Best J R Davis Podcasts (2024)

1
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, "Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023) 51:04

5d ago51:04

51:04

Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal edu…

1
Omar Valerio-Jiménez, "Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship" (UNC Press, 2024) 1:11:26

29d ago1:11:26

1:11:26

Omar Valerio-Jiménez's book Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (UNC Press, 2024) analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizensh…

1
Maria Cristina Garcia, "State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change" (UNC Press, 2022) 50:15

1M ago50:15

50:15

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022), there is actually…

1
Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, "Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:27:01

1M ago1:27:01

1:27:01

In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023), that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material …

1
Mateo Jarquín, "The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History" (UNC Press, 2024) 33:59

2M ago33:59

33:59

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past. In The Sandinista Revolution: A Globa…

1
R. J. Boutelle, "The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:07:55

2M ago1:07:55

1:07:55

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity? In The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press,…

1
Shardé M. Davis, "Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education" (UNC Press, 2024) 50:44

2M ago50:44

50:44

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops …

1
Joseph M. Thompson, "Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism" (UNC Press, 2024) 1:06:57

3M ago1:06:57

1:06:57

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to service members. Begi…

1
Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023) 55:20

3M ago55:20

55:20

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, …

1
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:21:27

3M ago1:21:27

1:21:27

In Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentiet…

1
John William Nelson, "Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:22:56

3M ago1:22:56

1:22:56

The birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson a…

1
Andrew J. Kirkendall, "Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America" (UNC Press, 2022) 1:44:04

3M ago1:44:04

1:44:04

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.-Latin American cooperation. In Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America (UNC Press, 2022), Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for …

1
Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:30:50

3M ago1:30:50

1:30:50

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and…

1
Carly Goodman, "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:10:10

4M ago1:10:10

1:10:10

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity …

1
Ariel Mae Lambe, "No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War" (UNC Press, 2019) 1:10:04

4M ago1:10:04

1:10:04

Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobilized in the mid-1930s to fight fascism both in Cuba and beyond. A wide variety of civic and political groups, including Communists, anarchists, Freemasons…

1
Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:02:15

4M ago1:02:15

1:02:15

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet gl…

1
Sarah Parry Myers, "Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition" (UNC Press, 2023) 56:44

4M ago56:44

56:44

Established by the Army Air Force in 1943, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program opened to civilian women with a pilot's licence who could afford to pay for their own transportation, training, and uniforms. Despite their highly developed skill set, rigorous training, and often dangerous work, the women of WASP were not granted military…

1
Robin Judd, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust" (UNC Press, 2023) 46:47

5M ago46:47

46:47

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europ…

1
Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023) 50:22

5M ago50:22

50:22

Since the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agricultural practices. But who really benefits from Right to Farm Laws? And what can be done to promote real agricultural, rural, and environmental justice? Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State…

1
Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023) 55:45

5M ago55:45

55:45

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that forme…

1
Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:08:14

5M ago1:08:14

1:08:14

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement…

1
Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019) 47:11

5M ago47:11

47:11

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental mo…

1
Katherine Rye Jewell, "Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio" (UNC Press, 2023) 41:35

5M ago41:35

41:35

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, stud…

1
Katherine M. Marino, "Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2019) 55:30

6M ago55:30

55:30

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) follows the many Latin American and Caribbean women in the first half of the century who not only championed feminism for th…

1
Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018) 50:30

6M ago50:30

50:30

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores …

1
On Native American Warfare: A Discussion with Author and Historian Wayne E. Lee 55:15

6M ago55:15

55:15

How did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores this often-neglected question in his book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).…

1
Trent Masiki, "The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism" (UNC Press, 2023) 35:06

6M ago35:06

35:06

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino M…

1
Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:00:32

7M ago1:00:32

1:00:32

The United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Second Amendment, or the history of gun safety, duties, and rights. Often, people assume that the number of guns is a natural state – the guns were always there. But were the guns always there? What caused the…

1
USSFCU Spotlight Podcast: Thomas R. Getman 1:00:14

7M ago1:00:14

1:00:14

It’s All About Compassion This Giving Tuesday we couldn’t think of anyone better suited to feature on our latest podcast than Mr. Thomas Getman. Dedicating his entire life to charity and service to others, Mr. Getman exemplifies the spirit of giving. He has worked worldwide from the U.S. Senate to the Middle East, Geneva, and everything in between.…

1
Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023) 48:27

7M ago48:27

48:27

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of th…

1
Drew A. Swanson, "A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:01:00

8M ago1:01:00

1:01:00

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in No…

1
Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023) 44:31

8M ago44:31

44:31

Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of Cincinnati, Sarah Mayorga argues that residents' interpretations of their circumstances, what she calls urban specters, are often partial recognitions of the exploitation and dehumanization produced …

1
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:06:25

9M ago1:06:25

1:06:25

In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice presid…

1
Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert, "The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914" (UNC Press, 2024) 1:15:02

9M ago1:15:02

1:15:02

It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. The Edwin…

1
Jamie L. Jones, "Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling" (UNC Press, 2023) 48:22

9M ago48:22

48:22

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Ja…

1
Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009) 1:03:58

9M ago1:03:58

1:03:58

Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards…

1
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, "Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2022) 1:02:05

9M ago1:02:05

1:02:05

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older B…

1
Diane Flynt, "Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South" (UNC Press, 2023) 42:24

9M ago42:24

42:24

For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was centra…

1
Josephine Lee, "Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater" (UNC Press, 2022) 47:15

9M ago47:15

47:15

The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (UNC Press, 2022). Dr. Lee, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, examines the linked histories of orientalism, Black…

1
USSFCU Spotlight Podcast: Jim Davis, Ken Harvey & John Booty with the Congressional Football Game 50:19

10M ago50:19

50:19

The Congressional Football Game is this month. We had the privilege of sitting down for a conversation with some key individuals who have made this Capitol Hill tradition a must-see experience for the entire family. Jim Davis is a CFG founding member representing the Capitol Police. Ken Harvey is a four-time NFL Pro-Bowler and Washington Commanders…

1
Jeanne K. Firth, "Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:20:58

10M ago1:20:58

1:20:58

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many high-profile chefs in New Orleans pledged to help their city rebound from the flooding. Several formed their own charitable organizations, including the John Besh Foundation, to help revitalize the region and its restaurant scene. A year and a half after the disaster when the total number of open restaurants ec…

1
Christian O. Paiz, "The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-And-File History of the UFW Movement" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:10:31

10M ago1:10:31

1:10:31

The past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers' (UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the UFW has lent its rallying cry to a presidential campaign and been the subject of no less than nine books, two documentaries, and one motion picture. Yet the full story of the women, men, and children who powered this so…

1
Juliana Hu Pegues, "Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements" (UNC Press, 2021) 56:45

10M ago56:45

56:45

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the …

1
Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023) 48:38

10M ago48:38

48:38

Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and rivetting book that offers the most authoritative account to date of the life and Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from what is today Senegal who was sold to slavery in the early 19th c…

1
Janiece Johnson, "Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture" (UNC Press, 2023) 27:13

10M ago27:13

27:13

On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western frontier of the United States, reaching the nation's capital and eventually crossing the Atla…

1
Jennifer Ritterhouse, "Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s" (UNC Press, 2017) 1:03:42

10M ago1:03:42

1:03:42

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fasc…

1
Bobby J. Smith II, "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2023) 1:18:27

10M ago1:18:27

1:18:27

Bobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Smith re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists e…

1
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America" (UNC Press, 2023) 57:11

11M ago57:11

57:11

Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly…

1
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, "Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America" (UNC Press, 2023) 57:28

11M ago57:28

57:28

Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals t…

1
Margaret M. Power, "Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism" (UNC Press, 2023) 55:47

11M ago55:47

55:47

Throughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far beyond the archipelago. It invested significant energy, members, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, p…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

J R Davis Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Quick Reference Guide