The University of North Carolina Press

News Bytes

October/December 1998


Odds & Ends

The next Win Free Books! drawing will be on March 15.... The hurricane history quiz is over for the year. When the hurrican season begins for 1999, look for a new hurricane history quiz.... The hurricane web page on UNC Press Online is a popular site. If you want to log on to one of the hottest weather sites around try http://sunsite.unc.edu/uncpress/hurricanes/.... Claudia Clark, author of Radium Girls, was featured in an AP story picked up by the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel-prize-winning experiments by Marie and Pierre Curie into the origins of radioactivity.


SHORT TAKES: Fall Books Preview
Sticks & Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers
by M. Ruth Little
Photography by Tim Buchman


From gravehouses to cedar boards to seashell mounds to tomb-tables to pierced soapstones to homemade concrete headstones, an incredibly rich collection of gravemarker types populates North Carolina's graveyards. Exploring the cultural, economic, and material differences that gave rise to such variation, Little traces three major parallel developments: a tradition of headstones crafted of native materials by country artisans; a series of marble monuments created by metropolitan stonecutters; and a largely twentieth-century legacy of wood and concrete markers made within the African American community.

With more than 230 illustrations, including 120 stunning photographs by Time Buchman, Sticks and Stones offers an illuminating look at an important facet of North Carolina's cultural heritage.

$45.00 hardcover
available October 26, 1998


Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten
by Jerry W. Cotten

A trailblazer for women photographers in the South, North Carolina's Bayard Wootten (1873-1959) overcame economic hardship, gender discrimination, and the obscurity of a small-town upbringing to become the state's most significant early female photographer. This advocate of equality for women combined an artistic vision of photography with determination and a love of adventure to forge a distinguished career spanning half a century.

Light and Air features 190 illustrations, including 136 duotone reproductions of Wootten's photographs taken in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee--many of which have never before been published. Though she was an accomplished landscape and architectural photographer, some of Wootten's most notable images were the portraits she crafted of black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society, working people whom other photographers often ignored. These images are perhaps her most enduring legacy.

$37.50 hardcover
available November 23, 1998


Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy
Edited by David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson
Foreword by John Hope Franklin

At the close of the nineteenth century, white supremacists in North Carolina engineered a revolution that set back decades of progress for African Americans in the state. The most notorious episode of the campaign was the Wilmington race riot of 1898, which claimed the lives of many black residents. This book draws together the best new scholarship on the events of 1898 and their aftermath. Many of the contributors participated in the symposium The 1898 Wilmington Racial Violence And Its Legacy in Wilmington on October 23-24, 1998. John Hope Franklin was the keynote speaker.

$18.95 paperback, $45 hardcover


Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992
by William M. LeoGrande

A detailed and gripping account of U.S. foreign policy toward Central America in the waning years of the Cold War by a leading scholar of U.S. relations with Central America who was also a senior advisor to Senate and House committees on the region. As LeoGrande argues, Central America's fate hinged on decisions that were subject to intense struggles among, and within, Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House--decisions over which Central Americans had little or no influence. LeoGrande takes the story through the Iran-contra affair, the nation's most serious political crisis since Watergate.

$39.95 hardcover



GOOD NEWS! Excerpts from Recent Reviews

Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
by Michael A. Gomez

"A fascinating treatment of the early history of African-American identity, one that should engage Americans of all races and ethnicities, and not just those who can claim this genealogy as an ancestral possession."--K. Anthony Appiah, New York Times Book Review


Pickett's Charge in History and Memory
by Carol Reardon

"A splendidly lively study of the manipulation, not necessarily deliberate or malign, of public opinion."--Atlantic Monthly

"A fresh look at the disastrous assault."--New Yorker


An Outer Banks Reader
Edited by David Stick

"[A] delightful potpourri."--Sierra

"A memorable, intimate portrait of life on a fragile chain of barrier islands. . . . Visible throughout this artfully crafted anthology is editor David Stick. He has rowed out to sea, like his forebears, in a little homemade boat and has captured a beautiful literary tribute of the island ranges."--Bloomsbury Review


North Carolina Beaches (Revised and Updated Edition)
by Glenn Morris

"This 312-page guide includes useful tips on the eight coastal counties, and also gives voice to delightful brief essays, such as 'How To Behave on a Pier' and 'Name That Wave.' Include this in your essential beach gear."--Southern Living


Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
by Philip D. Morgan
"A massive reconstruction of life in the 18th-century American South. . . . [Morgan] sets out to provide 'a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and of the ability of slaves to reshape their lives.' He has succeeded splendidly, and in the process reminded modern readers that the world of the 18th century is not so distant as they sometimes imagine."--New York Times Book Review



Award-winning books

Richard Ewell: A Soldier's Life, by Donald R. Pfanz, has won the 1998 Douglas Southall Freeman History Award from the Military Order of the Stars and Bars.

Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, by Carol Reardon, has won the 1998 Forrest C. Pogue Prize from the Eisenhower Center for American Studies.

Click here to see some more of our recent award-winning books.


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