UNC Press Presents Podcast

Joseph Weiss, "Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada" (UNC Press, 2026)

17 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, gover...

Antwain K. Hunter, "A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865" (UNC Press, 2025)

16 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 (UNC Press, 20...

Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

22 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A Histor...

Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

22 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade the...

Zaid Adhami, "Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith" (UNC Press, 2025)

11 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In one of the most important books published in 2025—Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith, published by UNC Press—Zaid Ad...

Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conc...

Brian D. Behnken, "Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025" (UNC Press, 2025)

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

How police abuse ignited the Chicano movement in the Southwest Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest,...

Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024)

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwor...

Aaron G. Fountain Jr., "High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2025)

27 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. hig...

Brittany Michelle Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

24 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of ...

Irvin Ibargüen, "Caught in the Current: Mexico's Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940-1980" (UNC Press, 2025)

21 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documen...

Amy Erdman Farrell, "Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA" (UNC Press, 2025)

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girl...

Amber Day, "Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars" (Indiana UP, 2025)

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream ...

René Esparza, "From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS" (UNC Press, 2025)

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormativ...

Black Girls and How We Fail Them

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From hip-hop moguls and political candidates to talk radio and critically acclaimed films, society communicates that Black girls don’t matter and th...

Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, t...

Erika Pani, "Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867" (UNC Press, 2025)

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, the United States and Mexico had quite a bit in common. Both suffered from reactionary succession movements...

Renata Keller, "The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United St...

John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)

22 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of Ameri...

Mila Burns, "Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War (UNC Press, 2025) offers a groundbreaking perspective on the 1973 Chilea...

Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2021)

08 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the c...

House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.

06 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to...

Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reim...

Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50...

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fa...

Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. ...

Mary E. Hicks, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every...

Susan Juster, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America" (UNC Press, 2025)

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Nevis to Newfoundland, Catholics were everywhere in English America. But often feared and distrusted, they hid in plain sight, deftly obscuring t...

Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi...

Alan McPherson, "Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice" (UNC Press, 2019)

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni...

Robert Fitzgerald, "Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency" (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up g...

Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the sam...

Ashley Howard, "Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement" (UNC Press, 2025)

24 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, ...

Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America" (UNC Press, 2021)

20 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnes...

Julia Brock, "Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South" (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock...

Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeterie...

John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that ...

Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Correctio...

Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and the...

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

29 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering...

Daniel A. Rodriguez, "The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana" (U North Carolina Press, 2020)

21 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindep...

Michael Rosino, "Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside American Grassroots Political Organizing" (UNC Press, 2025)

17 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In uncertain times, confronting pressing problems such as racial oppression and the environmental crisis requires everyday people to come together and...

María de Los Ángeles Picone, "Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina" (UNC Press, 2025)

16 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and...

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capit...

Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansi...

Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad J...

Kelly Alexander, "Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State" (UNC Press, 2024)

24 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy inst...

Jenny Shaw, "The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery" (UNC Press, 2024)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (UNC Press, 2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthe...

Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with...

The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian ...

Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our book is: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (UNC Press, 2025), by Ericka Verba, which explores the life of Chilean musician and artist...

Adrian de Leon, "Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" (UNC Press, 2023)

11 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: wha...

Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017)

06 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history depar...

Crystal R. Sanders, "A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs" (UNC Press, 2024)

30 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story ...

Travis A. Weisse, "Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness" (UNC Press, 2024)

23 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells ...

Andrew Stone Higgins, "Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan" (UNC Press, 2023)

18 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college edu...

Paul M. Renfro, "The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America" (UNC Press, 2024)

10 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan Whi...

Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, "The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game" (UNC Press, 2024)

27 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential...

Eric R. Schlereth, "Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America" (UNC Press, 2024)

14 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once th...

Zach Fredman, "The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949" (UNC Press, 2022)

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China...

Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024)

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwor...

Jennifer L. Lambe, "The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba" (UNC Press, 2024)

13 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (UNC Press, 2...

Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023)

07 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Sain...

Douglas K. Miller, "Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2019)

25 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,...

Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022)

05 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the...

Mónica A. Jiménez, "Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico" (UNC Press, 2024)

14 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Myths about the powers held by the United States are often supported by the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which derives its logic from the interp...

John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)

03 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalisation. Creatures of Fashion: Animals,...

Felicia Arriaga, "Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America" (UNC Press, 2023)

30 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many hav...

American Muslim Women on Campus

26 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A conversation with award-winning academic Dr. Shabana Mir discussing her book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identit...

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, "Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)

15 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren L...

Omar Valerio-Jiménez, "Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship" (UNC Press, 2024)

22 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Omar Valerio-Jiménez's book Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (UNC Press, 2024) analyzes the ways collective memorie...

Maria Cristina Garcia, "State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change" (UNC Press, 2022)

12 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and...

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, "Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States" (UNC Press, 2023)

07 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals...

Mateo Jarquín, "The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History" (UNC Press, 2024)

04 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as so...

R. J. Boutelle, "The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny" (UNC Press, 2023)

13 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expand...

Shardé M. Davis, "Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education" (UNC Press, 2024)

09 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people aff...

Joseph M. Thompson, "Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism" (UNC Press, 2024)

06 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history revea...

Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

03 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade the...

Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argu...

John William Nelson, "Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent" (UNC Press, 2023)

23 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Gr...

Andrew J. Kirkendall, "Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America" (UNC Press, 2022)

16 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to ...

Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023)

15 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US nationa...

Carly Goodman, "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction" (UNC Press, 2023)

29 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be...

Ariel Mae Lambe, "No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War" (UNC Press, 2019)

25 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a hi...

Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023)

17 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug educatio...

Sarah Parry Myers, "Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition" (UNC Press, 2023)

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Established by the Army Air Force in 1943, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program opened to civilian women with a pilot's licence who coul...

Robin Judd, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust" (UNC Press, 2023)

02 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldie...

Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023)

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Since the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agri...

Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)

17 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a ...

Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023)

13 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on ...

Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)

10 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In ...

Katherine Rye Jewell, "Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio" (UNC Press, 2023)

09 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and the...

Katherine M. Marino, "Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2019)

03 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an Int...

Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018)

27 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial ...

On Native American Warfare: A Discussion with Author and Historian Wayne E. Lee

24 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North ...

Trent Masiki, "The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism" (UNC Press, 2023)

21 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki...

Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023)

04 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Sec...

Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

12 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A Histor...

Drew A. Swanson, "A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction" (UNC Press, 2023)

04 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Step...

Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023)

29 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents ...