University of North Carolina Press

Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwork quilt of forested swamps, sandy plains, and...

Legions of bluegrass fans know the name Otto Wood (1893-1930) from a ballad made popular by Doc Watson, telling the story of Wood's crimes and violent death. However, few know the history of this...

This is an unmistakable time of crisis and confusion about the purpose, value, and sustainability of higher education in the United States. Data continues to show substantial benefits for students...

Publication is an act of power. It brings a piece of writing to the public and identifies its author as a person with an intellect and a voice that matters. Because nineteenth-century Black Americans...

Exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, and kinship within the context of Latter-day Saint theology and history, this provocative book theorizes the Mormon faith's complex relationship with...

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 the United States came into existence, its citizens...

Imprisoned since age nineteen, Alim Braxton has spent more than a quarter century on North Carolina's death row. During that time, he converted to Islam and dedicated his life to redemption. Braxton,...

This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the...

Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves...

Sabor Judio celebrates the delicious fusion of two culinary traditions: Jewish and Mexican. Written with joy and verve, Ilan Stavans and Margaret Boyle's lavishly illustrated cookbook demonstrates...

J Finley argues that through humor, and particularly sass, comedy functions as a medium for Black women to articulate and redress cultural, social, and political marginalization. Finley challenges...

This is the untold story of Dr. J. D. Harris, an African American physician whose life and career straddled enormous changes for Black professionals and the practice of medicine. Born in...

It is impossible to separate histories of sexual violence and the enslavement of Black women in the antebellum South. Rape permeated the lives of all who existed in that system: Black and white, male...

Shaking up New York and national politics by becoming the first African American congresswoman and, later, the first Black major-party presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark...

This cultural history of the American-Israeli relationship, beginning in the nineteenth century and going through 1947, when the state of Israel was established, to the present puts a focus on...

Stories I Lived to Tell is more than a selection of stories from revered mountain storyteller Gary Carden--it is a testimony of a distinguished culture, sense of place, and spirit of community that...

In 1830 Richard Walpole Cogdell, a husband, father, and bank clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Before her death in 1850, she bore...

Be popular and good-looking--it's the key to a happy life. Luckily, with a bit of know-how and money, you, too, can have it all. At least, that's what teen pop culture was selling in surround sound...

In twenty-four concussive, embodied, and nonlinear essays, Ramos creates a challenging and complex portrait of what it means to be a soldier, civilian, veteran, father, husband, and teacher - for...

For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver's license, verifying information for new employers, or claiming state and...

Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of...

Ethical dilemmas and value conflicts affect cities globally, but urban leaders and citizens often avoid confronting them directly and instead view the governance of cities as primarily an...

In 2003, Leon Fink published his oral history of Guatemalan and Mexican migrants in Morganton, North Carolina, and their fight for unionization in a poultry processing plant. In the years since, Fink...

For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public officials in cities like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have criminalized uprisings--portending Black "thugs" throwing rocks at police...

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime," and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to...

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted...

From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution explores how knowledge about the 1959 Cuban Revolution was produced and how the Revolution in turn shaped new...

In the summer of 1927, an itinerant Black laborer named Broadus Miller was accused of killing a fifteen-year-old white girl in Morganton, North Carolina. Miller became the target of a massive manhunt...

In November 2018, Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the odds, narrowly fending off a blue wave in the sprawling Ninth District of North Carolina. But word soon got around that something fishy was...

This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential...