“Set Clocks Back 100 Years”

With Election Day upon us, everybody in North Carolina seems to have their own opinion about where things stand and how they got here – but one former UNC history professor is answering that question by looking back through our state’s history.

Jim Leutze is an emeritus professor of history at UNC and the former chancellor at UNC-Wilmington. He’s recently published a book called “Entering North Carolina: Set Clocks Back 100 Years.”

“I told my publisher that I wanted to title the book ‘I’m Mad As Hell And I Want My State Back,'” he jokes.

Leutze’s book is a journey through nineteenth- and twentieth-century North Carolina politics, tracing the political ancestry of our leading public figures today. But it’s also a book with an agenda: Leutze says North Carolina thrived in the twentieth century because it was controlled by progressives in both parties (like Democratic Governor Jim Hunt and Republican Governor Jim Holshouser), but that’s no longer the case today.

“I don’t care what party it is,” he says. “Any party that wants to return to the moderate course of North Carolina…I’m for them.”

You can find the book at local bookstores (or buy it at this link); it was published earlier this year.