UNC Press Presents Podcast

Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

In Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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R. Scott Huffard Jr. is the author of Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Engines of Redemption is a fascinating history of capitalism in the South, which tells the story of how railroads revitalized the region following the Civil War. Huffard examines the myriad of was that railroads were used to secure political and economic growth and power in the South throughout the Reconstruction era. Railroads, however, were not always seen as a blessing, and Huffard pays close attention to how the rapid southern growth of the locomotive was accompanied by rising anxieties, from race to disease.

R. Scott Huffard Jr. is Assistant Professor of History at Lees-McRae College.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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With scholarship in the discipline of history witnessing a shift toward global approaches to local historical processes, new questions are being raised about how to identify commensurate theoretical methods and conceptual frameworks for analysis – with art history being no less part of this scholarly shift. How do we strike a balance between acknowledging distinctly local historical transformations with related global ones? In what ways can we conceptualize intertwined global networks that gave rise to local phenomena without erasing local agency and uniqueness? Where do we account for power in our analyses of local and global historical developments?

Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) by Alex Dika Seggerman deftly takes up the challenge posed by these and other questions by punctuating its mark both in the field of global modernism and in modern Arab and Islamic art history, offering the commensurate theories and frameworks necessary to help move these conversations forward. Through research conducted in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, Seggerman analyzes Egypt’s modernist art movement from the late-nineteenth century up until the 1960s, demonstrating the interconnectedness of this movement with a constellation of artistic production outside of Egypt.

By examining the work of a range of characters like the satirical cartoonist Ya’qub Sanua, the nationalist sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar, the enigmatic religious teacher Muhammad ‘Abduh and more, Seggerman argues that Egyptian modernism was neither “transnational” nor “global,” but manifested itself in a constellational network operating within a finite field that was wide enough to encompass an array of modernisms. Furthermore, by tracing and identifying “the Islamic” in modern Arab art, Seggerman also challenges the conventional periodization of Islamic art that heavily centers the premodern. She argues that we ought to pay more attention to the subtle inflections of Islam – not merely as a faith and doctrine but as a lived experience and cultural heritage – in the diverse work of major Egyptian artists of the time. This book is a welcome addition to the study of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and global modernisms.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Catherine A. Stewart is the author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Long Past Slavery examines the history behind the collection of more than 2,300 narratives from formerly enslaved people, as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project. Stewart pays close attention to how the ex-slave narratives represented a site of contestation between many people who had competing visions of what America’s past looked like, and what the future could hold. From Black interviewers to members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the formerly enslaved themselves, Stewart illustrates how these narratives were a battleground over national memory, Black identity, and Black citizenship.

Catherine A. Stewart is Professor of History at Cornell College.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name the "Civil War." In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics. In The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty at California community colleges as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobilized in the mid-1930s to fight fascism both in Cuba and beyond. A wide variety of civic and political groups, including Communists, anarchists, Freemasons, and Afro-Cubans, mobilized to support the Spanish Republican cause, which they connected to their efforts at home to fight persisting colonial structures and strongman politics. Lambe emphasizes the human side of antifascist activism through biographical studies of both well-known and overlooked Cuban figures. Her book shows that the 1930s, often dismissed as an apolitical period in Cuban history, were in fact characterized by vibrant efforts to raise funds, send combat troops, and provide other kinds of aid to Spanish Republicans. Lambe argues that important changes on the island in 1940 – the holding of free elections and the promulgation of a progressive constitution – suggest that Cuban antifascist efforts, though unable to turn the tide of the Spanish Civil War, did have an impact on Cuban domestic politics. In the interview, Lambe reflects on how her work is relevant to the Antifa movement of today.

Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about elite migration, education, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration.

The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America's postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Hong is an assistant professor of history at Occidental College where she specializes in 20th-century U.S. immigration and engagement with the world, with a focus on Asia.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

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Professor Talitha LeFlouria, a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, discusses her book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and the lives, labors, and legacies of incarcerated black women and the convict lease system in the early 20th century South.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), answers the long-standing question of how, and how well, Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Céline Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions.

In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by a multitude of languages, intimate and sensory expressions ensured that French colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. As Carayon demonstrates, nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous responses and resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the imperial French imagination. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Jason Smith discusses the US Navy’s role in exploring and charting the ocean world. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He’s the author of To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (UNC Press, 2018).

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.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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