Duke University Press Log

Take a Chance on the Carlyle Letters Online!

Make a donation of any size to help keep the Carlyle Letters Online openly available between now and Thursday, March 29th, for a chance to win this Carlyle-inspired basket!

Included in the basket:

-2 hardback volumes of the Carlyle Letters

-Stationery & fountain pen

-Writing journal, magnetic notepad, and desk calendar

-Yorkshire tea, tea tin, an English Tea Store mug, and a Union Jack tea towel

-Wilkin and Sons Ltd., English marmalade, Walker's shortbread biscuits, and a chocolate and toffee bar

 

To donate:

Click here to make a gift on a secure giving website administered by Duke University. As you complete the Web form, please confirm that "Carlyle Letters Online" is indicated under "Additional/Other Designations," and your entire donation will directly support The Carlyle Letters Online project.

Radical Foodways

Today’s New York Times features an article about a school district in Greely, Colorado that is a forerunner in the back-to-scratch food movement.  Most of the school’s lunches will be prepared from scratch this year, rather than relying on packaged or frozen foods, in an effort to combat obesity and poor nutrition.

The back-to-scratch movement is just a small part of the growing “Good Food Revolution” that Americans have embraced. “Radical Foodways,” the most recent issue of Radical History Review examines this “revolution” (evidenced by best-selling books, popular movies and TV shows, local and organic agriculture initiatives, even a vegetable garden at the White House). It also looks at the foundations of the problems in our food supply, including the historical structures of colonialism, labor, regulation, memory, racial and gender inequality that persist in every bite we eat. 

Read the introduction for free here.

Social Text Book Series Launch Party @ NYU

On November 21, Duke Press and Social Text will celebrate the launch of the first two books in the Social Text Books Series at a party at the NYU Tisch School of Arts. The first two books in the series are Randy Martin's An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management and Janet R. Jakobsen & Ann Pellegrini's Secularisms. For more information, please visit the Social Text Party Web page.

Examining the Role of Bananas in Central American Politics

Food and the politics of food were central on Bob Edwards Weekend. Last week's broadcast included an interview with Peter Chapman, author of Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Steve Striffler offers an ethnographic exploration of the United Fruit Company in Central America in his work In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995. Striffler tells the story of how Ecuadorian peasants gained, and then lost, control of the banana industry. Striffler is also the co-editor, with Mark Moberg, of Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Banana Wars reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in doing so, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.