The University of North Carolina Press

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity. Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.

How should we remember George Washington’s entanglement in slavery? Americans have argued over that question for nearly 250 years. More than any other Founding Father, Washington’s ties to slavery have vexed us. He enslaved more people than any of his fellow founders, yet he was the only one of them to emancipate the people he held in bondage. Since his death, Americans have grappled with this contradiction, shaping and reshaping our collective memory of Washington and slavery—along with our understanding of the nation. In Thy Will Be Done, historian John Garrison Marks tells the story of Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time. Marks shows how generational struggles over our collective memory of Washington and slavery have always been part of a bigger conversation about defining the United States and its people. As debates about the founders’ participation in the system of slavery continue to roil public discourse, Marks shows with new clarity that Americans have never collectively reconciled Washington’s conflicted legacy. By truly grappling with Washington’s role as enslaver and emancipator we may come to better understand the nation and ourselves.

The Declaration of Independence depicted Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages, and from its founding the United States aimed to expand westward by seizing Indigenous lands. While white settlers saw these conquests as victories for “true religion,” native people invoked the spirits in their own defense. Some claimed the powers of Christianity, while others drew on the English-language concept of religion to redefine their own ancestral traditions. As all sorts of people struggled to make their way within this new empire, a broad variety of new religious movements emerged. In this groundbreaking book, historian Tisa Wenger shows how the history of American religion unfolded on these settler colonial foundations. The imperatives of US empire, she argues, shaped the category and traditions of what we know as religion. Wenger also introduces the concept of “settler secularism” to explain how white settlers defined and managed religion in their own image, in order to facilitate their own rule. She shows how the concept of “religion”—whether as a special thing that requires protection or a mark of the primitive that must be transcended—has most often served the interests of those in power. Ultimately, settler colonialism organized American religion and created religious hierarchies that still influence the United States today.

My father’s heart, and my mother’s, can still break. In this most essential way, they are still themselves. They are still here. To stay together until the end was the deepest wish of Rebecca McClanahan’s elderly, frail parents. So when the two of them could no longer care for themselves, Rebecca and her siblings moved them from Indiana to North Carolina, where she and her husband assumed the roles of “first responders” with support from the extended family. Over the course of her parents' final years, Rebecca discovers that the landscape of dementia isn’t entirely bleak if we can hold on long enough to rediscover in our loved ones the essential selves we feared were lost. Light Falls on Everything takes us inside the intimate rooms of long-term caregiving, where exhaustion, confusion, heartbreak, and grief can shadow the most ordinary days. Still, light flickers in even the darkest corners, revealing moments of tenderness, laughter, absurdity, surprise, and unrelenting love. Emotionally gripping and unstintingly honest, this memoir invites us to reflect on the timeless nature of love and loss and, with it, the unexpected lessons of caregiving: how to move forward into our own uncertain futures, accept grief as a longtime companion, and approach death with some measure of grace.

Wyatt Outlaw’s story was one of Black success: He was a Union League leader, business owner, and the first Black town constable and commissioner in Graham, a small town located in North Carolina’s Alamance County. But in 1870, Outlaw was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, setting off a dramatic series of events: more lynchings, a Republican-led “war” against the Klan, and a white supremacist crackdown on Black political power that continues today. As a child, Black activist, musician, and Graham native Sylvester Allen frequently passed the site where Outlaw was killed without ever learning his name. Belle Boggs, white and also from the South, taught high school in Alamance County without knowing Outlaw’s importance. Allen and Boggs both sought to discover why Outlaw had been erased from mainstream history books. In The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw, they share what they found in artful detail and connect Outlaw’s story to the violence against Black people in Alamance and throughout the United States, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, the civil rights era, and Black Lives Matter. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and their own personal stories, Allen and Boggs join the conversation begun by historian Peniel Joseph and activist William Barber II about a third Reconstruction in America, but they also offer ways to move forward for any community struggling with a history of racism.

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As collections left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult. In this compelling and well-illustrated history, Sarah Jones Weicksel reveals as never before the meanings of clothing to Civil War Americans. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of the Civil War, Weicksel invites readers to understand the depth of how war penetrated daily life by focusing on the intimate, visceral, material experiences that shaped how people moved through the world.

Prior to the American Revolution, the urban centers of colonial North America had little direct experience of war. With the outbreak of violence, British forces occupied every major city, invading the most private of spaces: the home. By closely considering the dynamics of the household —how people moved within it, thought about it, and wielded power over it— The Home Front reveals the ways in which occupation fundamentally upended the structures of colonial society and created opportunities for unprecedented economic and social mobility. In occupied cities, British officers usurped male authority to quarter themselves with families, patriot wives governed households in their husbands' absence, daughters flirted with officers, domestic servants disappeared with soldiers, and enslaved kin absconded to British lines in pursuit of freedom. As Lauren Duval shows, the unique conditions of occupation produced an aggrieved American population bound by shared emotional distress and domestic disorder. In the wake of this deeply disorienting experience, elite Americans deliberately reconsecrated the private home as a national symbol that epitomized masculine authority. Building on a stunning wealth of primary sources, Duval vividly captures daily life during the Revolution through the eyes and ears of those who intimately experienced it, showing how men and women of all races, statuses, and states of freedom understood its implications for their lives, families, and the nascent American Republic.

Women’s history traveled a long and fascinating path before it became a respected and recognized academic field in twentieth-century America. This book explores the field’s development as a multiracial and multigenerational effort, going beyond the careers of individual women historians to focus on how the discipline itself took shape. Focusing on the crucial period between 1900 and 1968, Jennifer Banning Tomás shines a light on the work performed by archivists and professional historians that gave women’s history its own identity and legitimacy. The women in Reclaiming Clio laid the groundwork for the field’s remarkable expansion during the final wave of twentieth-century feminism after 1970, when a genuine movement for women’s history emerged. Their contributions made the later success of women’s history possible. Tomás reveals the dedication and vision that turned women’s history into the thriving, influential field it is today.

While the war on terror has been America's largest and most publicized attempt to root out foreign enemies this century, the quest to identify and destroy real or imagined threats to national security has long been a part of US history. Indeed, since the onset of the United States' overseas empire at the dawn of the twentieth century, it has pursued enemies in places of strategic interest around the globe: the remote islands of the Philippines, the US southern border, hemispheric hot spots in Central and South America, and the greater Middle East. The common depiction of these kinds of foes—private actors who did not formally represent the countries they fought for—has maintained a remarkable consistency over time. The only difference is that enemies who used to be called "bandits" then are now more often referred to as "terrorists." Connoting an illegitimacy of both cause and means, the widespread use of such terms also has served to blunt deeper considerations of US foreign engagements. Drawing on six case studies, Michael E. Neagle spotlights the commonalities of how the United States has leveraged popular understandings of "bandits" to justify incursions abroad as well as rally popular and political support at home.

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or “enslaved,” as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction’s health and social consequences. Medical and government authorities compounded veterans' suffering and imbued the epidemic with cultural meaning by branding addiction as a matter of moral weakness, unmanliness, or mental infirmity. Framing addiction as “opium slavery” limited the efficacy of care and left many veterans to suffer needlessly for decades after the war ended. Drawing from veterans' firsthand accounts as well as mental asylum and hospital records, government and medical reports, newspaper coverage of addiction, and advertisements, Jonathan S. Jones unearths the poorly understood stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans in unflinching detail, illuminating the war’s traumatic legacies. In doing so, Jones provides critical historical context for the modern opioid crisis, which bears tragic resemblance to that of the post–Civil War era.

The memory of the long civil rights movement often celebrates white men and women who drew on their religious faith to support Black demands for racial justice. However, the visions and actions of these leaders and their organizations often conflicted with those of Black leadership. While Black activists fought for a broad vision of freedom, white allies focused more narrowly on cultivating interracial friendship, marching in parallel to Black movement leaders rather than alongside them. Damned Whiteness offers an unflinching history of white-led efforts at interracial organizing gone astray. Considering the examples of Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement Clarence Jordan, spiritual father of Habitat for Humanity and Ralph Templin, a Christian missionary who studied nonviolence in Gandhi's India, David F. Evans reveals how religious white progressives inherited strategies that remained disconnected from the ideas and actions of Black communities. These disconnects have often been cloaked as disagreements over religious doctrine and practice, but Evans reveals how they stem from refusals to acknowledge Black leaders' philosophies and freedom dreams. Though these patterns persist, Evans offers a way out of this legacy of white allyship and into a future where freedom is possible.

When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal reflections, Farrell uncovers the Girl Scouts intricate history, revealing how the organization has shaped the lives of more than 5 million girls and women since its founding in 1912. With Farrell as our own intrepid guide, we travel to American Indian Boarding Schools, Japanese American incarceration centers, segregated African American communities, middle-class white neighborhoods, and outposts throughout the globe. Intrepid Girls unpacks how the Girl Scouts navigated tensions over feminism, race, class, and political differences, carving out extraordinary opportunities for girls and women—even as it participated in the very discrimination it promised to transcend. For anyone who has ever worn a uniform or wondered about the hidden history behind this iconic American institution, Intrepid Girls will surprise, inspire, and challenge what we think we know about the Girl Scouts.

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground—a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. This first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region experienced it, revealing that, had the missiles been activated, millions of people across Latin America would have been at grave risk. Traversing the region from the Southern Cone to Central America, Renata Keller describes the deadly riots that shook Bolivia when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, the naval quarantine that members of Argentina’s armed forces formed around Cuba, the pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students, and much more. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.

Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documented and undocumented workers, a "dam" that has broken. Scholars, journalists, and novelists often tell this story from a south-to-north perspective, emphasizing Mexican migration to the United States, and the American response to the influx of people crossing its borders. In Caught in the Current, Irvin Ibargüen offers a Mexico-centered history of migration in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on Mexican periodicals and archival sources, he explores how the Mexican state sought to manage US-bound migration. Ibargüen examines Mexico's efforts to blunt migration's impact on its economy, social order, and reputation, at times even aiming to restrict the flow of migrants. As a transnational history, the book highlights how Mexico's policies to moderate out-migration were contested by both the United States and migrants themselves, dooming them to fail. Ultimately, Caught in the Current reveals how both countries manipulated the border to impose control over a phenomenon that quickly escaped legal and political boundaries.

For centuries, Urdu-speaking poets and their audiences have gathered for mush? rahs, literary competitions for spoken-word verse. Today the mush? rah is a global phenomenon, as audiences in the millions convene in person and online for hours of poetic performance. Tracing these modern gatherings back to their origins, Nathan L. M. Tabor introduces readers to the popular emergence of the mush? rah in eighteenth-century Delhi. Scores of poets composed two-line lyric poems, called ghazals, that they muttered, sang, shouted, and spat out in contentious salon spaces across India’s largest metropolis. Delhi’s mush? rahs circulated lyrics, satires, and songs for both common and elite poets, who traded and assessed words like an urban commodity that defined hierarchy, taste, and notions of delight. Via poets' verse exchanges and the histories they wrote about Dehli’s literary scene, City of Lyrics reconstructs the social networks the mush? rahs produced. By understanding the roots of this uniquely Islamic literary practice, readers will also gain insight into global popular culture today, which increasingly takes shape according to tastes and values from the Muslim world yet is enjoyed by wide audiences comprised of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1779 – 1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted. What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson's relationship with Chinn ruined his political career and Myers compellingly demonstrates that it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.