UNC Press Presents Podcast

Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Rebecca L. Davis's book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics (UNC Press, 2021) reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explain...

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective wo...

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. He learned to read at ten years of age, left school at fourteen, became a skilled metalworker, rose to union leadership, helped end a military dictatorship--and in 2003 became the thirty-fifth president of Brazil. During his administration, Lula led his...

Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past...

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 Riveter had fewer paid employment options after being told to cede her job to returning World War II veterans, her sisters and daughters found new work opportunities in national defense. The 1948 Women's Armed Services Integration Act created permanent milita...

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 their service in the conflict. In The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era an...

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-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's live...

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 nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street "Merchant Prince...

Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the me...

P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey's edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021) is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Blac...

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 opportunity for vast riches to be made. In  Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 (UNC Press, 2019), Dr. Jessica Kim, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California, trace...

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 prosecution undertaken in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the decades since Garrison captured headlines with this high-profile legal spectacle, historians, conspiracy advocates, and Hollywood directors alike have fixated on how a New Orleans–bas...

"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, the island's first psychiatric hospital has been an object of persistent political attention. Drawing on hospital documents and government records, as well as the popular press, photographs, and oral histories, Jennifer L. Lambe charts the connection...

Remapping empire, nature, and scientific enquiry beyond the simple binary exchange between periphery and metropole, Dr. Kirsten Greer demonstrates how ornithology, the study of birds, became entwined with tours of duty for British military officers shaping military strategy and developing ecological understanding. A critical historical geography of empire, Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Or...

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 dish, an entrée, and dessert; pair it with sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla for a sweet dish or add tomatoes, onions, and peas for a savory meal. In Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook (UNC Press, 2021), Michael Twitty explores the culinary history of rice...

I had the pleasure of interviewing my mentor, Dr. Michael J. Bustamante on his first monograph, Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile which was published in March 2021 as part of the Envisioning Cuba series by the University of North Carolina Press.  "For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointme...

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 of North Carolina Press, 2020). Celia Sanchez Manduley (1920-1980) is famous for her role in the Cuban revolution and being the "first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra." Sanchez joined the movement in her early thirties and went on to serve as a...

In Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba (UNC Press, 2021), Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary...

In Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (UNC Press, 2020), Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher Kit Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Berni...

The geography of American slavery was continental, argues Dr. Kevin Waite, an assistant professor at Durham University, in West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021). Rather than being confined to the South, the institution of slavery infected North America as the American empire expanded across the Mississippi River, including places often thought of as "fr...

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 overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise th...

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and...

After a cascade of failures left residents of Flint, Michigan, without a reliable and affordable supply of safe drinking water, citizens spent years demanding action from their city and state officials. Complaints from the city's predominantly African American residents were ignored until independent researchers confirmed dangerously elevated blood lead levels among Flint children and in the city'...

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 explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (UNC Press, 2021) details entrepreneurial labor on the b...

Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley’s agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarcera...