University of North Carolina Press

About University of North Carolina Press

The University of North Carolina Press, a nonprofit publisher of both scholarly and general-interest books and journals, operates simultaneously in a business environment and in the world of scholarship and ideas. The Press advances the University’s triple mission of teaching, research, and public service by publishing first-rate books and journals for students, scholars, and general readers. The Press has earned a distinguished reputation by publishing excellent work from the nation’s leading scholars, writers, and intellectuals and by presenting that work effectively to wide-ranging audiences.

Established in 1922, unc Press was the first university press in the South and one of the first in the nation. Our regional publishing program—aimed at general readers and offering engaging, authoritative work on all aspects of the region’s history and culture, its natural and built environment, its music, food, literature, geography, plant and animal life—has been widely adopted in other parts of the country. Over the years, Press books have won hundreds of prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and those of many national scholarly societies. Today, the imprint of unc Press is recognized worldwide as a mark of publishing excellence—both for what we publish and for how we publish.

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The Other Side of Silence

A Memoir of Exile, Iran, and the Global Women’s Movement

MAHNAZ AFKHAMI

When a phone rings in the early hours of a November 1978 New York hotel room, Mahnaz Afkhami, the first Minister of Women’s Affairs for Iran, learns she can never go home again: her country has fallen to Ayatollah Khomeini. A member of the Shah’s government, Mahnaz struggles to rebuild her life in the United States even as she faces exile and a death warrant from the Islamic revolution. Refusing to remain silent, she reemerges as an architect of the women’s movement in the global South—only to encounter familial, cultural, political, and organizational hurdles that threaten to derail her quest to empower women and change the structure of human relations. A skilled storyteller who has spent a lifetime living in two worlds, Mahnaz shares with humor, honesty, and compassion her unexpected and meteoric rise from unassuming English professor to a champion of women’s rights in Iran.

Born in Kerman, Iran, Mahnaz Afkhami is the founder and president of Women’s Learning Partnership, executive director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and former minister for women’s affairs in Iran. She lives and works in Bethesda, Maryland.

October 2022

320 pages, 26 halftones, 1 map Memoir Rights: World

October 2022

185 pages Medicine Rights: World

January 2023

324 pages, 13 halftones, 2 maps, 4 tables History / Iran / Cold War Rights: World A Doctor’s Notes on Empathy

MICHAEL STEIN

We will all be patients sooner or later. And when we go to the doctor, when we’re hurting, we tend to think in terms of cause and condemnation. We often look for relief not only from physical symptoms but also from our self-blame. We want from our doctors kindness under any of its many names: empathy, caring, compassion, humanity. We look for safety and forgiveness. But we forget that doctors, too, are often in need of forgiveness—from their patients and from themselves. No doctor enters the medical profession expecting to be unkind or to make mistakes, but because of the complexity of our current medical system and because doctors are human, they often find themselves acting much less kindly than they would like to. Drawing on his work as a primary care physician and a behavioral scientist, Michael Stein artfully examines the often conflicting goals of patients and their doctors. In those differences, Stein recognizes that kindness should not be a patient’s forbidden or unrealistic expectation. This book leaves us with new knowledge of and insights into what we might hope for, and what might go wrong, or right, in the most intimate clinical moments.

Michael Stein, M.D., is award-winning author of six novels and four books of nonfiction, most recently Broke: Patients Talk About Money with Their Doctor. He is professor of health policy at the Boston University School of Public Health and executive editor of PublicHealthPost.org.

The Struggle for Iran

Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954 DAVID S. PAINTER and GREGORY BREW

Beginning with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in spring 1951 and ending with its reversal following the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953, the Iranian oil crisis was a crucial turning point in the global Cold War. The nationalization challenged Great Britain’s preeminence in the Middle East and threatened Western oil concessions everywhere. Fearing the loss of Iran and possibly the entire Middle East and its oil to communist control, the United States and Great Britain played a key role in the ouster of Mosaddeq, a constitutional nationalist opposed to communism and Western imperialism. US intervention helped entrench monarchical power, and the reversal of Iran’s nationalization confirmed the dominance of Western corporations over the resources of the Global South for the next twenty years.Drawing on years of research in American, British, and Iranian sources, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew provide a concise and accessible account of Cold War competition, Anglo-American imperialism, covert intervention, the political economy of global oil, and Iran’s struggle against autocratic government. The Struggle for Iran dispels myths and misconceptions that have hindered understanding this pivotal chapter in the history of the post–World War II world.

David S. Painter is associate professor emeritus of international history at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Cold War: An International History and Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of US Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954. Gregory Brew is a Henry A. Kissinger Postdoctoral Fellow at International Security Studies and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University.

How the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant Captivated Brazil

SETH GARFIELD

In this sweeping chronicle of guaraná—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guaraná as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Sateré-Mawé people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation’s origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guaraná was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings to guaraná and found new uses for it. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol. Guaraná’s journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America’s largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage’s history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.

Seth Garfield is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is In Search of the Amazon.

The Vietnam War in the Pacific World

Edited by BRIAN CUDDY and FREDRIK LOGEVALL

Fifty years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords signaled the final withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, the war’s mark on the Pacific world remains. The essays gathered here offer an essential, postcolonial interpretation of a struggle rooted not only in Indochinese history but also in the wider Asia Pacific region. Extending the Vietnam War’s historiography away from a singular focus on American policies and experiences and toward fundamental regional dynamics, the book reveals a truly global struggle that made the Pacific world what it is today.

Brian Cuddy is Lecturer in security studies at Macquarie University and historian of twentieth century international politics and US foreign relations. Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer professor of international affairs and professor of history at Harvard University.

December 2022

336 pages, 17 halftones, 2 maps, 1 table History / Brazil Rights: World

November 2022

382 pages History / Vietnam Rights: World

December 2022

324 pages, 6 halftones, 4 maps History / Mexico Rights: World

May 2023

Environmental Studies Rights: World Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town

DAVIKEN STUDNICKI-GIZBERT

This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro’s operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-nafta world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out. Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico’s mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision—a moral ecology—that defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book’s breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert is associate professor of history at McGill University and author of A Nation upon the Ocean Sea.

Making the Green Revolution

TIMOTHY LOREK

In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (ciat) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As a renowned research center in the Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, ciat is usually praised for its contribution to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where ciat is physically located, which has been transformed into an industrial monocrop of sugarcane, operated by thirteen Colombian corporations that now control the vast majority of this valley’s famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the paradox Timothy Lorek describes in Making the Green Revolution: an international research center emphasizing small-scale and sustainable agricultural systems sited conspicuously on a landscape otherwise dominated by a large-scale corporate sugarcane industry. Utilizing archives in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Lorek tracks the paradoxical but intertwined twentieth-century processes of global agricultural research and technology and industrial-scale corporate sugarcane production in the Cauca Valley. He traces the ways Colombians played a vital role in the growth and dissemination of Green Revolution technologies, serving as a springboard and a model for replicable programs across Latin America and in India and Africa. The Cauca Valley’s history thus reveals how the agencies and philanthropies behind the Green Revolution eventually displaced local orientations and erased regional histories and actors as they celebrated their own Cold War narrative of technological triumph in feeding the global tropics.

Timothy Lorek is associate professor of history the College of St. Scholastica.

ROBERT GOODRICH

Democracy in Crisis explores how a democracy, grounded in fair elections, parliamentary institutions, and a liberal constitution, nonetheless can fall prey to extreme partisanship, ideological radicalism, procedural manipulation, and external pressures. Arguably the greatest failure of this democratic challenge came in Germany in the early twentieth century—a failure that led to the Third Reich. Here, all of the great ideologies of the modern West collided as roughly equal and viable contenders during the so-called Weimer Republic, 1919–1933. For over a decade since World War I, liberalism, nationalism, conservatism, social democracy, Christian democracy, communism, fascism, and every variant of these movements struggled for power. Although the constitutional framework boldly enshrined liberal democratic values, the political spectrum was so broad and fully represented that a stable parliamentary majority required constant compromises—compromises that alienated citizens embittered by national humiliation in the war and ensuing treaty, struggling to survive in economic turmoil, and confused by rapidly changing cultural norms. As positions hardened, the door was opened to radical alternatives. In the game, players, as delegates of the Reichstag , must contend with intense parliamentary wrangling, constant and uncontrollable world events, street fights, assassinations, and even insurrections. Our game begins in late 1929, just after the US Stock Market Crash as the Reichstag deliberates the Young Plan (a revision to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I). The players belong to various political parties and must debate these matters and more as the combination of economic stress, political gridlock, and foreign pressure turn Germany into a volcano on the verge of eruption.

Robert Goodrich is professor of history at North Michigan University.

Vodou En Vogue

EZIAKU NWOKOCHA

Vodou En Vogue is a transnational religious ethnography that tells the story of a Vodou practitioner, Manbo Maude, and her inventive fashion practices designing and creating the ritual clothing that Vodou practitioners need. Author Eziaku Nwokocha spent eight years as a participant-observer of Manbo Maude’s practices. Nwokocha’s analysis centers on the ritual purposes of the clothing used in Manbo Maude’s ceremonies, and in Vodou more broadly. Clothing and adornment are powerful mediums that create connections between devotees and the spirits, as well as between members of devotional communities. Nwokocha analyzes the complex communal process of creating and giving meaning to this fashion. In so doing, she challenges stereotypical characterizations of Vodou as an exotic example of Africana religions’ unintelligibility. Rather, Nwokocha presents Vodou as a cosmopolitan religion that extends from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. In so doing, she situates Voudou alongside other global religions and subtly dismantles colonial and racist imaginaries that have viewed the religion as a dangerous practice.

Eziaku Nwokocha is Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the department of religion at Princeton University.

January 2023

European History Rights: World

June 2023

Religious Studies Rights: World

April 2023

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Rights: World

March 2023

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Rights: World

MARGARET POWER

The struggle waged by Puerto Rican nationalists against US imperialism is a long one, starting with opposition to the 1898 invasion and subsequent 3-year military occupation of the island. More recently, activists in both Puerto Rico and the United States protested the latter’s military exercises on Vieques and decried insufficient aid and recovery efforts to the island following Hurricanes Maria and Irma. Given this fraught relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, the general narrative of Puerto Rican nationalism tends to be framed by the perspectives from only Puerto Rico and the US. Margaret Power, a historian of Latin American and US foreign relations, has delved deep into the archives throughout the Americas to document how the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (pnpr) built a much broader movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and in New York City. This hemispheric history introduces us to a sprawling transnational network nurtured by the pnpr from its founding in 1922 through its dissolution in 1965 that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas.

Margaret Power is professor of history at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Indigenous Civil Society in Latin America

PASCAL LUPIEN

Over the past decade, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile have been buffeted by intensive neoliberal reforms. Such changes, political scientist Pascal Lupien argues, have pressured and stimulated significant populations of Indigenous political activists in their long, ongoing struggles for equal citizenship rights and the economic and political power from which they have historically been shut out. Bolstering findings that Indigenous activists in Latin America draw on both civic and uncivic, or disruptive, forms of collective action, Lupien argues that now, in fact, Indigenous people’s collective actions, long viewed as social movements, have come to more closely resemble what is known as civil society. But this is only the beginning of what Lupien’s rich, descriptive work contributes to understanding Indigenous peoples’ contemporary struggles. Drawing on four years of immersive fieldwork with more than ninety Indigenous organizations and groups within and across the three countries, and building on theories of resource mobilization, Lupien shows how Indigenous organizations today are newly pursuing, adapting, and sustaining local activism in a globalized world. The book contributes not only to new media and technology studies, which have not given much attention to the Latin American Indigenous experience, but also to the growing awareness and internationalization of Indigenous political and cultural rights as set out in the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Pascal Lupien is assistant professor of political science at Brock University.

KELLY URBAN

The handling of an epidemic is difficult under any conditions, let alone during a full-blown national revolution. In this first comprehensive study of tuberculosis in modern Cuba, Kelly Urban analyzes the medical, social, and governmental responses to the highly contagious disease, particularly as the island was heading into and emerging from the 1959 revolution. But Urban does more: in her book, tuberculosis—one of the top three causes of death in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century—provides a window onto broad questions of citizens’ rights, biomedicine and public health, and political change. Drawing on a diverse range of sources revealing the perspectives of those at the center of power as well as those on the margins, Urban finds that the Cuban republic intervened heavily to confront the tuberculosis epidemic but only after coming under intense pressure by a loose coalition of slum dwellers, Black public intellectuals, radical thinkers, and some physicians.

Kelly Urban is assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama.

Seeing Things

MASON ALLRED

In this work of cultural history and media analysis, Mason Kamana Allred draws on theories of media in order to unearth the ways Mormons employed technologies to translate events, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes into reproducible experiences and the growth of their religious system of meaning. By analyzing technologies intimately commingled with Mormonism’s historical development, the book offers a provocative reevaluation of a religion whose doctrinal focus on materiality and embodiment is ripe for such an analysis. While Mormon uses of television and the internet are recent examples of the tradition’s use of technology, Allred also attends to older technologies that Mormons used for negotiating the spirit, such as typewriters, panorama displays, and magic lantern shows. He resurrects these dead media, arguing that these technologies were essential to Mormons’ feelings of communion with God and fellow humans. Offering a fresh and extended engagement with the “doors of perception” that many religious traditions deal with, Allred envisions media as channels, operations, and procedures. On a broader level, Allred’s methodological lens reveals just how central media and technology have been to the doctrine and lived experience of religion. Allred shows how rather than transcending bodies, language, and machines, religion thrives in them.

Mason Allred is assistant professor of communication, media, and culture at Brigham Young University—Hawaii.

May 2023

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Rights: World

March 2023

Religious Studies Rights: World

April 2023

Religious Studies Rights: World

JACK DELEHANTY

In Making Moral Citizens, Jack Delehanty analyzes faith-based community organizing and how it can give rise to persons and groups who sustain democratic vision, multiracial commitments, and political work for structural change in society. Through a case study of elijah, one of the largest faith-based community organizations in the United States, Delehanty argues that faith-based community organizing hinges on a complex cultural project: making social justice action into a means of personal moral fulfillment for people of different race, class, and faith backgrounds. In a time when media and the public—and many social scientists—continue to cast politics and culture as a battleground between a “religious right” and a “secular left,” Delehanty finds that leaders in activist spaces may marshal faith practices to construct and enact an ambitious vision of equity and justice that has roots in religious traditions but resonates far outside the boundaries of religious affiliation and commitment.

Jack Delehanty is assistant professor of sociology at Clark University.