UNC Press Presents Podcast

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023)

10 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered...

Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert, "The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914" (UNC Press, 2024)

02 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of t...

Jamie L. Jones, "Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling" (UNC Press, 2023)

26 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illu...

Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)

25 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States...

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, "Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2022)

22 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and ...

Diane Flynt, "Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South" (UNC Press, 2023)

20 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the a...

Josephine Lee, "Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater" (UNC Press, 2022)

11 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Format...

Jeanne K. Firth, "Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice" (UNC Press, 2023)

09 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many high-profile chefs in New Orleans pledged to help their city rebound from the flooding. Several formed their own...

Christian O. Paiz, "The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-And-File History of the UFW Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)

08 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers' (UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the UFW has lent its ra...

Juliana Hu Pegues, "Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements" (UNC Press, 2021)

25 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in t...

Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023)

25 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascin...

Janiece Johnson, "Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture" (UNC Press, 2023)

22 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Mea...

Bobby J. Smith II, "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)

16 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Bobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story burie...

Jennifer Ritterhouse, "Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s" (UNC Press, 2017)

16 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. I...

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America" (UNC Press, 2023)

04 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story o...

Thurka Sangaramoorthy, "Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America" (UNC Press, 2023)

03 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbe...

Margaret M. Power, "Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism" (UNC Press, 2023)

29 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far be...

Rebecca Sharpless, "Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)

25 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complica...

Jessica D. Klanderud, "Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh" (UNC Press, 2023)

17 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Cities are nothing without the streets—the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the c...

Robin James, "The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence" (UNC Press, 2023)

07 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omni...

Chad E. Pearson, "Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2022)

02 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers, government officials, journalists, and powerful individuals deployed a variety o...

Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South" (UNC Press, 2023)

29 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the A...

Beth Bailey, "An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era" (UNC Press, 2023)

25 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

By the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as...

Ana Schwartz, "Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America" (UNC Press, 2022)

23 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a soci...

Susan Burch, "Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions" (UNC Press, 2021)

14 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indian...

Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities

06 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s book is: Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (UNC Press, 2018), by Jonathan Coley. Al...

Elizabeth Lhost, "Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia" (UNC Press, 2022)

24 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But professiona...

Sarah Foss, "On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala" (UNC Press, 2022)

16 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evide...

J. Brent Morris, "Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (UNC Press, 2022)

31 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early sev...

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, "The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954" (UNC Press, 2023)

28 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Beginning with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in spring 1951 and ending with its reversal following the overthrow of Prime Minister M...

Viola Franziska Müller, "Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South" (UNC Press, 2022)

20 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (UNC Press, 2022), Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged t...

Jonathan W. White, "To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln" (UNC Press, 2021)

08 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White...

Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022)

01 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: ...

Michael Ayers Trotti, "The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)

23 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Ayers Trotti's The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South (The University of North Carolina Press, 202...

Lauren N. Haumesser, "The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861" (UNC Press, 2022)

23 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Lauren N. Haumesser's The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (UNC Press, 2022) offers a fresh examinati...

Finis Dunaway. "Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2021)

22 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal...

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, "A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American" (UNC Press, 2019

17 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Kathleen Sprows Cu...

Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)

29 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the ...

Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022)

24 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be...

Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022)

22 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. ...

Michael Stein, "Accidental Kindness: A Doctor’s Notes on Empathy" (UNC Press, 2022)

22 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We will all be patients sooner or later. And when we go to the doctor, when we're hurting, we tend to think in terms of cause and condemnation. We oft...

David Morgan, "The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions" (UNC Press, 2021)

01 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Common views of religion typically focus on the beliefs and meanings derived from revealed scriptures, ideas, and doctrines. David Morgan has broadene...

Larisa Kingston Mann, "Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (UNC Press, 2022)

24 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host Mariela Morales Suárez discusses the book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of C...

Randall Balmer, "Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America" (UNC Press, 2022)

20 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a...

Anima Adjepong, "Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra" (UNC Press, 2021)

11 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian pra...

Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022)

20 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals...

Randall Balmer, "Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America" (UNC Press, 2022)

20 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a...

Allyson P. Brantley, "Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism" (UNC Press, 2021)

06 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Before the craft beer revolution, Coors was a hot commodity. Impossible to find outside a few states in the West, the beer had a level of "cool" that ...

Merlin Chowkwanyun, "All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health" (UNC Press, 2022)

30 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Health care is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation ...

Daniel T. Fleming, "Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day" (UNC Press, 2022)

05 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (UNC Press, 2022) tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther K...

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

28 Jul 2022

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...

Traci Parker, "Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s" (UNC Press, 2019)

22 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (UNC Press, 2019), Traci Parke...

Ricardo A. Herrera, "Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778" (UNC Press, 2022)

07 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Dr. Ricardo Herrera presents a m...

Christina Ramos, "Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment" (UNC Press, 2022)

01 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (UNC Press, 2022), Cristina Ramos tells us the story of Mexico city’s o...

G. Ronald Murphy, "Brecht and the Bible: A Study of Religious Nihilism and Human Weakness in Brecht's Drama of Morality and the City" (UNC Press, 2020)

30 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Brecht and the Bible: A Study of Religious Nihilism and Human Weakness in Brecht's Drama of Morality and the City (UNC Press, 2020), Father G. R...

Mahshid Mayar, "Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire" (UNC Press, 2022)

27 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies, John Yargo spoke with Mahshid Mayar about how children’s puzzles and schoolbooks at the turn of th...

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

23 Jun 2022

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...

Irvin J. Hunt, "Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement" (UNC Press, 2022)

02 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In their darkest hours over the course of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, and Fannie Lou Hamer gathered hundreds...

Tracey Deutsch, "Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2010)

31 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The title of the book that we are introducing today is Building a Housewife's Paradise Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentiet...

Ryan Hall, "Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877" (UNC Press, 2020)

12 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistan...

Glenda E. Gilmore, "Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South" (UNC Press, 2022)

10 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South (UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents...

Rana A. Hogarth, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" (UNC Press, 2017)

28 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the ...

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

05 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between...

Scott Kugle, "Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean" (UNC Press, 2021)

01 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and is available as an open-ac...

Francesca Morgan, "A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History" (UNC Press, 2021)

25 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), historian Francesca M...

K. Stephen Prince, "The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot Of 1900" (UNC Press, 2021)

17 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with poli...

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

22 Feb 2022

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...

Mary J. Henold, "The Laywoman Project: Remaking Catholic Womanhood in the Vatican II Era" (UNC Press, 2020)

01 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In The Laywoman Project: Remaking Catholic Womanhood in the Vatican II Era (UNC Press, 2020), Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishion...

Tyler D. Parry, "Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual" (UNC Press, 2020)

28 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (UNC Press, 2020), Tyler D. Parry untangles the convoluted hist...

Fay A. Yarbrough, "Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country" (UNC Press, 2021)

26 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the ...

Sarah J. Purcell, "Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2022)

03 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (UNC Press, 2022) examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civ...

Susan J. Pearson, "The Birth Certificate: An American History" (UNC Press, 2021)

27 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver’s license, verifying i...

Warren E. Milteer, Jr., "Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South" (UNC Press, 2021)

20 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We often focus on enslaved people of color but Dr. Warren E. Milteer Jr.’s Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, ...

Samantha Seeley, "Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)

16 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Samantha Seeley is the author of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, published by the University o...

Rebecca L. Davis, "Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics" (UNC Press, 2021)

10 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods ...

John D. French, "Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil" (UNC Press, 2020)

30 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Known around the world simply as Lula, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva was born in 1945 to illiterate parents who migrated to industrializing São Paulo. H...

Crystal Webster, "Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North" (UNC Press, 2021)

30 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African Amer...

Kevin Bruyneel, "Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)

29 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, a...

Tanya L. Roth, "Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980" (UNC Press, 2021)

19 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Tanya L. Roth's Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explains that while Rosie the Rivet...

Stephen Cushman, "The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today" (UNC Press, 2021)

17 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of...

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, "The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South" (UNC Press, 2021)

15 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghome...

Joan Marie Johnson, "Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870-1967" (UNC Press, 2020)

29 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late ninet...

Kristy Nabhan-Warren, "Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland" (UNC Press, 2021)

28 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among wo...

P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey, "The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2021)

18 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey's edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021) is...

Jessica M. Kim, "Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941" (UNC Press, 2019)

14 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1865 and 1900, the population of Los Angeles grew from around 5,000 people to over 100,000. With population growth that explosive came the opp...

Alecia P. Long, "Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination As a Sex Crime" (UNC Press, 2021)

04 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's decision to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, set off a chain of events that culminated in the only pros...

Jennifer L. Lambe, "Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History" (UNC Press, 2017)

31 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

"On the outskirts of Havana lies Mazorra, an asylum known to--and at times feared by--ordinary Cubans for over a century. Since its founding in 1857, ...

Kirsten A. Greer, "Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire" (UNC Press, 2020)

25 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Remapping empire, nature, and scientific enquiry beyond the simple binary exchange between periphery and metropole, Dr. Kirsten Greer demonstrates how...

Michael Twitty, "Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook" (UNC Press, 2021)

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Rice is a central ingredient to Southern foodways, and it is one of the most versatile grains served around the world. It could be prepared as a side ...

Michael J. Bustamante, "Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile" (UNC Press, 2021)

18 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

I had the pleasure of interviewing my mentor, Dr. Michael J. Bustamante on his first monograph, Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolut...

Tiffany A. Sippial, "Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary" (UNC Press, 2020)

06 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

I sat down with Dr. Tiffany Sippial to talk about her latest book, Celia Sanchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary (University ...

Elizabeth B. Schwall, "Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba" (UNC Press, 2021)

03 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba (UNC Press, 2021), Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focus...

Susan Lee Johnson, "Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West" (UNC Press, 2020)

30 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (UNC Press, 2020), Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tale...

Kevin Waite, "West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire" (UNC Press, 2021)

21 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The geography of American slavery was continental, argues Dr. Kevin Waite, an assistant professor at Durham University, in West of Slavery: The Sout...

Van Gosse, "The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2021)

30 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the ov...

Katherine Carté, "Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History" (UNC Press, 2021)

14 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. ...

Katrinell M. Davis, "Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery" (UNC Press, 2021)

09 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

After a cascade of failures left residents of Flint, Michigan, without a reliable and affordable supply of safe drinking water, citizens spent years d...

Heather Berg, "Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2021)

03 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to...

Jessica Ordaz, "The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity" (UNC Press, 2021)

24 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Dieg...

Christine Walker, "Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire" (UNC Press, 2020)

21 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire (Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press, 2020) is t...