UNC Press Presents Podcast

In his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the international political and diplomatic competition for control of the Old Southwest. His book begins with the conclusion of the French and Indian War and follows the story until the Louisiana Purchase secured the area for the United States. It superbly illustrates the weak control exerted by Britain, France, and Spain over the Louisiana-Florida borderlands during the last half of the eighteenth century. It also highlights the fragile ties between Anglo-Americans in the region and the newly independent United States. In doing so, Narrett introduces a rogues’ gallery of schemers and adventurers who operated below the radar, ready to do whatever it took to further their private ends. He also ably covers the diplomatic machinations of imperial and American officials as they tried to make good their claims to lands between the southern Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

George Milne, the host of this podcast is an associate professor of history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He specializes in Native American, Colonial, and Atlantic World history. His book Natchez Country, Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015. You can contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Facebook at George.E.Milne.

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

Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2015), Hanna weaves a fascinating tale from legal and commercial sources to illustrate ways that the English government often tolerated, and at times encouraged predation on the high seas. The goods obtained in these thinly disguised robberies not only helped prime the economic pump of the England’s North American and Caribbean colonies, they were often vital for their survival during their early years. The tide turned against unregulated privateering and outright piracy after London reformed key aspects of overseas trade. As a result, formerly scarce commodities became widely available in the New World, diminishing the demand for stolen property. Simultaneously, the royal government also sought to rationalize its legal system, making it easier for Admiralty courts to prosecute pirates while also simplifying process of selling off goods seized by legitimate privateers who operated with the king’s permission.

George Milne is an associate professor of American History at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan. His research interests include Native American history, Colonial North America, and the Atlantic World. His book Natchez Country, Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015. You can contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Facebook at George.E.Milne.

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

Typically the Jim Crow Era of segregation is understood as beginning directly after Reconstruction and going into the mid-twentieth century with the dual climaxes of the Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Movement in Montgomery, Alabama. What this narrative suggests is that Jim Crow was a southern phenomenon. Such a view is unfortunately ill conceived. Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), written by Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Associate Professor of History at Smith College, reshapes contemporary memory of when and why Jim Crow laws were enacted. In Colored Travelers, Dr. Pryor details how while antebellum-era Northern black abolitionists simultaneously fought to abolish slavery, they also pushed the limits of what citizenship meant by attempting to freely travel within it. They did this by challenging Northern Jim Crow laws set to undermine the mobility of black people in general, but this oppression hit black abolitionists most because of the mobility needed to reach their events. By using travel narratives, newspaper articles, and various primary sources of domestic and international black travel, Dr. Pryor explains why the pre-Civil War period was an essential training ground for the laws that would nationally become entrenched in the post-emancipation United States of America.

Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A in History student at Simmons College in Boston, MA. He graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Fall 2015 with B.S. in History. Adam can be reached at @CulturedModesty.

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

The Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups are typically known for their male leaders. Men like the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Malcolm X or Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey are notable examples. But what about the work of black women in these groups? Ula Yvette Taylor’s new book, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), expands our knowledge of the role of black women from the Depression-era development of Allah Temple of Islam in Detroit to the formal group known as the Nation of Islam that expanded under the leadership in the 1960s and 1970s of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Women like Clara Muhammad, Burnsteen Sharrieff, and Thelma X Muhammad were essential to the development of the Nation of Islam’s goal of creating a black nation within the American nation. The Promise of Patriarchy shows how black women created notions of black womanhood and black motherhood that best helped them deal with the daily indignities of living in Jim Crow America.

Ula Yvette Taylor is Professor and H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair in the African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015.

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

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan’s remarkable post World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan’s globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the yellow peril, and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world?

From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.

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

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts.

In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver.

Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at

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

Black Power was one of the most iconic movements of the twentieth century. Recent documentary treatments like The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 in 2011 and The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution in 2015 brought the Panthers into the households of a new generation. When combined with Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance, the Black Power movement’s memory hit a high note upon its fiftieth anniversary. Ashley D. Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (University of North Carolina Press Press, 2017) increases scholarly and mainstream audiences’ knowledge of black women’s centrality in theorizing and organizing Black Power and black nationalist circles throughout the majority of the twentieth century. Not only does Farmer’s work push our grasp of the black women who influenced the Black Power Movement from within, but Remaking Black Power is also the first comprehensive study of black women’s intellectual production throughout the Black Power era.

What makes Remaking Black Power such a compelling history is that it uses similar source material as prior scholars, but Farmer uses them much differently. Accessing untapped sources of cartoons, political manifestos, and political essays, Farmer asserts that they were important sites which redefined black womanhood and ultimately black thought in general. As the Black Power movement grew throughout the world, black women were central to the movement’s expansive visions of black freedom and political organizing. Ultimately, Remaking Black Power deepens our understanding of what black intellectual history is, and what groups are considered “intellectuals.”

Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the African American Studies Program at Boston University. Farmer also is a leader of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and a regular blogger for Black Perspectives.

Click here to read the introduction to Remaking Black Power. Ashley Farmer can be reached through Twitter at @drashleyfarmer

Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015.

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

What were the dreams of the Civil War? Find out by listening to my conversation with Jonathan White about his new book Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of several books and almost one hundred articles, essays, and reviews about the Civil War. His earlier book, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, was the winner and finalist for a number of book prizes.

Now he has written a book about a subject few, if anyone, has known much about—and that in itself is a feat for Civil War history. Midnight in America surveys the dreams of soldiers, civilians, African Americans, the dying, and Abraham Lincoln, including how those dreams were represented in popular culture. The dreams he includes are truly strange, with all the wacky juxtapositions we expect in our own dreaming. Indeed, what White’s book shows overall is that it is the dreams during the Civil War, and not any more the wakeful, sober analyses of official accounts, that most clearly reveal the life of the country, with all its fears, desires, and struggles.

Soldiers’ dreams of home (the most prominent ‘theme’ of their dreams) pivoted around feelings of vulnerability and mortality, and, consequently, the need for care and affection. We talk about how their dreams harbored fears of being cheated upon, forgotten, no longer important, and even replaced—fears many times instigated by not having received a letter from home recently. Dreaming is how we get through the day, even as, in their most free-ranging forms, dreams can reveal that which we are trying to escape. As we discuss in our conversation, surveying the content of these dreams offers a view of the emotional dynamics that underwrote ‘the war,’ as well as the dreamer’s drive to fight. We also discuss the differences between white and black cultures of dreaming. The stark divides of the relationships that appeared in the dreams of soldiers and their families back home were on full display in the daily lives of slaves. In contrast to white people, African-Americans gave dreaming a more central, ritualistic place in their cultural practices. And while in public slaveowners presented a ‘rational’ defense of slavery, their dreams evinced a complex recognition of the humanity of black people. The very “dream” of a perfect union, with clear differences between good and evil, especially as sentimentalized in popular culture, was premised on the fear of disunion, disconnection, and incompleteness in ones own life. For better and worse, the war was a dream.

Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, “The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War,” is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction.

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

J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-long conversation, we discuss her new book Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

New England has long presented an idealized sense of its past. Restored colonial homes, antique shops, white picket fences around town greens—these are some features you may associate with a conservative, even blinkered view of the past. But the reality is otherwise. Lockwood shows how the story behind this burst of regionalist pride, much the product of the late nineteenth century, is queerer and more women-centered than you could possibly have imagined. In her book, Lockwood argues that nineteenth-century women writers, photographers, and colonial revivalists presented the queer, unmarried daughter of New England as a figure crucial to remembering and producing US history, crucial to that history itself. These women include Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, C. Alice Baker, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and many more. Their literary work, history writing, china collecting, and home restoration evinced a deep cosmopolitanism far exceeding the limits of any supposed provincialism of the New England spinster, both in their own time and in the past about which they wrote.

We talk about how the late-nineteenth century New England regionalists aligned themselves with colonial forms of dissent against monarchical rule, but also rule by men. They followed the trails of colonial women who once manned garrisons in times of war, as well as women who, after capture, chose to stay living with Indians. Much of our conversation talks about how the later women regionalists found roots in the past for their own forms of living intimately with women in the present, including in romantic relationships. A large part of our discussion also focuses on how the knowledge they produced of that past was largely found through the use of their bodies as historical instruments in the care of objects and spaces of a home, the tending of gardens, the wearing of colonial dress. Their bodily sensorium revealed similarities of experiences across time, including feelings of intense sexual pleasure as well as gender-based oppression. Ultimately, this work attuned people to how affective ties and material forms of everyday life (which include nature, objects, the space of a town and its buildings) structure each other in dynamic relationship. The preservation of historic homes and other open to the public and welcoming visitors today owes much to these women. Throughout our conversation, Lockwood and I continue to return to the fact that new possibilities for the ongoing American democratic experiment were to be found in the past as much as the present. The same is true today—if you learn to open your senses to the world around you.

Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of

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

In Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Turtle Mountain Tribal Court Associate Justice and UNC-Chapel Hill American Studies Assistant ProfessorKeith Richotte, Jr., offers a critical examination of one tribal nation’s decision to adopt a constitution.

In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce’s choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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