Browse by Subject: History

While bus boycotts, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience were the engine of the civil rights movement, the law was a primary context. Lawyers played a key role amid profound social upheavals, and the twenty-six contributors to this volume reveal what it was like to be a southern civil rights lawyer in this era.

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.

One of the Coast Guard’s great heroes and the secret he kept hidden

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.

Beginning with the invention of balloons that lifted early explorers into the stratosphere, Ted Spitzmiller describes how humans first came to employ lifting gasses such as hydrogen and helium. He traces the influence of science fiction writers on the development of rocket science, looks at the role of rocket societies in the early twentieth century, and discusses the use of rockets in World War II warfare.

Annotating and interpreting a vast collection of documents that illuminate and contextualize the 1822 Denmark Vesey plot, the editors of this volume argue that this landmark event was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.

Bryan Thrift mines over 2,700 WRAL-TV "Viewpoint" editorials broadcast between 1960 and 1972 to offer not only a portrait of a skilled rhetorician and wordsmith but also a lens on the way the various, and at times competing, elements of modern American conservatism cohered into an ideology couched in the language of anti-elitism and "traditional values."

The Silencing of Ruby McCollum refutes the carefully constructed public memory of one of the most famous--and under-examined--biracial murders in American history.

This book weaves archaeology and history to illuminate this vibrant, densely packed Atlantic port city. It details the residential, commercial, and public life of the city, the ruins of taverns, markets, and townhouses, including those of Thomas Heyward, shipping merchant Nathaniel Russell, and William Aiken.