UNC Press Presents Podcast

In this original and innovative study of the American military chaplaincy, Jacqueline E. Whitt examines the institution’s challenges and struggles in the post-World War II era, with the Vietnam War acting as the fulcrum for existential change in its identity and mission. By all accounts a largely ecumenical based ministry before Vietnam, according the Whitt the chaplaincy underwent a bell-wether change, becoming more conservative and evangelical in composition and outlook after 1975. The greater context of the book, however, focuses on the experiences of the chaplains, individually and collectively, in the face of tremendous challenges to the institution, the soldiers and civilians they served, and their own concepts of morality and obligation to authority. Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) is an important study of a very overlooked and often taken for granted branch of the military, and should be of special interest to students and scholars of the intersections of civilian society and military institutions, in time of peace and war.

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For all the incisive work published in Native American and Indigenous studies over the past decades, troubling historical myths still circulate in both academic and popular discourse. One of the most persistent is how we tell the story of the Atlantic world as a set of unidirectional processes dominated by Europeans and populated by enslaved Africans, neatly summarized in those triangle-trade illustrations we all studied in high school history class. Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic opened fresh scholarly ground, conceptualizing the Atlantic world as a cosmopolitan space of cultural exchange and alternative modernities. But for all its originality and profound importance, Gilroy remained entrenched in a black-white dyad; Indigenous people of the Americas were almost entirely ignored.

Enter Jace Weaver, Franklin Professor and Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia (and a former guest on this program), and his new book The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). In this sweeping and skillful book of synthesis, analysis, and original research, Weaver places Indigenous people at the heart of the Atlantic world. Native people, their ideas, their culture, their products, and their labor traversed the Atlantic in staggering numbers, reconfiguring destinies on both sides of the great ocean. Much like Gilroy, Weaver’s new paradigm is sure to launch numerous further studies.

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Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam.

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If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways, it might be said to go back to Tacitus’ Germania – or at least, to 19th-century Germans’ readings of Germania – but it was also indelibly shaped by the writings of explorer Alexander von Humboldt and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which were enormously influential in Germany and on Germans abroad. German landscape painters also created some of the most enduring and iconic images of the American West. When Germans in America fought with American Indians over land, their compatriots in Europe tended to side with the Indians. Later, over the successive ruptures of 20th century German history, Germans always found new ways of engaging with American Indians, whether through hobbyist organizations, Wild West shows, through their political commitments to Indian political causes – like the American Indian Movement – or through the astoundingly popular novels of Karl May.

Exploring with great verve the transnational connections between various groups of Germans and Native Americans over two centuries, H. Glenn Penny‘s Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) engages in a wide-ranging set of discussions that open up new and unexpected vistas onto questions of modern German history, the history of European and American colonialism, histories and legacies of genocide, and a host of other key topics.

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Host Jonathan Judaken talks with author and professor Amy Wood about her book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Wood discusses her book, the use of photography and media in the spectacle of lynching, religious justification for the practice, and the importance of honoring the legacies of anti-lynching Civil Rights Era leaders like Medgar Evers and Ida B. Wells.

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If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s. It represented a breakthrough moment for women in sports, a symbol of the progress women were making to finally receive something like equality of opportunity and resources in athletics.

For Billie Jean King, however, the match was only a small part of a life lived in the pursuit of the opportunity for access and success for herself and for women in general. As Susan Ware outlines in her outstanding new book Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), King saw herself not simply as an athlete, but as an advocate for women in athletics. Throughout her career, King lent her voice and her reputation to those pushing institutions and leaders to let women play. The result was, as Ware puts it, revolutionary.

Ware’s book is biography at its best. It examines King’s life on its own terms. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead, it uses King’s life as a lens through which to view the broader social and cultural conflicts that swept through American society in the 1970s and after. Anyone reading the book will have a much greater sense of why the world we live in today is so dramatically different than the one in which our parents or grandparents grew up.

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Jesus has inspired millions of people to both strive for social justice and commit horrific acts of violence. In the United States, Jesus has remained central in the construction of American identities and debates about Jesus have frequently revolved around his skin color and bodily appearance. In The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), we get a history of Americans’ encounters with images of Jesus and the creation of them. Edward J. Blum, professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, professor of history at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have carefully mined a plethora of sources, including paintings, drawings, music, poetry, sermons, visions, and other historical documents, to reveal the rich conversation Americans have had around religion and race. The Color of Christ offers a chronological history from the colonial period to the present that weaves through the construction of Jesus’ image in various Christian groups consisting of primarily white members, and appropriations and challenges within Native Americans and African Americans communities. In our chat, Blum and Harvey discuss the ups and downs of American religious history, offering various vignettes of Jesus’ role in determining opinions about race. They also help us think about being an author, including issues of public scholarship, hustling as an academic, creating a book website, successful peer review, editorial control, and co-writing a book.

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How were black women manumitted in the Old South, and how did they live their lives in freedom before the Civil War? Historian, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington) answers this complex question by explaining the precarious nature freedom for African American women in Charleston before the Civil War in Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (UNC Press, 2011). In three tightly woven sections, she tells stories that reveal what it meant to glimpse, build and experience freedom from the early national period to the end of the antebellum era. Her beautifully written prose, coupled with thorough research to understand black women’s experiences in antebellum Charleston, makes her work an important contribution to the historical literature. Furthermore, her book has been awarded several prizes, namely the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize (2012) from the Southern Association of Women Historians, the George C. Rogers Jr. Award (2011) from the South Carolina Historical Society, and the Anna Julia Cooper – CLR James Book Award (2011) from the National Council for Black Studies.

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Historian Stephen Hall passionately engages in the history of nineteenth-century African American intellectual life in his first monograph, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). This work traces the long nineteenth-century and how black historical writers evoked various themes at different moments, including ancient African history, biblical history, the paradox of American slavery, and challenges to black citizenship during the Reconstruction era. He unearths of a plethora of black historical sources in the nineteenth century in various forms, including speeches, sermons, newspapers, and literary texts, which each serve as precursors to the black historical writing of the twentieth century. His work reveals the complexities of African American intellectual history, and would be a great inclusion for undergraduate or graduate course, or for a general audience of readers who would be interested in learning more about the important history he illuminates. Listen in.

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Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years.

Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction, dynamic figures like Ely Parker — briefly featured in Speilberg’s Lincoln — attempted to harness the power of a growing federal government to protect indigenous nations from rapacious land loss and cultural genocide, only to be outmaneuvered by elite “humanitarian” forces who equated dispossession with progress. Adeptly synthesizing the study of American political development with post-colonial thought, and demonstrating an keen attentiveness to human agency within the limitations of larger structures, Genetin-Pilawa excavates the “repressed alternatives” of late nineteenth century Indian policy, destabilizing a narrative too often presented as inevitable.

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