Bücher veröffentlicht von The University of North Carolina Press

From 1933 to 1945, the Reich Chamber of Culture exercised a profound influence over hundreds of thousands of German artists and entertainers. Alan Steinweis focuses on the fields of music, theater, and the visual arts in this first major study of Nazi cultural administration, examining a complex pattern of interaction among leading Nazi figures, German cultural functionaries, ordinary artists, and consumers of culture. Steinweis gives special attention to Nazi efforts to purge the arts of Jews and other so-called undesirables. Steinweis describes the political, professional, and economic environment in which German artists were compelled to function and explains the structure of decision making, thus showing in whose interest cultural policies were formulated. He discusses such issues as insurance, minimum wage statutes, and certification guidelines, all of which were matters of high priority to the art professions before 1933 as well as after the Nazi seizure of power. By elucidating the economic and professional context of cultural life, Steinweis helps to explain the widespread acquiescence of German artists to artistic censorship and racial 'purification.' His work also sheds new light on the purge of Jews from German cultural life.

Timothy Lomperis persuasively argues the ironic point that the lessons of American involvement in Vietnam are not to be found in any analysis of the war by itself. Rather, he proposes a comparison of the Vietnam experience with seven other cases of Western intervention in communist insurgencies during the Cold War era: China, Indochina, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, Cambodia, and Laos. Lomperis maintains that popular insurgencies are manifestations of crises in political legitimacy, which occur as a result of the societal stresses caused by modernization. Therefore, he argues, any intervention in a 'people's war' will succeed or fail depending on how it affects this crisis. The unifying theme in the cases Lomperis discusses is the power of land reform and electoral democracy to cement political legitimacy and therefore deflect revolutionary movements. Applying this theory to the ongoing Sendero Luminoso insurgency in Peru, Lomperis makes a qualified prediction of that conflict's outcome. He concludes that a global trend toward democratization has produced a new era of 'people's rule.'

'Things ain't now like they used to be nohow,' a Virginia native told a WPA worker in the 1930s. Indeed, a central theme unifying the hundreds of life histories recorded by Virginia Writers' Project fieldworkers between 1938 and 1941 is that the narrators all bear witness to the vast socioeconomic and cultural changes brought about by the Great Depression and the New Deal's responses to it. These never-published VWP narrative interviews, however, have remained largely unknown and unavailable to readers until now. Talk about Trouble presents 61 Writers' Project life histories that depict Virginia men and women, both blacks and whites, and offer a cross-section of ages, occupations, experiences, and cultural and class backgrounds. Headnotes set the context for each life history and introduce people and themes that link individual events and experiences. One hundred sixty photographs, most taken in the state by Farm Security Administration or Virginia WPA photographers, add graphic texture and backdrop to the stories and lives recounted.

Just four months after Richard Nixon's resignation, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh unearthed a new case of government abuse of power: the CIA had launched a domestic spying program of Orwellian proportions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The country's best investigative journalists and members of Congress quickly mobilized to probe a scandal that seemed certain to rock the foundations of this secret government. Subsequent investigations disclosed that the CIA had plotted to kill foreign leaders and that the FBI had harassed civil rights and student groups. Some called the scandal 'son of Watergate.' Many observers predicted that the investigations would lead to far-reaching changes in the intelligence agencies. Yet, as Kathryn Olmsted shows, neither the media nor Congress pressed for reforms. For all of its post-Watergate zeal, the press hesitated to break its long tradition of deference in national security coverage. Congress, too, was unwilling to challenge the executive branch in national security matters. Reports of the demise of the executive branch were greatly exaggerated, and the result of the 'year of intelligence' was a return to the status quo. American History/Journalism

Reidy has produced one of the most thoughtful treatments to date of a critical moment in southern history, placing the social transformation of the South in the context of 'the age of capital' and the changes in the markets, ideologies, etc. of the Atlantic world system. Better than anyone perhaps, Reidy has elaborated both the large and small narratives of this development, connecting global forces with the initiatives and reactions of ordinary southerners, black and white.--Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago "e;Joseph Reidy's detailed analysis of social and economic developments in central Georgia during and after slavery will take its place among the standard works on these subjects. Its discussions of the expansion of the cotton kingdom and of the changes after emancipation make it necessary reading for all concerned with southern and African-American history.--Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester "e;Successfully places the experience of one region's people into the larger theoretical context of world capitalist development and in the process challenges other scholars to do the same.--Rural Sociology

In Creating the Modern South, Douglas Flamming examines one hundred years in the life of the mill and the town of Dalton, Georgia, providing a uniquely perceptive view of Dixie's social and economic transformation. "e;Beautifully written, it combines the rich specificity of a case study with broadly applicable synthetic conclusions.--Technology and Culture"e;A detailed and nuanced study of community development. . . . Creating the Modern South is an important book and will be of interest to anyone in the field of labor history.--Journal of Economic History "e;A rich and provocative study. . . . Its major contribution to our knowledge of the South is its careful account of the evolution and collapse of mill culture.--Journal of Southern History "e;Ambitious, and at times provocative, Creating the Modern South is a well-researched, highly readable, and engaging book.--Journal of American History

As the charismatic leader of the wave of religious revivals known as the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) is one of the most important figures in American religious history. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, his writings were generally dismissed as remnants of a moribund Puritan tradition. Focusing on the publishing history and appropriation of Edwards's works by succeeding generations, Joseph Conforti explores the construction and manipulation of the Edwards legacy and demonstrates its central place in American cultural and religious history. Most of Edwards's writings were not regularly republished or widely read until the early nineteenth century, when he emerged as a prominent thinker both in academic circles and in the new popular religious culture of the Second Great Awakening. Even after the Civil War, Edwards remained a popular figure from the Puritan past for colonial revivalists. But by the early twentieth century, scholars had again reinvented Edwards, this time deemphasizing his influence. These contrasting constructions of the one man, Conforti says, reveal the dynamic process of cultural change.

Sheila Adams has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over twenty years. A native of Madison County, North Carolina, she was introduced to the tale-telling tradition by her great-aunt 'Granny,' well-known balladeer Dellie Chandler Norton. This collection of Adams's stories provides a rare portrait of a distinctive mountain community and charts the development of an artist's unique voice. The tales range from stories of heroic, sometimes fierce, mountain settlers to the comic adventures of local drifters and tricksters, from magical childhood encounters to adult rites of passage. We meet Bertha and the snake handlers, local preacher Manassey Fender (who 'looked like a pencil with a burr haircut, in a suit'), and Adams's beloved grandfather Breaddaddy, who taught her about life and death with an enchanting graveyard dance. But perhaps the most powerful character depicted here is 'Granny,' whom Adams calls 'the most exciting person I have ever known and the best teacher I would ever have.' By weaving these remembrances into her stories, Adams both preserves and extends a rich artistic heritage.

Jack Temple Kirby charts the history of the low country between the James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The Algonquian word for this country, which means 'swamp-on-a-hill,' was transliterated as 'poquosin' by seventeenth-century English settlers. Interweaving social, political, economic, and military history with the story of the landscape, Kirby shows how Native American, African, and European peoples have adapted to and modified this Tidewater area in the nearly four hundred years since the arrival of Europeans. Kirby argues that European settlement created a lasting division of the region into two distinct zones often in conflict with each other: the cosmopolitan coastal area, open to markets, wealth, and power because of its proximity to navigable rivers and sounds, and a more isolated hinterland, whose people and their way of life were gradually--and grudgingly--subjugated by railroads, canals, and war. Kirby's wide-ranging analysis of the evolving interaction between humans and the landscape offers a unique perspective on familiar historical subjects, including slavery, Nat Turner's rebellion, the Civil War, agricultural modernization, and urbanization.

Using the Tennessee antievolution 'Monkey Law,' authored by a local legislator, as a measure of how conservatives successfully resisted, co-opted, or ignored reform efforts, Jeanette Keith explores conflicts over the meaning and cost of progress in Tennessee's hill country from 1890 to 1925. Until the 1890s, the Upper Cumberland was dominated by small farmers who favored limited government and firm local control of churches and schools. Farm men controlled their families' labor and opposed economic risk taking; farm women married young, had large families, and produced much of the family's sustenance. But the arrival of the railroad in 1890 transformed the local economy. Farmers battled town dwellers for control of community institutions, while Progressives called for cultural, political, and economic modernization. Keith demonstrates how these conflicts affected the region's mobilization for World War I, and she argues that by the 1920s shifting gender roles and employment patterns threatened traditionalists' cultural hegemony. According to Keith, religion played a major role in the adjustment to modernity, and local people united to support the 'Monkey Law' as a way of confirming their traditional religious values.

More than sixty million people have been victims of genocide in the twentieth century alone, including recent casualties in Bosnia and Rwanda. Herbert Hirsch studies repetitions of large-scale human violence in order to ascertain why people in every historical epoch seem so willing to kill each other. He argues that the primal passions unleashed in the cause of genocide are tied to the manipulation of memory for political purposes. According to Hirsch, leaders often invoke or create memories of real or fictitious past injustices to motivate their followers to kill for political gain or other reasons. Generations pass on their particular versions of events, which then become history. If we understand how cultural memory is created, Hirsch says, we may then begin to understand how and why episodes of mass murder occur and will be able to act to prevent them. In order to revise the politics of memory, Hirsch proposes essential reforms in both the modern political state and in systems of education.

The temple mound and mortuary at Town Creek, in Montgomery County, is one of the few surviving earthen mounds built by prehistoric Native Americans in North Carolina. It has been recognized as an important archaeological site for almost sixty years and, as a state historic site, has become a popular destination for the public. This book is Joffre Coe's illustrated chronicle of the archaeological research conducted at Town Creek, a project with which Coe has been intimately involved for more than fifty years, since its inception as a WPA program in 1937. Written for visitors as well as for scholars, Town Creek Indian Mound provides an overview of the site and the archaeological techniques pioneered there, surveys the history of the excavations, and features more than 200 photographs and maps. The book carefully reconstructs the archaeological record, including plant and animal remains, pottery sherds, stone tools, and clay ornaments. In a concluding interpretive section, Coe reflects on what Town Creek and its artifacts tell us about this prehistoric Native American society.Originally published in 1995. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History

The "Jack" known to all of us from "Jack and the Beanstalk" is the hero of a cycle of tales brought to this country from the British Isles. Jack in Two Worlds is a unique collection that brings together eight of these stories as transcribed from actual performances by tellers and eight interpretive essays by leading folktale scholars. The "two worlds" in the book's title refer to the Jack tales' popularity first among traditional Appalachian taletellers and now among storytelling revivalists. The tellers included in this volume represent both worlds. Unlike previous collections of Jack tales, in which the stories were heavily revised and rewritten, the tales in this volume have been transcribed verbatim and are presented in a format that preserves much of the oral quality of the taletellers' craft. The result is a body of richly nuanced tales that can be read with pleasure both by scholars who are studying the Jack tale tradition and by general readers who love a good story. The taletellers are Stewart Cameron, Donald Davis, Ray Hicks, Bonelyn Lugg Kyofski, Maud Long, Frank Proffitt, Jr., Leonard Roberts, and Marshall Ward. The essayists are Bill Ellis, Carl Lindahl, William Bernard McCarthy, W. F. H. Nicolaisen, Cheryl Oxford, Joseph Daniel Sobol, Kay Stone, Ruth Stotter, and Kenneth A. Thigpen.

Feminism in Action is Jean O'Barr's firsthand account of two decades spent working to promote the cause of higher education for women through the establishment of women's studies programs. The book brings together revised versions of O'Barr's most significant presentations on the subject, from a 1976 talk to incoming Duke University students, through original essays that document the process of institutional change, to a 1993 lecture on the impact of race on discussions of gender. Striking the perfect balance between a theoretical sense of what feminism proposes and a practical sense of what is politically feasible, these essays pose--and help to answer--basic questions about the role of women's studies programs in the academy. Exactly what kinds of changes do such programs instigate? How do they work, institutionally? What accounts for their extraordinary success in supporting higher education for all women, from recent high school graduates to older returning students? Written in a lively, anecdotal style and supplemented by personal testimonies from students and colleagues, the essays provide not only a valuable history of the field of women's studies but a concrete blueprint for current and future programs. from the book From a student point of view, the way in which women and gender are presented and discussed appears as important as their mere mention as topics, if not more so. Such student observations suggest that individual faculty members function as 'gatekeepers' of knowledge to a much greater degree than disciplines or departments do. . . . Students require active preparation and encouragement if they are to be able to transfer information learned in the context of a women's studies class into other courses.

In this important new book, Melvyn Dubofsky traces the relationship between the American labor movement and the federal government from the 1870s until the present. His is the only book to focus specifically on the 'labor question' as a lens through which to view more clearly the basic political, economic, and social forces that have divided citizens throughout the industrial era. Many scholars contend that the state has acted to suppress trade union autonomy and democracy, as well as rank-and-file militancy, in the interest of social stability and conclude that the law has rendered unions the servants of capital and the state. In contrast, Dubofsky argues that the relationship between the state and labor is far more complex and that workers and their unions have gained from positive state intervention at particular junctures in American history. He focuses on six such periods when, in varying combinations, popular politics, administrative policy formation, and union influence on the legislative and executive branches operated to promote stability by furthering the interests of workers and their organizations.

Professing a policy of cultural and social integration, the American settlement house movement made early progress in helping immigrants adjust to life in American cities. However, when African Americans migrating from the rural South in the early twentieth century began to replace white immigrants in settlement environs, most houses failed to redirect their efforts toward their new neighbors. Nationally, the movement did not take a concerted stand on the issue of race until after World War II. In Black Neighbors, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn analyzes this reluctance of the mainstream settlement house movement to extend its programs to African American communities, which, she argues, were assisted instead by a variety of alternative organizations. Lasch-Quinn recasts the traditional definitions, periods, and regional divisions of settlement work and uncovers a vast settlement movement among African Americans. By placing community work conducted by the YWCA, black women's clubs, religious missions, southern industrial schools, and other organizations within the settlement tradition, she highlights their significance as well as the mainstream movement's failure to recognize the enormous potential in alliances with these groups. Her analysis fundamentally revises our understanding of the role that race has played in American social reform.

In this provocative book, Wilfred McClay considers the long-standing tension between individualism and social cohesion in conceptions of American culture. Exploring ideas of unity and diversity as they have evolved since the Civil War, he illuminates the historical background to our ongoing search for social connectedness and sources of authority in a society increasingly dominated by the premises of individualism. McClay borrows D. H. Lawrence's term 'masterless men'--extending its meaning to women as well--and argues that it is expressive of both the promise and the peril inherent in the modern American social order. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines--including literature, sociology, political science, philosophy, psychology, and feminist theory--McClay identifies a competition between visions of dispersion on the one hand and coalescence on the other as modes of social organization. In addition, he employs intellectual biography to illuminate the intersection of these ideas with the personal experiences of the thinkers articulating them and shows how these shifting visions are manifestations of a more general ambivalence about the process of national integration and centralization that has characterized modern American economic, political, and cultural life.

The broad sweep of environmental and ecological history has until now been written and understood in predominantly male terms. In Made From This Earth, Vera Norwood explores the relationship of women to the natural environment through the work of writers, illustrators, landscape and garden designers, ornithologists, botanists, biologists, and conservationists.Norwood begins by showing that the study and promotion of botany was an activity deemed appropriate for women in the early 1800s. After highlighting the work of nineteenth-century scientific illustrators and garden designers, she focuses on nature's advocates such as Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey who differed strongly with men on both women's "e;nature"e; and the value of the natural world. These women challenged the dominant, male-controlled ideologies, often framing their critique with reference to values arising from the female experience. Norwood concludes with an analysis of the utopian solutions posed by ecofeminists, the most recent group of women to contest men over the meaning and value of nature.

Offner clarifies the complex relations of the United States, Spain, and Cuba leading up to the Spanish-American War and contends that the war was not wanted by any of the parties but was nonetheless unavoidable. He shows that a final round of peace negotiations failed in large part because internal political constraints limited diplomatic flexibility.

John French analyzes the emergence of the Brazilian system of politics and labor relations between 1900 and 1953 in the industrial municipalities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano do Sul. These municipalities, which constitute the so-called ABC region of greater Sao Paolo, were made famous in the late 1970s as a result of a series of strikes by militant autoworkers. French challenges a scholarly consensus that has portrayed Brazilian populism as a "demobilizing" experience in which workers and their leaders were seduced and co-opted by charismatic politicians while being subjected to pervasive domination by the state.This revisionist, grass-roots view of Brazil's corporatist system of state-linked trade unionism in the 1930s examines the tumultuous political transition after World War II, when workers entered into electoral politics on an unprecedented scale. In examining the interplay between the industrial working class, its leaders, and politicians such as Getulio Vargas, Luis Carlos Prestes, and Adhemar de Barroas, French shows that workers were active and resourceful political political actors whose participation propelled Brazilian politics in a new, more democratic direction.

This provocative study explores the function of the unconscious in reading and creative processes. The book asks if reading can change the reader and if women, through reading, can change the unconscious fantasy structures that govern desire. Using models of the unconscious developed by Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Cixous, Nay, and Chodorow, Wyatt explores the complex interactions between a text and a reader's unconscious. She theorizes specific processes whereby young readers can assimilate dynamic images of female autonomy in Heidi, The Wizard of Oz, and Little Women. By tracing the imprint of father-daughter relations on women's unconscious fantasy life, Wyatt seeks to explain the hold of romantic love fantasies like Jane Eyre over many female readers. She looks to contemporary novels for alternative fantasies: to female artist novels by Lessing, Drabble, and Walker for fantasies of sexuality nurturing creativity; and to the flexible family circles of Beloved and The Color Purple for alternatives to patriarchal family arrangements. Wyatt argues that novels like The Awakening and Housekeeping that reflect and transform readers preoedipal fantasies offer women radical alternatives to dominant cognitive and social structures.

Based on a sophisticated reading of legal evidence, this book offers a balanced assessment of the status of women in classical Greece. Raphael Sealey analyzes the rights of women in marriage, in the control of property, and in questions of inheritance. He advances the theory that the legal disabilities of Greek women occurred because they were prohibited from bearing arms.Sealey demonstrates that, with some local differences, there was a general uniformity in the legal treatment of women in the Greek cities. For Athens, the law of the family has been preserved in some detail in the scrupulous records of speeches delivered in lawsuits. These records show that Athenian women could testify, own property, and be tried for crime, but a male guardian had to administer their property and represent them at law. Gortyn allowed relatively more independence to the female than did Athens, and in Sparta, although women were allowed to have more than one husband, the laws were similar to those of Athens. Sealey's subsequent comparison of the law of these cities with Roman law throws into relief the common concepts and aims of Greek law of the family.Originally published in 1990.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.