UNC Press Presents Podcast

Boston’s political culture is most known within the frame of antebellum political struggles over the institution of slavery. What about Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era Black Bostonian politics though? That story is made clear by the Dr. Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood’s newly published book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Centering Edwin Garrison Walker, political leader and son of antebellum era abolitionist and pamphleteer David Walker, Bergeson-Lockwood tells the story of how independent Black Bostonian politics was used as a mechanism to shield Black Bostonians from party loyalty. Party loyalty, especially to the Republican Party, could be used to promote a connection to the “Party of Lincoln,” or to retain Black voters despite not always being on the side of their best interest. Ultimately, Black citizenship and the protection of the Black rights were at the forefront of Black Bostonians’ political project, and Bergeson-Lockwood’s history of Black politics in the late nineteenth century dramatically highlights the successes and shortcomings of this era.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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In Middle Eastern and Islamic intellectual history, there has long been an assumption of decline in the eighteenth century, right before the nineteenth century, when the nahda or Arabic intellectual renaissance, began: intellectuals were caught in a period of stagnation and retrograde. Ahmad Dallal pushes back against this in Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), bringing together an intricate matrix of ideas stemming from multiple fields of knowledge. He pins this all together with the notion of reform, all the while reminding us that reform is also about tradition. He starts with Wahhabism, carefully dissecting the thought of Muhammad ibn Abdel Wahhab, and then connects it to eighteenth century responses to Wahhabism. From there on, he draws in Hadith studies, Sufism, the concept of Ijtihad in legal reasoning, and legal theory to paint a tapestry of interlaced and dynamic ideas. Overwhelmingly, Dallal demonstrates that reform was tied to giving practicing Muslims increasing control over their own faith. Beyond that, Dallal talks to us about Islamic studies, Orientalism, and modernity, elucidating why we need to bring the 18th century back into the fold of Islamic and Middle Eastern intellectual history.

Ahmad Dallal is the dean of Georgetown University in Qatar. He was professor of history (2009-2017) and was the provost at the American University in Beirut (AUB) from 2009 to 2015.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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The early-modern Atlantic World was a chaotic place over which European empires frequently had little control. In her new book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Molly Warsh uses the pearl trade to explain the complications around imperial economies and imaginations. ...

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Historians have gotten the story of the colonial Ohio River Valley all wrong, argues Susan Sleeper-Smith in Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Omonundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Sleeper-Smith, a Professor of History at Michigan State University and soon-to-be Interim Director of the D’arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, reads colonial sources against the grain and uses material culture to demonstrate how the Great Lakes region was a prosperous multicultural zone characterized by trade and agriculture well into the eighteenth century. Moreover, women played a central (and heretofore under-appreciated) role in the fur trade and agricultural work that made the Ohio River Valley such a fertile and bountiful region. Indigenous societies such as the Miami, Wea, and Shawnee have often been characterized as living primarily off hunting and suffering through ever-increasing reliance on fur trading and geopolitical chaos wrought by adjacent colonial empires. Sleeper-Smith instead paints a picture of primarily agricultural towns defined by their stability up until the years of American conquest and displacement. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest is a much needed counterweight to narratives about the early American west which have for decades gone largely unquestioned.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritual practitioners in the Caribbean claimed knowledge about the natural world during the 17th century. With penetrating research and analysis, Gomez illustrates how these specialists of African descent devised localized ways of knowing health, nature, and the body, while working within cosmopolitan Caribbean societies in which ritual traditions from around the Atlantic intersected. In a region that was of majority African descent, these practitioners rose to become the intellectual leaders, devising epistemological innovations that spoke to, engaged with and were parallel with European scientific developments, but have hitherto never been included in intellectual history.

Pablo Gomez is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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In History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska examines Americans’ changing relationship to history in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the 1976 Bicentennial celebration and planning, Rymza-Pawlowska explores the new ways Americans engaged with the past. Starting with historical television such as Little House on the Prairie and the advent and success of miniseries such as Roots, Rymsza-Pawlowska examines the various ways Americans began to interact with history. Rymsza-Pawlowska characterizes Americans’ relationship with history prior to this time period as separate from the present. She argues that the shift in the ways in which popular culture interacted with history created more emotional connections to history—considering feelings and motivations of historic individuals. Through live interactions, immersive museums, historical fiction, and living history events, Americans’ relationship with history was forever changed. Rymsza-Pawlowska’s book is an important exploration into the foundation for the way in which we experience and practice history today.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected].

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In Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Lon Kurashige emphasizes the contingencies that shaped the history of Asian restriction and exclusion in the United States from the 1840s to the 1980s. Two Faces of Exclusion answers the question, posed by another scholar, of why Asian exclusion took so long to achieve and was so uneven if racism was so total and overwhelming. Kurashige proposes that we think about anti-Asian racism as the result of a “perfect storm” that required the convergence of several vulnerabilities—most important among them the inability of Asians to become U.S. citizens—with fears about political, economic, and social contamination by Asians. Contesting the ebbs and flows of this storm were two camps that Kurashige calls the “exclusionists” and the “egalitarians,” which themselves evolved over time. Like other recent cutting-edge scholarship in the field of Asian American history, Two Faces of Exclusion follows these threads internationally and shows how American lives and careers abroad in many cases influenced their support for egalitarianism at home. Kurashige’s use of quantitative data about congressional roll call votes and precinct-level voting patterns will interest fans of historical methods, and adds fresh insights to a story that many may think they already know.

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As America changed in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, the Southern music industry was changing as well. The music studios of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals–known as the “country-soul triangle”–began producing some of the most important music of the 1960s and 1970s. In Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Charles Hughes chronicles the ways in which inter-racialism, cultural appropriation, racism, and racial politics affected the musical studios and the country and soul industry. How could two separate musical sounds, one white and country, and the other Black and soul, be considered completely separate when many of the musicians and producers worked in the same buildings? Charles Hughes explains all!

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Douglas L. Winiarski is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and winner of the 2018 Bancroft Prize in American history for his book Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth Century New England (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Winiarski has written a masterful and detailed narrative of the Great Awakening ushered in by the evangelical and charismatic preacher George Whitfield. Beginning with the established churches of New England, he offers a clear portrait of a highly structured and regulated communal and religious life centered in the Congregational churches. From birth to death parishioners found their place and the meaning of life by participating in prescribed religious and social practices. Whitfield, and many itinerate preachers following in his wake, renounced the establish churches as false and proclaim individual direct experience of the Holy Spirit unleashing a torrent of dramatic conversions, ecstatic expression, chaos and division in the churches. New converts demands for proof of a spiritual awakening and theological battles forever changed New England social and religious landscape. Winiarski has written a riveting account of the religious convulsions experienced by individuals and communities laying the foundation for American evangelical attitudes toward authority and the nature of our common life.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming August 2018 from Oxford University Press.

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The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017),  invokes enduring family ties, as well as the connections between slavery, migration, and colonization in the Atlantic world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The book returns, again and again, to the theme of vulnerability as a consequence of the fragile freedoms of African Americans and Africans of the period, and charts the unusual story of two families – one African American and the other Nigerian – connected by a common ancestor, who have managed against significant odds, to keep in touch over many generations. The life story of one of the sons of Scipio Vaughan (the common ancestor), Churchwill Vaughan, forms the arc of Atlantic Bonds and traces, among other things, a “reverse migration” from South Carolina to West Africa.

In the interview, Lisa Lindsay, discusses the ways in which this family was both typical and exceptional.

Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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