UNC Press Presents Podcast

Today Professor Cindy Hahamovitch of the University of Georgia discusses her research connecting the global histories of 19th-century indentured servants and today's guestworkers.

In 1933 Congress granted American laborers the right of collective bargaining, but farmworkers got no New Deal. In The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Hahamovitch shows how growers enlisted the aid of the state in an unprecedented effort to keep their fields well stocked with labor.

This is the story of the farmworkers--Italian immigrants from northeastern tenements, African American laborers from the South, and imported workers from the Caribbean--who came to work in the fields of New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida in the decades after 1870. These farmworkers were not powerless, the author argues, for growers became increasingly open to negotiation as their crops ripened in the fields. But farmers fought back with padrone or labor contracting schemes and 'work-or-fight' forced-labor campaigns. Hahamovitch describes how growers' efforts became more effective as federal officials assumed the role of padroni, supplying farmers with foreign workers on demand.

Today's migrants are as desperate as ever, the author concludes, not because poverty is an inevitable feature of modern agricultural work, but because the federal government has intervened on behalf of growers, preventing farmworkers from enjoying the fruits of their labor.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Scholarly and public discourse on Islamic intellectual thought in the modern period tend to frame it narrowly through the concept of “influence” as it emanates from the Middle Eastern “center” to the non-Middle Eastern “peripheries” without paying sufficient attention to the ways in which these variegated “peripheries” retain the autonomy to form their own conceptions of religious identity in relation to themselves and to those “centers.”

In his latest work, In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Simon Wolfgang Fuchs interrogates this framework with a novel intervention by examining the case of Shi’i Islamic intellectual thought in Pakistan as it relates to the Middle East. Beginning his study with pre-colonial India, Simon explores the internal debates that took place within Shi’i scholarly circles in the subcontinent prior to and after the founding of Pakistan to unearth the myriad ways in which they negotiated and contested their place within their social and intellectual milieus as arbiters of their religious tradition on equal footing with Middle Eastern Shi’i scholars and with their Sunni counterparts in South Asia.

Through rigorous research conducted in libraries across the Middle East and South Asia, Simon re-centers the importance of theological ideas – as elaborated in doctrinal texts, journal publications, and speeches – as a necessary complement to material interests in the formation of religious and sectarian identity in modern Islamic thought. He further demonstrates how Pakistani Shi’i intellectuals were not passive recipients of concepts from the Shi’i centers of Iraq and Iran, but active participants in the process of evaluating the usefulness of those ideas, working to re-appropriate or repackage them for their own local circumstances. Pakistani Shi’i scholars thus “indigenized” watershed events like the Iranian Revolution but also retained their own autonomy as actors with full agency to determine to what extent Iranian notions of authority and hierarchy ought be emulated.

This work cuts across the fields of Middle East Studies, South Asia Studies, and Islamic Studies, and creates avenues for further research in the history of transnational and transregional Islamic thought by challenging the conventional “center-periphery” binary between the Middle East and South Asia and by drawing our attention to the importance of the bidirectional flow of ideas between those regions.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), historian Brianna Theobald delivers a long-overdue, comprehensive history of Native women’s reproductive health, rights, and practices. Alternating her focus between the Crow Reservation in Montana and the experiences of Native women across the United States, Theobald shows how Native women navigated and resisted colonial attempts to restrict their bodily autonomy. By extension, argues Theobald, Native women constituted a particularly resilient vanguard of cultural resistance and persistence in the face of an increasingly aggressive, ever-expanding settler colonial system.

Reproduction on the Reservation draws on a diverse range of ethnographic sources, health records and correspondence from the Office of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Indian Health Service, oral and tribal histories, and secondary literature. With nuanced analysis and clear prose, Theobald weaves together these sources to highlight the intersections of reproduction, women’s health, and colonialism, and how these historical forces converge upon Native women’s lives throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, Theobald shows how this history continues through the present day, as Native women continue to fight for their reproductive sovereignty, in turn embodying the resilience of their communities, cultures, and histories.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the department of history at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Wheat’s fantastic book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) argues that the extensive participation of Luso-Africans, Latinized Africans, and free people of color made possible Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean. For Wheat, the history of the region is entangled with older and deeper histories of Atlantic Africa and the Iberian world. Particularly, Wheat focuses on events and precedents that took place in Upper Guinea and West Central Africa, two regions that experienced very different patterns of exchange, conquest, and enslavement. Such emphasis on connection and entanglement pushes our listeners to move away from narratives that have argued that Africans and their descendants were brought to the New World simply to “replace” the labor of extinguishing indigenous communities. Instead, Wheat asks us to focus on the specific roles that these forced migrants had in the colonization of important Caribbean ports such as Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Panama City, Santo Domingo and their semirural hinterlands. We thus learn about the existence of Nharas and Morenas Horras, black women that held social power and prestige. We also hear about black peasants, men and women that were the basis of agricultural production, and that occasionally found ways to move up the social ladder, even managing to become property owners. This is then a nuanced story that complicates seemingly straightforward concepts such as “settler” and “colonialist,” and that asks us to re-conceptualize this period as one of social mobility, in which racial hierarchies were less stark and somewhat more flexible. As Wheat tell us by the end of the interview, this deep past teaches us that identities can, and have been in the past, flexible and prone to transformation. This is of course an important lesson for the present for questions about identity are ever more pressing in contemporary political debates.

Lisette Varón Caravajal is a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University. 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and the roles that race, the institution of slavery, and slave labor played in the development of psychiatric diagnosis and care through the nineteenth century and beyond.

Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants.

Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press.

Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools.

Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.

Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South.

Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis.

Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Buddhism and psychotherapy have been in conversation since the days of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erich Fromm. Today, when practices drawn from Buddhism have entered the mainstream, that conversation continues in multiple dimensions. In Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Ira Helderman looks at the ways psychotherapists, some of them also active as leaders of Dharma communities, have engaged Buddhism, both as individuals and in their approach to their psychotherapeutic practice. He relies on his own research, interviews with therapists, and fieldwork in a field that continues to take new forms.

Jack Petranker is the founder of Founder, Center for Creative Inquiry and Full Presence Mindfulness.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, sheds new light on one of Chicano history’s most notorious figures in her new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Oropeza intervenes in the conventional historical scholarship on protest politics through her biography of Reies López Tijerina, a land grant activist and founder of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Tijerina was a living testament to the fact that individuals of Mexican descent were part and parcel of the monumental political changes in the United States during the 1960s and the challenge to the established racial order. But Tijerina was more than just another radical advocate of armed protest, he was also uniquely shaped by his extreme religious beliefs and his particular understanding of justice rooted in the restoration of land rights. As the author argues, Tijerina was the harbinger of an anti-colonial rhetoric that helped reframe Mexican American civil rights. Perhaps most importantly, Oropeza centers the experiences and treatment of women in Tijerina’s life as a lens with which to view his world and activism. Drawing from her experience as a former journalist and now academic historian, Oropeza investigates the lives of Tijerina’s wives and daughters through oral history in order to reveal that “the subordination of women was fundamental to his ideal community.” In the end, Reies López Tijerina was a man of intense conviction who sought to achieve his goals at any cost – often at the expense of those that once loved him most.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Karen Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, discusses her new book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and what one murder case in 1930s Mississippi reveals about race relations, criminal justice, and life in the Jim Crow South.

In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"—enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate "Goat Castle." Pearls was killed by an Arkansas policeman in an unrelated incident before he could face trial. However, as was all too typical in the Jim Crow South, the white community demanded "justice," and an innocent black woman named Emily Burns was ultimately sent to prison for the murder of Merrill. Dana and Dockery not only avoided punishment but also lived to profit from the notoriety of the murder by opening their derelict home to tourists.

Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the story of this local feud, killing, investigation, and trial, showing how a true crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all too familiar story of racial injustice.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.