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. uncpress.org

Brown Women Have Everything

Meditations on Witches, Wives, and Goddesses

SAYANTANI DASGUPTA

This is an essay collection exploring global women's interior lives and how they contrast sharply from their outer lives, irrespective of geography, class, socio-religious status, age, and the color of their skin. It covers urgent and huge subjects such as body image, citizenship, workplace culture, mass shootings, and climate change. But it also includes “quiet,” intimate subjects. Such as women and their relationship with hair; the Biblical heroine Judith; the city of Beaufort, North Carolina, where lies the grave of a six-year-old girl buried in a keg of rum; the chaos of putting together a wedding when the traditions one has grown up with aren’t available. Interspersed are stories of interests in food, religion, mythology, popular culture, women’s history, cinema, art, and travel.

Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She is the author of Women Who Misbehave (Penguin Random House), Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between (Two Sylvias Press) & the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood (Red Bird Press).

Spring 2024

200 pages,

Memoir/Essay

Rights: World English

October 2023

272 pages, Asian Studies / Political History / Religion Rights: World

Far from the Rooftop of the World

AMY YEE, with a foreword by HIS HOLINESS THE

DALAI LAMA

When journalist Amy Yee first visited Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s exile home in the foothills of India’s Himalayas, she was drawn to the stories of Tibetan exiles who lived there. But she never imagined the 2008 trip would result in a global, fourteen-year journey to document the experiences of Tibetan refugees who make their way in the world far from home. As she explores what it means for people to retain a strong cultural and religious identity in exile, Yee immerses herself in Dharamsala and meets Tibetans from all walks of life: spiritual leaders, exile government politicians, monks and nuns, teachers, students, activists, former political prisoners, Chinese democracy activists, and Tibetans born in India as well as new refugees. She comes to know ordinary people like Thukjee, a monk and unlikely veterinary assistant; Ngawang, a cook and political refugee; and Deckyi and Dhondup, a married couple who fled middle-class lives in Lhasa during the 2008 clashes between Tibetans and the Chinese government. As Yee's new friends seek homes beyond Dharamsala, Yee follows them to other parts of India, and across oceans to Australia, Belgium, and the United States. Weaving reportage and travel narrative, Far from the Rooftop of the World tells these stories and others against the backdrop of milestones and events in Tibet’s recent history—some memorable, too many tragic. The resulting portrait illuminates the humanity, strength, and generosity of a people facing great adversity.

Amy Yee is a journalist with Bloomberg News

The Struggle for Iran

Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954

DAVID S. PAINTER AND GREGORY BREW

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 U.S. 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.

January 2023

324 pages

History/Iran/Cold War Rights: World

Guaraná

How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant

SETH GARFIELD

Brazil Winner, 2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards—Low or No-Alcohol Drink & Drink History; Food and Indigenous Peoples.

In this sweeping chronicle of guarana—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 guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the SatereMawe 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, guarana 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 guarana and found new uses for it. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol. Guarana'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

Sharing Yerba Mate

How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region

REBEKAH E. PITE

Made from a species of holly called Ilex paraguariensis A., yerba mate (also known as maté and ka’a) is one of the most distinctive, stimulating, and widely consumed beverages in South America. Since the 1970s, yerba mate has become increasingly popular in the United States (where it is mixed into energy drinks) and other parts of the world, such as Syria and Lebanon, who import it from Argentina. Like so many foods, yerba mate is far more than an ingestible commodity—it possesses social, cultural, economic, and political meanings that change over time and serves different functions for different consumers. In the modern era, for example, friends and families from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds gather in parks to socialize over a round of mate, students sip it while studying, and others consume it during a work break. Many engage in a longstanding ritual by enjoying it communally sharing the same cup and drinking through the same straw. With lively prose and vivid illustrations, Rebekah Pite reveals the plant’s long history as a drink, a key commodity, and a ritual.

Rebekah E. Pite is associate professor of history at Lafayette College.

December 2022

336 pages

History/Brazil

Rights: World

September 2023

296 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Food Studies

Rights: World

The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro

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 goldand 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. 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.

The Edwin Fox

The Extraordinary Story of How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization

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

BOYD COTHRAN AND ADRIAN SHUBERT

The Edwin Fox was an ordinary ship in an extraordinary age. Built in Calcutta in 1853, the vessel was used, sold, recommissioned, and refitted over some sixty years by an increasingly far flung constellati19th Centruyon of national militaries, merchants, and others. Chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War, it subsequently carried indentured laborers from China to Cuba, transported convicts from the United Kingdom and its empire to be settled in western Australia, and carried every imaginable cargo around the world. In 1885, after the ship was well past its prime, it was converted into a floating freezer unit for the emerging trade in frozen lamb between New Zealand and Great Britain. Today it rests in the harbor of a small town in New Zealand's Marlborough region and serves as a public history museum. Using every record they could discover about the history and voyages of the Edwin Fox and placing the ship's story in broad context, Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert have produced an engagingly written narrative that presents the history and processes of globalization from the deck and holds of a single vessel.

Boyd Cothran is associate professor of history at York University. Adrian Shubert is professor emeritus at York University.

High Bias

The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape MARC MASTERS

The cassette tape holds a strange place in the history of contemporary music. To many audiophiles, the medium falls short of vinyl, CDs, and even streaming. However, it was the first mass-produced music format that was affordable and offered the unprecedented ability to copy and share music. Its popularity boomed in the 70s and 80s. From concert bootlegs to high school mixtapes, the humble cassette held the promise of freedom and self-expression to generations of music lovers. Marc Masters charts the surprising ups and downs of the cassette tape’s journey through international music culture. Masters explores the cultural impact of cassettes on music listening, on music portability, and on music making itself. This includes early hip-hop tape trading, the deeply personal act of making a mixtape, and even contemporary composers who use cassettes to create musique concrète compositions and the current generation of tape-only music labels. Capturing the resilient do-it-yourself spirit of cassettes through conversations with scene-setters, deep explorations into musical history, and engaging prose, this book promises to be the most comprehensive look at how cassettes have changed music while also serving as a vivid tribute to a format that refuses to fade away.

Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and The Washington City Paper and is the author of No Wave

Country Capitalism

How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet BART ELMORE

Acclaimed scholar Bart Elmore uses the histories of five southern firms—Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America—to investigate the environmental impact of our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy. Drawing on exclusive interviews with company executives, corporate archives, and other records, Elmore explores the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that gave rise to these five trailblazing corporations. He then considers what each has become: an essential presence in the daily workings of the global economy and an unmistakable contributor to the reshaping of the world's ecosystems. Even as businesses invest in sustainability initiatives and respond to new calls for corporate responsibility, Elmore shows the limits of their efforts to "green" their operations and offers insights on how governments and activists can push corporations to do better. This book is a must-read for anyone who hopes to create an ecologically sustainable future economy.

Bart Elmore is associate professor of environmental history at The Ohio State University and the 2022 recipient of the Dan David Prize. His previous books include Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism and Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future

October 2023

224 pages

Music / Popular Culture Rights: World

May 2023

248 pages

Ecology / Environmental Studies / Business & Economic History / History / United States: Southern Rights: World

September 2023

224 pages

Religion / African & African Diaspora Studies

Rights: World

I Cannot Write My Life Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said's America

MBAYE LO AND CARL W. ERNST

This work centers on the life and writing of Omar Ibn Said, born in 1770 in a border region between Senegal and Mauritania that played a significant role in Islamic nations. Omar studied for 25 years at an Islamic seminary and was poised to become a leader in the faith, but after being captured by an invading army, he fell into the hands of transatlantic slave traders. He was sold to a plantation owner near Charleston, SC, in 1808, but he escaped two years later and fled as far as Fayetteville, NC. There he was arrested and jailed, but attracted attention from his jailers for strange signs he wrote on the walls—understood to be Arabic. He was soon enslaved again and died in 1863 before he could achieve liberation under the Emancipation Proclamation. What we know of Omar’s life comes largely from a series of brief autobiographical writings and transcriptions, comprising the only known narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in North America. Lo and Ernst weave fresh and accurate translations of Omar’s writing together with context and interpretation to provide the fullest possible account of this Islamic scholar’s life and significance.

Mbaye Bashir Lo is associate professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Carl Ernst is William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Captivity's Collections

Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade KATHLEEN S. MURPHY

October 2023

272 pages

History / African & African Diaspora Studies / Natural History

Rights: World

Basil from Africa’s Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, Balsam of Tolu from Colombia—in the eighteenth century, these species from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard a British slaving vessel. In looking to the development of British science in the eighteenth century, Kathleen S. Murphy reveals that the era’s explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of objects, ideas, and individuals through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, insects, shells, and seeds were gathered by Britons employed on slaving vessels, at British slaving factories in West Africa, in British American ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the British South Sea Company’s trading factories in Spanish America. Grounded in extensive archival research in museums, libraries, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Captivity's Collections mines scientific treatises, slaving companies’ personal records, personal correspondence, and abolitionist literature to recover in rich detail the scope of the slave trade’s collecting operations, the crucial role of collection-holding museums on emerging ideas in natural history—like taxonomy—and even the influence of natural science on the development of the slave trade.

Kathleen S. Murphy is professor of history and associate dean for student success in the College of Liberal Arts at California Polytechnic State University.