Books published by The University of North Carolina Press

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.

Nellie McKay was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. She is best known for coediting the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy.

In this fascinating work, K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured.

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.

Mapping out a trajectory that links the sexist buffoonery of Bobby Riggs in the 1970s, the popularity of Rush Limbaugh's screeds against ""Feminazis"" in the 1990s, and the present day misogyny underpinning Trumpism, Julie Willett shows what can happen when we neglect or trivialize the political power of humour.

Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work.

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.

In this history of a unique tradition, Tyler Parry untangles the history of the ""broomstick wedding"". Popularly associated with African American culture, Parry traces the ritual's origins to marginalized groups in the British Isles and explores how it influenced the marriage traditions of different communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Analysing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century.

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.

Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Adam Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

Illuminating the entangled histories of the people and commodities that circulated across the Atlantic, Sharika Crawford assesses the Caribbean as a waterscape where imperial and national governments vied to control the profitability of the sea.

Surveying some two dozen films and the literary and historical sources from which they were adapted, John Inscoe argues that in the American imagination Appalachia has long represented far more than deprived and depraved hillbillies. Rather, the films he highlights serve as effective conduits into the region's past.

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.

In this sweeping history, Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the US occupation in 1915.

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War-era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights.

This history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the US occupation focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state.

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its population. In this groundbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War.

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.

In Athens, Georgia in the '80s, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow.

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.