitt, author of Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s, on the popularity and impact of anime and manga in America today. Consuming Japan explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan’s remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian… Continue Reading Andrew C. McKevitt: Globalization’s Heroes in the Age of Trumpism
The world Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba were building for all of their children continues among poets, musicians, and activists who embody the struggles and scars, and look to places like Jackson where activists imagine and demand justice, understanding what is at stake in Banner’s call–on behalf of Lumumba–to “please remember my name.” Continue Reading Ira Dworkin: In the Name of Lumumba
Macklemore’s 2013 tribute to thrift shops articulates the enduring association of creative output with secondhand commerce. Voluntary secondhand dress persists precisely because it suggests both cultural and economic distinction. It satisfies a desire to be seen as different than the average consumer dupe, as willing to invest time in the cultivation of originality without utilizing class and wealth privilege. In reality, however, secondhand economies and styles throughout the twentieth century are much more complicated; studying them reveals the futility of pursuing an effective anti-consumer consumption. But whatever the continuing or resurgent stigmas and social critiques of secondhand products may be, many creative dressers continue to agree with Macklemore’s concise assessment: “This is fucking awesome.” Continue Reading Jennifer Le Zotte: Poppin’ Tags: How Musicians Helped Make Used Clothes Fashionable
Back in 2008 when Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton vied for the Democratic nomination, the “Will Latinos support a black candidate?” narrative dominated the news cycle. “Many Latinos are not ready for a person of color,” said a young Latina in a typical quote featured by the New York Times. “I don’t think many Latinos will vote for Obama.” Academic social science from new Latino settlement areas in the U.S. South seemingly confirmed the narrative: “Latino Immigrants come to the U.S. with negative stereotypes of black Americans,” declared a Duke research team after conducting a survey in Durham, N.C., in 2003. Yet though Clinton did dominate among Latinos in the 2008 primary, they rallied to Obama’s side once he clinched the nomination, delivering the country’s first black president a historically large margin of Latino votes that November. Continue Reading Julie M. Weise: African Americans and Immigrants’ Rights in the Trump Era
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
In the late 1970s, when owner Hugh Morton closed the mountain’s trails after a hiker had died, I proposed a backcountry management program to make the trails safe and persuaded Morton to hire me to reopen the deteriorating paths. I often hiked the mountain alone as trail manager and one of the mysteries that frequently crossed my mind was the strange death of Worth Hamilton Weller. Continue Reading Randy Johnson: One of Grandfather Mountain’s Mysteries, Unraveled
My mother and her only sibling, my aunt, are losing their memories. Though their short-term memory has all but disappeared, their shared memories of childhood still remain vivid. One of their neurologists described the brain’s storage of memory and the onset of dementia as a file cabinet, with the most recently filed folders disappearing first, and the ones stored long ago as the last to go. Continue Reading Catherine A. Stewart: Looking Backward: On Memory and the Challenges of Oral History
In the following video, Gaffield navigates a history wrought with slavery, colonialism, racial stereotyping, and global power politics, revealing how her book answers the question: What happened after the Haitian revolution? (running time 2:19). Continue Reading Book Trailer: Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World by Julia Gaffield
If the Windsor Jazz Riot has long been lost from our collective historical memory, it provides an important moment to think about current national debates over riots, race relations, and national boundaries. Borders—be they national, geographical, social, or cultural—provide us the opportunity to blame outsiders for social ills, and for expressing collective fears. We tend to associate this most often with the U.S.–Mexico border, where inflammatory language about anchor babies, Mexican rapists, and drug smugglers dominates public debates. But there is a deep history of racial division along the U.S.–Canada divide, one that needs to be acknowledged as we debate the “American” race problem in the twenty-first century. Continue Reading Holly M. Karibo: Race and Violence on the Northern Borderline: The Case of the Windsor “Jazz Riot”
Stories such as this one about middle-class riders making motorcycling respectable were common in the early 1960s. Their arrival both coincided with and was the product of the introduction of the Japanese Honda into the American marketplace. Yet despite the enthusiasm that greeted the middle-class rider, ambivalence and frustration also surrounded him. These were serious riders, or so they claimed, yet their critics found it all too easy to dismiss them as “casual” motorcyclists. If anything, their struggle to overcome this claim made their impact on motorcycling more conspicuous than it might have been otherwise, and it brought the issue of class to the fore. Continue Reading Excerpt: Born to Be Wild: The Rise of the American Motorcyclist, by Randy D. McBee
Southern Cultures is now multimedia! Download the app for your tablet, and in addition to all the great content available in the print journal, you can also enjoy embedded audio, video, and links to additional resources. Continue Reading Southern Cultures Journal App Now Available
There is no way to tell the story of what happened on June 17, 2015, without talking about deeper histories of race, religion, and violence. Continue Reading History Matters: Historians Respond to the Charleston Shooting [Updated]
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