Founded in 1922, the University of North Carolina Press is the oldest university press in the South and one of the oldest in the United States. The purpose of the Press, as stated in its charter, is "to promote generally, by publishing deserving works, the advancement of the arts and sciences and the development of literature." The Press early achieved that goal, and the excellence of its publishing programs has been recognized for seven decades by scholars throughout the world. In March 1997, the Press received the LMP Award for achievement in scholarly publishing.
American history and literary criticism are fields in which the Press has traditionally excelled, but in recent years it has expanded its publishing programs in women's studies, cultural studies, legal history, folklore, and Latin American and Caribbean studies.
Individual Press titles have won many distinctions, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in History for The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, by Rhys Isaac, and the 1968 National Book Award for White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, by Winthrop D. Jordan.
But the Press is perhaps best known for developing one of the strongest--and the earliest--regional publishing programs in the United States. This innovation attracted national attention and established a pattern of regional publishing quickly adopted by other university presses. The Press's regional publishing program encompassed scholarly books about the region, such as Howard W. Odum's Southern Regions of the United States (1936) and general-interest books for the people of the state and region, like B. W. Wells's The Natural Gardens of North Carolina (1932) and Marion Brown's Southern Cookbook, published in 1951 and still in print.
One of the Press's most famous regional books is the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published in 1989 and now with more than 53,000 copies sold.
UNC Press was also the first publisher to develop an ongoing program of books by and about African Americans. By as early as 1950, nearly one hundred volumes in this genre had appeared under the Chapel Hill imprint, including John Hope Franklin's classic volume, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, published in 1943.
The Press has also delved into electronic publishing; three electronic book projects are in development, and the Press has an Internet presence with UNC Press Online, a World Wide Web site.
In late 1990, a devastating fire destroyed most of the Press's office building adjacent to the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. The facility has now been rebuilt, complete with a sprinkler system, and, miraculously, the fire had little impact on Press's publication schedule.
Now celebrating its seventy-fifth year as a publisher of enduring books, the Press has around 1,000 titles in print, publishing about 80-90 new books per year, with sales in excess of $4.5 million annually. It is widely considered to be one of the Tar Heel state's cultural treasures.
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This page last updated on Thursday, 02-Oct-2003 12:03:33 EDT.