4 grads make USA Today All Academic Teams

Our students keep making us proud, but we’re not surprised. Four new graduates of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences made USA Today’s All USA College Academic Teams:  Libby Longino, Jimmy Waters, Henry Spelman and Lauren Teegarden.

Libby and Henry are Rhodes Scholars;  all four students had full four-year merit scholarships to UNC.  Click here to learn more and to read the USA Today’s coverage.

Wind Power, Rwanda Revisited and Facing the Past

 In this issue of our periodic e-news,  you can read about:

• Marine scientists Harvey Seim and Pete Peterson, who conducted research with the assistance of undergraduates, showing that North Carolina could derive 20 percent of its energy from wind power.

• Donna LeFebvre and 20 undergraduates, who traveled to Africa last summer to confront the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda They learned about hope from the survivors.

• Minrose Gwin, a prominent southern literature scholar, whose first novel explores the segregated south of the past. Her book has been compared favorably with To Kill a Mockingbird.

Click here to read online.

Carolina Arts and Sciences magazine online

PlayMakers Reaches Out, Football Fallout, Hotel Rwanda Revisited….  

These stories and more are available in the Spring 2010 issue of Carolina Arts and Sciences magazine. Our semi-annual publication is mailed to faculty, alumni and friends who have made a gift to the College, and is available to all online.

Taylor Branch talks about secret Clinton tapes, Feb. 23

UNC College alumnus Taylor Branch ’68 will discuss his book  The Clinton Tapes at UNC Wilson Library Special Collection on Feb. 23 at 5 pm. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King biographer was invited to record a series of secret White House conversations with Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. The President kept the tapes, but the historian published his recollections of what was said, based on his personal notes and recordings made on the drive home. The result is a fascinating though complicated glimpse of an irrepressible politiciain’s perpsective on our time.

Branch’s tapes, transcripts and notes are available to researchers through the University Library’s Southern Historical Collection.  He returns to his alma mater this month to talk about it all.

Details: http://bit.ly/9uorti

Alum on Public TV’s ‘Environmental Heroes’ Feb. 11

UNC TV’s Environmental Heroes features alum Todd Miller of NC Coastal Fed and 2 other local heroes, Thurs 9:30 pm http://bit.ly/btooun

E-News: Blues Goldmine, Nicholas Nickleby, Chinese Lessons

In the latest edition of Carolina Arts and Sciences E-News:

• UNC historian and folklorist William Ferris spent the 1960s and 70s traveling the back roads of his native Mississippi tracing the roots of American blues music. He found them in church halls, prison fields and rural homes, where he recorded and filmed African American musicians and storytellers.
• Like everyone in PlayMakers Repertory Company, Jeff Meanza plays multiple characters in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. The company’s most ambitious undertaking ever runs on the Paul Green stage through Dec. 20.
• Wyatt Bruton ’11 spent last summer in Beijing, where he worked at a public relations agency during the week and taught in a migrant village on the week-ends.

Learn more here.

Red Clay Ramblers release Old North State

Jack Betts likes the Red Clay Ramblers’ new CD, “Old North State” with our very own Creative Writing Professor Bland Simpson, alum Jack Herrick, and company. Learn more.

Joe Klein reviews ‘The Clinton Tapes’ by Taylor Branch

UNC alum Taylor Branch ( ’68 History) and former President Bill Clinton are friends and of course Branch is the acclaimed author of  Parting the Waters, the three-volume Martin Luther King biography. So when Clinton wanted to record his thoughts for posterity, he called on Branch.

Branch’s newest book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, comes out Tues. Sept. 29. It doesn’t include actual excerpts from the tapes, for they are still under the control of Clinton.  The book is about Branch’s recollections about what was said during those extensive, often late-night White House sessions, with the kind of context an award-winning historian can provide. Branch took notes during their recorded conversations and dictated his own account of what was said into a tape recorder in his car on the way home. So we have a lively book based on notes, analysis and tapes about the tapes.

Branch is donating his tapes and papers associated with the making of The Clinton Tapes to UNC’s Southern Historical Collection, as part of the Taylor Branch Papers.

So who reviews The Clinton Tapes for the Sunday New York Times Book Review? Joe Klein, the journalist who made news himself by writing an anonymous, controversial, fictionalized account of the Clinton campaign, called Primary Colors, which was made into a movie. Klein, whose fiction surely helped shape public opinion about Clinton, then wrote a Clinton biography, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.

Branch’s book includes a “blue jillion” colorful anecdotes, Klein says, such as Senator Robert Byrd’s “gaseous disquisition” on homosexuality and Julius Caesar when Clinton was trying to decide what to do about policies concerning gays in the military (“don’t ask, don’t tell”), and Elizabeth Taylor’s question about whether Clinton checked out Sophia Loren’s breasts during a state dinner.

“Branch’s friendship with Clinton…makes possible a remarkable portrait of White House life,” Klein writes, including the revelation that Bill and Hillary Clinton seemed to have a strong relationship and that the President was an attentive father to Chelsea.

“In the end, though, The Clinton Tapes will stand as an important work about American political life because of two dominant themes that emerge gradually,” Klein continues, ” one about the man himself and the other about the nature of the current era. ”

You can read Joe Klein’s New York Times review here.

Alum is new social-entrepreneur-in-residence

Micah C. Gilmer ’03, a Morehead-Cain Scholar and UNC College alumnus, is Carolina’s new social entrepreneur-in-residence.

Gilmer is now directing Project Innovation, an initiative to examine the courses, programs and services needed to support students interested in social innovation and entrepreneurship. He will create a development and funding plan as well.

He is teaching a new course in public policy called Implementing Change: Barriers and Opportunities n Policy, Government and the Nonprofit Sector.

“UNC has a tremendous history and culture of public service and engagement,” says Gilmer, who has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke.

Click here to learn more about Gilmer and social entrepreneurship across the UNC campus.

UNC women’s soccer documentary airs Sunday at 5

“Winning Isn’t Everything,” a documentary about the amazing UNC women’s soccer team, is scheduled to air on the Fox Soccer Channel Sunday Sept. 6 at 5 p.m. Produced by UNC communication studies professor Hap Kindmem, the film follows the 2007 team in their attempt to repeat as NCAA national champions. It also features two NCAA national championships for the women’s team, in 2006 and 2008.

The UNC women’s soccer dynasty has won 19 NCAA national championships in the last 27 years. One of the current players featured in the documentary is communication studies major Casey Nogueira, named the 2008-2009 ACC Female Athlete of the Year. She has also won multiple national player of the year honors.

Viewers will hear head coach Anson Dorrance’s pregame, halftime and sideline speeches to the 2007 team. Former stars Mia Hamm, Heather O’Reilly, Cindy Parlow, Carla Overbeck and Wendy Bebauer Palladino are also in the film.