Browse by Subject: American

The Shadow of Selma provides a comprehensive assessment of the 1965 civil rights campaign, the historical memory of the marches, and the continuing relevance of and challenges to the Voting Rights Act. The essays consider Selma not just as a keystone event but, much like Ferguson today, as a transformative place: a supposedly unimportant location that became the focal point of epochal historical events.

Karen Hawkins describes the founding of Craven Operation Progress in North Carolina, discusses the philosophies and tactics of its directors, and outlines the tensions that arose between local leadership and federal control. 

Broadening the idea of “borderlands” beyond its traditional geographic meaning, this volume features new ways of characterizing the political, cultural, religious, and racial fluidity of early America.

Tracing the development of the U.S. presidency since Harry S. Truman took office in 1945, this volume describes the many ways the president’s actions have affected the development of capitalism in the post–World War II era.

Clune and Stringfield use a wide range of historical and archaeological records, spiced with traditional period recipes, to provide a unique look into the daily lives of the people who endured hardship, disease, and hurricanes to settle the Gulf coast frontier. The result is a highly readable account of a city with a rich and fascinating past.

After the American Revolution, enslaved and free blacks who had been loyal to the British cause arrived in the Bahamas, drawn by British promises of liberty and land. Freedom and Resistance shows how Black Loyalists struggled to find freedom, clashing with white loyalists who tried either to bind them to illegal indentured contracts or to enslave them.

Home Front traces the evolution of the people, customs, traditions, and attitudes, arguing that World War II was the most significant event in the history of modern North Carolina.

Here, leading scholars--including Hodgson himself--confront the longstanding theory that a liberal consensus shaped the United States after World War II. The essays draw on fresh research to examine how the consensus related to key policy areas, how it was viewed by different factions and groups, what its limitations were, and why it fell apart in the late 1960s.

In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.

In Dirty Harry's America, Joe Street argues that the movies shed critical light on the culture and politics of the post-1960s era and locates San Francisco as the symbolic cultural battleground of the time.