Christensen: Books light up history newsobserver.com
The most traditional of the histories, "To Right These Wrongs" (UNC Press, 2010), is the story of the North Carolina Fund, which Democratic Gov. Terry Sanford created in the early 1960s to fight poverty and inequality.
A more complicated book, "Declarations of Dependence" (UNC Press, 2011), takes us back to 19th century North Carolina...
North Carolina was a very poor state in the 1800s, and Downs views it through the lens of both blacks' and poor whites' dependence on government. He argues that it is a myth that American citizens wanted little from their government before the New Deal of the 1930s.