Books published by The University of North Carolina Press

No professional group in the United States benefited more from World War II than the scientific community. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists enjoyed unprecedented public visibility and political influence as a new elite whose expertise now seemed critical to America's future. But as the United States grew committed to Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and the ideology of anticommunism came to dominate American politics, scientists faced an increasingly vigorous regimen of security and loyalty clearances as well as the threat of intrusive investigations by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and other government bodies.This book is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations, the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, and the relationships between Cold War ideology and postwar science policy, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the politics of science. She exposes the deep divisions over the Cold War within the scientific community and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.

Sweet Chariot is a pathbreaking analysis of slave families and household composition in the nineteenth-century South. Ann Malone presents a carefully drawn picture of the ways in which slaves were constituted into families and households within a community and shows how and why that organization changed through the years. Her book, based on massive research, is both a statistical study over time of 155 slave communities in twenty-six Louisiana parishes and a descriptive study of three plantations: Oakland, Petite Anse, and Tiger Island.Malone first provides a regional analysis of family, household, and community organization. Then, drawing on qualitative sources, she discusses patterns in slave family household organization, identifying the most significant ones as well as those that consistantly acted as indicators of change. Malone shows that slave community organization strongly reflected where each community was in its own developmental cycle, which in turn was influenced by myriad factors, ranging from impersonal economic conditions to the arbitrary decisions of individual owners. She also projects a statistical model that can be used for comparisons with other populations. The two persistent themes that Malone uncovers are the mutability and yet the constancy of Louisiana slave household organization. She shows that the slave family and its extensions, the slave household and community, were far more diverse and adaptable than previously believed. The real strength of the slave comunity was its multiplicity of forms, its tolerance for a variety of domestic units and its adaptability. She finds, for example, that the preferred family form consisted of two parents and children but that all types of families and households were accepted as functioning and contributing members of the slave community."e;Louisiana slaves had a well-defined and collective vision of the structure that would serve them best and an iron determination to attain it, "e; Malone observes. "e;But along with this constancy in vision and perseverance was flexibility. Slave domestic forms in Louisiana bent like willows in the wind to keep from shattering. The suppleness of their forms prevented domestic chaos and enabled most slave communities to recover from even serious crises."e;

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture--that is, their ideas about what law was and how it could be used.Originally published in 1995.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Examining the scientific activities and contributions of the members of the Charleston's circle of naturalists, this text pays attention to the problems faced by the group and the ways in which their religious and racial beliefs interacted with and shaped their scientific pursuits.

Reflects a new understanding of modernism by following the fortunes of a single item of fashion. "When Fred Miller Robinson tugs the bowler from the closet in The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, a wealth of cultural and social baggage comes tumbling out after it." - Esquire

Relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, the author's insightful and documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

An innovative reinterpretation of the relationships forged between African revolutionaries and the countries of the Warsaw Pact, Cold War Liberation is a bold addition to debates about policy-making in the Global South during the Cold War.

One of the most influential leaders in the civil rights movement, Robert Parris Moses was essential in making Mississippi a central battleground state in the fight for voting rights. Examining the dilemmas of a leader who worked to cultivate local leadership, historian Laura Visser-Maessen explores the intellectual underpinnings of Moses's strategy, its achievements, and its struggles.

Takes the reader deep inside faith and character-based correctional institutions, analysing the subtle meanings and difficult choices with which the incarcerated, prison administrators, staff, and chaplains grapple every day.

Drawing on decades of researching the ethnohistory of the coastal mid-Atlantic, Helen Rountree reconstructs the Indigenous world the Roanoke colonists encountered in the 1580s. Blending research with accessible narrative, Rountree reveals in detail the social, political, and religious lives of Native Americans before European colonization.

How did the American colonies overcome long odds to create a durable union capable of declaring independence from Britain? In this powerful new history of the fifteen tense months that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, Robert Parkinson provides a troubling answer: racial fear.

This new history of the Christian right does not stop at national or religious boundaries. Benjamin Cowan chronicles the advent of a hemispheric religious movement whose current power and influence make headlines and generate no small amount of shock in Brazil and the United States.

Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Susan Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. In so doing, Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and US social and cultural history generally.

For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time.

In this age of shortened office visits, doctors take care of their patients' immediate needs and often elide their own personal histories. But as reflected in Broke, Michael Stein takes the time to listen to the experiences of his patients whose financial challenges complicate every decision in life they make.

Examines the creation of "the streets" not just as a physical, racialized space produced by segregationist policies but also as a sociocultural entity that has influenced our understanding of blackness in America for decades.

Explores antebellum American conceptions of bioplasticity - the body's ability to react and change from interior and exterior forces - and argues that literature helped to shape the cultural reception of these ideas.

Focusing on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, Julia Charles creates a new discourse around racial passing to analyse mixed-race characters' social objectives when crossing into other racialized spaces.

Weaving together biography and political history, Michael Woods restores Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the centre of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife.

Using Alan Berkman's unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan Reverby sheds fascinating light on questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of Berkman's extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice.

The Army of the Potomac was a hotbed of political activity during the Civil War. In this comprehensive reassessment of the army's politics, Zachery Fry argues that the war was an intense political education for its common soldiers.

Robert Schwartz examines the French government's attempts to suppress mendicity from the reign of Louis XIV to the Revolution. His study provides a rich account of the evolution of poverty, the varied and shifting attitudes toward the delinquent poor, and the government's efforts to control mendicity by strengthening the state's repressive machinery during the eighteenth century. As Schwartz demonstrates, popular conceptions of the mendicant poor in the ancient regime increasingly focused on the threat that they presented to the rest of society, thereby opening the way for the central state to augment its authority and enhance its credibility by acting as the agent protecting the majority of the populace from its threat to public security.Government efforts to control the activity of the "e;unworthy poor"e; -- those of sound mind and body who were seen to prefer idleness over productive work -- were most pronounced during two periods of repressive policing, one in the early eighteenth century and the other in the last two decades before the Revolution. From 1724 to 1733 beggars were interned in hopitaux, existing municipal institutions intended for the care of the "e;worthy poor,"e; including orphans, the infirm, and the aged. But from 1768 until the outbreak of the Revolution, more stringent measures were taken. Sturdy beggars and vagrants were confined apart from the worthy poor on specially established, royal workhouses called depots de mendicite, and in the case of some repeat offenders, were sentenced to the galleys. This stepped-up level of policing arose not only from royal administrators' long-standing view of mendicity as criminal activity; it was also made possible because the propertied classes had likewise come to believe the mendicant poor were a danger rather than a nuisance. Economic and demographic conditions combined to swell the ranks of paupers and vagrants, especially in the 1760s and 1770s, and social tensions, along with calls for government action, multiplied in proportion to their numbers. As villagers came to call upon the improved royal police for help, a popular mental association of the state with public security began to take root.In arriving at these conclusions, Schwartz concentrates on law enforcement in a single area, Lower Normandy, but continually provides a perspective on local events by putting them in the context of national trends and realities. He tells the story of the poor in eighteenth-century France in sympathetic terms, giving a human face to poverty and to the men who policed its effects.Originally published in 1987.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Asking why many American intellectuals have had such difficulty accepting wholeheartedly the cultural dimensions of democracy, Robert Dawidoff examines their alienation and ambivalence, a tradition of detachment he identifies as "e;Tocquevillian."e; In the work of three towering American literary figures - Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana -- Dawidoff explores fully this distancing and uneasy response to democratic culture.Linked together by common Harvard, Cambridge, and New England connections, and by an upper-class, Brahmin background, each of these three writers, Dawidoff argues, was at once self-critical and contemptuous of cultural democracy -- especially its indifference to them and what they represented. But their claims to detached observation of democratic culture must be viewed skeptically, Dawidoff warns, and borrowed with caution.An important contribution of the book is its integration of gay issues into American intellectual history. Viewing James's and Santayana's attitudes toward their homosexuality as affecting their views of American society, Dawidoff examines this significant and overlooked element in the American intellectual and cultural mix. Dawidoff also includes powerful new readings of Adams's Democracy and James's The Ambassadors and discusses Santayana's Americanist essays.In his foreward, Alan Trachtenberg notes the "e;taboo"e; that seems to have fallen over the word democracy. "e;It is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies,"e; he says, "e; snubbed in favor of gender, class, race, region."e; This trend, he says, may be in part due to an unease about studying the culture in which we participate because the posture of the cutural critic implies a certain detachment. "e;The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage returns the question of democracy to centerstage,"e; he concludes, "e;not as political theory alone but as cultural and personal experience."e;Originally published in 1992.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Provides a full-bodied and living picture of the land that sprawls widely from the Potomac to the Rio Grande - a land of religious bigotry, ignorance, and stubborn fundamentalism, cape jessamine and moonlight, possum hunts and demagogues, local opinion and local cawn. It is the land that produced Huey Long, The Man Bilbo, and the Heflin thunder concerning "white supremacy".

The idea for this volume resulted from the preparation of a bulletin on poor relief in North Carolina for the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare. Beginning with the problems of pauperism, the author discusses the conditions of the three classes of poor: the able-bodied rogues, the impotent poor, and the children. He offers suggestions for possible solutions of the problems in poor relief.

This is the authentic story of the thirty-year effort of the Communist party to channel Afro-American protest in terms of Kremlin edicts rather than the Bill of Rights. From its beginnings after World War I, the party chose blacks as a major target in its recruiting campaign. Wilson shows the patriotism and wisdom of the black leaders who have resisted the pressure of the Communist attack.