Search results for ""university of north carolina press""

Offers an exploration on celebrity and the self, on home and what that means when you leave it, and why we love and admire the people we do - even if we've never met them - all told through the entwined lives of iconic actor Andy Griffith and writer Evan Dalton Smith.

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Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities-all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities. At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these narratives raise important questions about queer identity formation, community building, and power relations as they are negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of the patchwork quilt that is southern culture.

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This title features from Molly Pitcher to Patty Hearst. The gun-toting woman holds enormous symbolic significance in American culture. Laura Browder examines the relationship between women and guns in America and the ways in which the figure of the armed woman has served as a lightning rod for cultural issues. In an entertaining and provocative analysis, she looks at women including Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man to fight in the American Revolution; Pauline Cushman, who posed as a Confederate to spy for Union forces during the Civil War; Wild West sure-shot Annie Oakley; African explorer Osa Johnson; 1930s gangsters Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker; and Patty Hearst, the hostage-turned-revolutionary-turned-victim.

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In this landmark book, Daniel Crofts examines a little-known episode in the most celebrated aspect of Abraham Lincoln's life: his role as the "Great Emancipator." Lincoln always hated slavery, but he also believed it to be legal where it already existed, and he never imagined fighting a war to end it. In 1861, as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the Union and prevent war, the new president even offered to accept a constitutional amendment that barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the slave states. Lincoln made this key overture in his first inaugural address.Crofts unearths the hidden history and political maneuvering behind the stillborn attempt to enact this amendment, the polar opposite of the actual Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 that ended slavery. This compelling book sheds light on an overlooked element of Lincoln's statecraft and presents a relentlessly honest portrayal of America's most admired president. Crofts rejects the view advanced by some Lincoln scholars that the wartime momentum toward emancipation originated well before the first shots were fired. Lincoln did indeed become the "Great Emancipator," but he had no such intention when he first took office. Only amid the crucible of combat did the war to save the Union become a war for freedom.

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The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, we often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled. In this powerful collection of pathbreaking essays, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. She explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history. The book illustrates both the breadth of Painter's interests and the originality of her intellectual contributions. This edition features refreshed essays and a new preface that sheds light on the development of Painter's thought and our continued struggles with racism in the twenty-first century.

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The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12 were the strongest temblors in the North American interior in at least the past five centuries. From the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a broad cast of thinkers struggled to explain these seemingly unprecedented natural phenomena. They summoned a range of traditions of inquiry into the natural world and drew connections among signs of environmental, spiritual, and political disorder on the cusp of the War of 1812. Drawn from extensive archival research, Convulsed States probes their interpretations to offer insights into revivalism, nation remaking, and the relationship between religious and political authority across Native nations and the United States in the early nineteenth century. With a compelling narrative and rigorous comparative analysis, Jonathan Todd Hancock uses the earthquakes to bridge historical fields and shed new light on this pivotal era of nation remaking. Through varied peoples' efforts to come to grips with the New Madrid earthquakes, Hancock reframes early nineteenth-century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions amid prophecies, political reinventions, and war.

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During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself.In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era.

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As the United States grew into an empire in the late nineteenth century, notions like "sea power" derived not only from fleets, bases, and decisive battles but also from a scientific effort to understand and master the ocean environment. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and concluding in the first years of the twentieth, Jason W. Smith tells the story of the rise of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of American ocean empire through its struggle to control nature. In vividly told sketches of exploration, naval officers, war, and, most significantly, the ocean environment, Smith draws together insights from environmental, maritime, military, and naval history, and the history of science and cartography, placing the U.S. Navy's scientific efforts within a broader cultural context.By recasting and deepening our understanding of the U.S. Navy and the United States at sea, Smith brings to the fore the overlooked work of naval hydrographers, surveyors, and cartographers. In the nautical chart's soundings, names, symbols, and embedded narratives, Smith recounts the largely untold story of a young nation looking to extend its power over the boundless sea.

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As a longtime leader of the Democratic Party and key member of Woodrow Wilson's cabinet, Josephus Daniels was one of the most influential progressive politicians in the country, and as secretary of the navy during the First World War, he became one of the most important men in the world. Before that, Daniels revolutionized the newspaper industry in the South, forever changing the relationship between politics and the news media. Lee A. Craig, an expert on economic history, delves into Daniels's extensive archive to inform this nuanced and eminently readable biography, following Daniels's rise to power in North Carolina and chronicling his influence on twentieth-century politics.A man of great contradictions, Daniels-an ardent prohibitionist, free trader, and Free Silverite-made a fortune in private industry yet served as a persistent critic of unregulated capitalism. He championed progressive causes like the graded public school movement and antitrust laws even as he led North Carolina's white supremacy movement. Craig pulls no punches in his definitive biography of this political powerhouse.

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Mirsad Hadžkadić never planned for a life in politics. Yet, in 2018, he decided to run for the Bosniak presidential council seat in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mirsad made the life-changing decision to run, despite the fact that he had a successful, thirty-year career as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and very little experience in politics outside of academia. However, a conversation with a dear friend from Sarajevo planted the idea in his mind. Samir Avdakovi suggested that he run for office because "there may never be another election in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the country as we know it will probably disintegrate." The words rumbled within Mirsad's mind for the next several months, and he thought to himself, "if what Samir says is so, who am I, because of the comforts I have, to decide not to even try?" After announcing his intentions on national TV in January of 2018, Mirsad began this journey in earnest in May of 2018 by building a campaign from the ground up with the hope of instilling a vision of hope and change and shifting the country's political discourse. However, he soon learned that the odds were stacked against him. He only had five months and limited funds to prove to the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina that he deserved their votes. And so, he took his meager funds, limited time, and infinite passion to do just that. He toured the country, meeting and talking with citizens, to share his vision of hope and change. Though Mirsad was not victorious on October 7th, his results were deemed historic and unprecedented. A relatively unknown, underfunded independent candidate managed to receive 60,000 votes or ten percent of the total votes cast. And, despite the defeat, Mirsad succeeded in spearheading a democratic movement, resulting in the formation of the Platform for Progress political organization in November of 2018 and the official dawning of The Odyssey for Democracy.

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Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged. To explain the emergence of distinctive strategies to explain and manage diabetes, Armstrong-Hough argues that physicians act on not only increasingly globalized professional standards but also on local knowledge, explanatory models, and cultural toolkits. As a result, strategies for clinical management diverge sharply from one country to another. Armstrong-Hough demonstrates how distinctive practices endure in the midst of intensifying biomedicalization, both on the part of patients and on the part of physicians, and how these differences grow from broader cultural narratives about diabetes in each setting.

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In this stunning book, nature photographer and ecologist David Blevins offers an inspiring visual journey to North Carolina's barrier islands as you have never seen them before. These islands are unique and ever-changing places with epic origins, surprising plants and animals, and an uncertain future. From snow geese mid-flight to breathtaking vistas along otherworldly dunes, Blevins has captured the incredible natural diversity of North Carolina's coast in singular detail. His photographs and words reveal the natural character of these islands, the forces that shape them, and the sense of wonder they inspire.Featuring over 150 full-color images from Currituck Banks, the Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout National Seashores, and the islands of the southern coast, North Carolina's Barrier Islands is not only a collection of beautiful images of landscapes, plants, and animals, but also an appeal for their conservation.

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One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.

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In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A ""carto-coded"" America - a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful - had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.

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According to a 2018 survey, 89 percent of "white-collar" workers at least occasionally work as members of global virtual teams. The percentage has likely increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as bans on international travel and the shifts to telework prompted more online collaboration. Collaboration among people from different countries, cultures, organizations, and institutional environments presents numerous advantages; the diversity of perspectives and knowledge pools greatly enhances the team's creativity and decision-making. However, such workgroups often have to deal with time-zone differences, limited in-person contact substituted by communication online, and the differences stemming from cultural and institutional diversity, which presents challenges not experienced by traditional collocated teams. Based on a wealth of research and personal experiences, contributors to The X-Culture Handbook of Collaboration and Problem Solving in Global Virtual Teams review known challenges and recommend evidence-based best practices for working in global virtual teams. The book provides practical advice not only to members of global virtual teams, but also for team managers, coaches, counselors, and educators. This book is available in an open access digital format.

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This informative and engaging book tells the true stories of the hurricanes that had the greatest impact on North Carolina and South Carolina, from the eighteenth century to the present day. Hurricane historian Jay Barnes offers an illuminating and compelling account of the Carolinas' most recent storm disasters, Matthew and Florence, as well as thirteen other memorable hurricanes in the Tar Heel and Palmetto States, including Hazel, Hugo, Fran, and Floyd. In Barnes's hands, the examination of these powerful tropical cyclones leads to a broader view of the history of the Carolinas, revealing not only their terrifying and deadly consequences but also the perseverance of the regions' people in the face of such extraordinary disasters.In recounting the rich hurricane history of the Carolinas, from the mountains to the coast, Barnes urges readers to consider the storms to come and profiles how a warming planet and rising seas will affect future Carolina hurricanes.

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This work should be of interest to those who would like to understand Brazil and Latin America, past and present. First published in 1985, and now expanded and revised to include a new chapter on women, the book explores the social, political, economic, and intellectual currents that shaped 19th century Brazil and whose reverberations continue to be felt throughout contemporary Brazilian society. Placing her findings in a comparative context with regard to US history, the author concentrates on crucial moments in Brazilian history to shed light on a number of vexing questions. Why in a nation so rich in material resources is there so much poverty? How was slavery abolished without bloodshed in a country where slaves had represented the main labour force for almost 400 hundred years? Why did self-described liberal elites twice lead the country toward authoritarian regimes? In exploring these and other puzzles, she uncovers the realities behind many of the persistent myths surrounding the Brazilian empire.

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Thousands of women pursued artistic careers in the United States during the late 19th century. According to census figures, the number of women among the ranks of professional artists rose from 10 per cent to nearly 50 per cent between 1870 and 1890. Examining the effects of this change, Kirsten Swinth explores how women's growing presence in the American art world transformed both its institutions and its ideology. Swinth traces the careers of women painters in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, opening and closing her book with discussion of the two most famous women artists of the period -Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe. Perhaps surprisingly, Swinth shows that in the 1870s and 1880s men and women easily crossed the boundaries separating conventionally masculine and feminine artistic territories to compete with each other as well as to join forces to professionalize art training, manage a fluid and unpredictable art market, and shape the language of art criticism. By the 1890s, however, women artists faced a backlash. Ultimately, Swinth argues, these gender contests spilled beyond the world of art to shape 20th-century understandings of high culture and the formation of modernism in profound ways.

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Environmental scientist Ryan Emanuel, a member of the Lumbee tribe, shares stories from North Carolina about Indigenous survival and resilience in the face of environmental changes. These stories connect the dots between historic patterns of Indigenous oppression and present-day efforts to promote environmental justice and Indigenous rights.

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Health care is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often narrated from a national, top-down view. In All Health Politics Is Local, Merlin Chowkwanyun shifts our focus, taking us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and central Appalachia—to experience a national story through a regional lens. He shows how racial uprisings in the 1960s catalyzed the creation of new medical infrastructure for those long denied it, what local authorities did to curb air pollution so toxic that it made residents choke and cry, how community health activists and bureaucrats fought over who'd control facilities long run by insular elites, and what a national coal boom did to community ecology and health. In a country riven by regional differences, All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a shared national health agenda. It shows that health has always been political and shaped not just by formal policy but also by grassroots community battles.

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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. Stein asks his patients to tell him about their financial conditions not only to find out how to better treat them but also to bear witness to their very survival and the power of human resilience. Stein's intimate vignettes capture these encounters, allowing his patients to offer profound, moving, and unguarded reflections about their struggles, sometimes in a single sentence. Broke is a quietly passionate critique of a country that has grown callous to the plight of the poor, the tens of millions of people in the United States who live below the poverty line and who have no obvious path to security. Full of heartbreaking and surprising details and framed by a wry, knowing, and empathic humor, there is no other book that illuminates the experience of people facing economic hardship in this way.

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The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations, and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.

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By delving into the complex, cross-generational exchanges that characterize any political project as rampant as empire, this thought-provoking study focuses on children and their ambivalent, intimate relationships with maps and practices of mapping at the dawn of the "American Century."Considering children as students, map and puzzle makers, letter writers, and playmates, Mahshid Mayar interrogates the ways turn-of-the-century American children encountered, made sense of, and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of the United States and the world. Mayar further probes how children's diverse patterns of consuming, relating to, and appropriating the "truths" that maps represent turned cartography into a site of personal and political contention.To investigate where in the world the United States imagined itself at the end of the nineteenth century, this book calls for new modes of mapping the United States as it studies the nation on regional, hemispheric, and global scales. By examining the multilayered liaison between imperial pedagogy and geopolitical literacy across a wide range of archival evidence, Mayar delivers a careful microhistorical study of U.S. empire.

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While Hollywood deserves its reputation for much-maligned portrayals of southern highlanders on screen, the film industry also deserves credit for a long-standing tradition of more serious and meaningful depictions of Appalachia's people. Surveying some two dozen films and the literary and historical sources from which they were adapted, John C. 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, some grounded firmly in documented realities and life stories, others only loosely so. In either case, they deserve more credit than they have received for creating sympathetic and often complex characters who interact within families, households, and communities amidst a wide array of historical contingencies. They provide credible and informative narratives that respect the specifics of the times and places in which they are set. Having used many of these movies as teaching tools in college classrooms, Inscoe demonstrates the cumulative effect of analyzing them in terms of shared themes and topics to convey far more generous insights into Appalachia and its history than one would have expected to emerge from southern California's ""dream factory.

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Alan Berkman (1945-2009) was no campus radical in the mid-1960s; he was a promising Ivy League student, football player, Eagle Scout, and fraternity president. But when he was a medical student and doctor, his politics began to change, and soon he was providing covert care to members of revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground and becoming increasingly radicalized by his experiences at the Wounded Knee massacre, at the Attica Prison uprising, and at health clinics for the poor. When the government went after him, he went underground and participated in bombings of government buildings. He was eventually captured and served eight years in some of America's worst penitentiaries, barely surviving two rounds of cancer. After his release in 1992, he returned to medical practice and became an HIV/AIDS physician, teacher, and global health activist. In the final years of his life, he successfully worked to change U.S. policy, making AIDS treatment more widely available in the global south and saving millions of lives around the world.Using Berkman's unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan M. 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.

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After the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction shattered the plantation economy of the Old South, white southerners turned to the railroad to reconstruct capitalism in the region. Examining the rapid growth, systemization, and consolidation of the southern railroad network, R. Scott Huffard Jr. demonstrates how economic and political elites used the symbolic power of the railroad to proclaim a New South had risen. The railroad was more than just an economic engine of growth; it was a powerful symbol of capitalism's advance. However, as the railroad spread across the region, it also introduced new dangers and anxieties. White southerners came to fear the railroad would speed an upending of the racial order, epidemics of yellow fever, train wrecks, violent robberies, and domination by corporate monopolies. To complete the reconstruction of capitalism, railroad corporations and their allies had to sever the negative aspects of railroading from capitalism's powers and deny the railroad's transformative powers to black southerners. This study of the New South's experience with the growing railroad network provides valuable insights into the history of capitalism--how it evolves, expands, and overcomes resistance.

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Now in English for the first time, Keila Grinberg's compelling study of the nineteenth-century jurist Antonio Pereira Reboucas (1798–1880) traces the life of an Afro-Brazilian intellectual who rose from a humble background to play a key as well as conflicted role as Brazilians struggled to define citizenship and understand racial politics. One of the most prominent specialists in civil law of his time, Reboucas explained why blacks fought stridently for their own inclusion in society but also complicitly embraced an ethic of silence on race more broadly. Grinberg argues that while this silence was crucial for defining spaces of social mobility and respectability regardless of race, it was also stifling, and played an important role in quelling political mobilization based on racial identity. Reboucas's commitment to liberal ideals also exemplifies the contradiction he embodied: though he rejected movements that were grounded in racial political mobilization, he was consistently treated as potentially dangerous for the single fact that he was of African origin. Grinberg's analysis of Reboucas and his times demonstrates how his life and career—encompassing such themes as racial politics and identities, slavery and racism, and imperfect citizenship—are central for our understanding of Atlantic slave and post-abolition societies.

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During the nineteenth century, Britain maintained a complex network of garrisons to manage its global empire. While these bases helped the British to project power and to secure trade routes, they served more than just a strategic purpose. During their tours abroad, many British officers engaged in formal and informal scientific research. In this ambitious history of ornithology and empire, Kirsten A. Greer tracks British officers as they moved around the world, just as migratory birds traversed borders from season to season. Greer examines the lives, writings, and collections of a number of ornithologist-officers, arguing that the transnational encounters between military men and birds simultaneously shaped military strategy, ideas about race and masculinity, and conceptions of the British Empire. Collecting specimens and tracking migratory bird patterns enabled these men to map the British Empire and the world, and therefore to exert imagined control over it. Through its examination of the influence of bird watching on military science and soldiers' contributions to ornithology, Red Coats and Wild Birds remaps empire, nature, and scientific inquiry in the nineteenth-century world.

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For centuries we’ve believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance—in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself.In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem —why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that “full employment” is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world—and showingus that we can afford to leave that world behind.

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Guest edited by T. Dionne Bailey and Garrett Felber, this issue of Southern Cultures makes visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions.

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The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom—to create, to invent, to connect.Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.

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What is American roots music? Any definition must account for a kaleidoscope of genres from bluegrass to blues, western swing to jazz, soul and gospel to rock and reggae, Cajun to Celtic. It must encompass the work of artists as diverse as Alice Gerard and Alison Kraus, George Thorogood and Sun Ra, Bela Fleck and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, the Blake Babies and Billy Strings. What do all these artists and music styles have in common? The answer is a record label born in the wake of the American folk revival and 1960s movement politics, formed around the eclectic tastes and audacious ideals of three recent college grads who lived, listened, and worked together. The answer is Rounder Records. For more than fifty years, Rounder has been the world's leading label for folk music of all kinds. David Menconi's book is the label's definitive history, drawing on previously untapped archives and extensive interviews with artists, Rounder staff, and founders Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy, and Bill Nowlin. Rounder's founders blended ingenuity and independence with serendipity and an unfailing belief in the small-d democratic power of music to connect and inspire people, forging creative partnerships that resulted in one of the most eclectic and creative catalogs in the history of recorded music. Placing Rounder in the company of similarly influential labels like Stax, Motown, and Blue Note, this story is destined to delight anyone who cares about the place of music in American culture.

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In this richly illustrated love letter to the wild places and natural wonders of North Carolina, Tom Earnhardt, writer and host of UNC-TV's Exploring North Carolina and lifelong conservationist, seamlessly ties deep geological time and forgotten species from our distant past to the unparalleled biodiversity of today. With varied topography and a climate that is simultaneously subtropical, temperate, and subarctic, he shows that North Carolina is a meeting place for living things more commonly found far to the north and south. Highlighting the ways in which the state is a unique ecological crossroads, Earnhardt's research, insightful writing, and stunning photography will both teach and inspire. Crossroads of the Natural World invites readers to engage a variety of topics, including the impacts of invasive species, the importance of forested buffers along our rivers, the role of naturalists, and the challenges facing the state in a time of climate change and sea-level rise. By sharing his own journey of more than sixty years, Earnhardt entices North Carolinians of every age to explore the natural diversity of our state.

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Nestled between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, and stretching from Hampton Roads to Assateague Island, Virginia's Eastern Shore is a distinctly southern place with an exceptionally southern taste. In this inviting narrative, Bernard L. Herman welcomes readers into the communities, stories, and flavors that season a land where the distance from tide to tide is often less than five miles. Blending personal observation, history, memories of harvests and feasts, and recipes, Herman tells of life along the Eastern Shore through the eyes of its growers, watermen, oyster and clam farmers, foragers, church cooks, restaurant owners, and everyday residents. Four centuries of encounter, imagination, and invention continue to shape the foodways of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, melding influences from Indigenous peoples, European migrants, enslaved and free West Africans, and more recent newcomers. Herman reveals how local ingredients and the cooks who have prepared them for the table have developed a distinctly American terroir--the flavors of a place experienced through its culinary and storytelling traditions. This terroir flourishes even as it confronts challenges from climate change, declining fish populations, and farming monoculture. Herman reveals this resilience through the recipes and celebrations that hold meaning, not just for those who live there but for all those folks who sit at their tables--and other tables near and far.

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