The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is pleased to announce that new materials from our generous partners at North Carolina Central University are now available for viewing and research purposes on DigitalNC! The materials consist of publications from historically Black Churches in and around Raleigh, Durham, Henderson and Oxford North Carolina, a handmade scrapbook consisting of newspaper clippings detailing Black law enforcement officers and agents in Durham and educational materials pertaining to The North Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Inc and the North Carolina Teachers Association. These materials give insight into Black life in the region.
The North Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Inc was founded in 1927 with the mission to improve student attendance rates, promote the overall health of students, lengthen the school year (NCpedia). Additionally local chapters raised money to buy land for schools, beautify campus grounds and to purchase musical instruments and other supplemental educational materials (NCpedia). In the 1950’s and 60’s local units garnered the support of radio and V ads along with a membership of over 300,000 participants to meet financial goals (NCpedia). The materials we have from the North Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teacher’s, Inc. are from the mid to late 1960’s. During this time education was still racially segregated by law. However, in 1969 the organization merged with it’s white counterparts and became known as the North Carolina Parent-Teacher’s Association. History of the north Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers Inc. was gathered from NCpedia.
We have publications for the North Carolina Teachers Association as well. The North Carolina Teachers Association serve African American educators across the state of North Carolina. The organization originated as early as 1881. Educators from across the state would meet annually at various schools for networking and skill sharing sessions. The organization eventually merged with its white counterparts in 1970 when racial segregation ended (NCpedia). We have the a special edition souvenir program from 1970 honoring Mrs. Ruth Braswell Jones, who served as president from 1968-1970. The bulk of materials we have for the North Carolina Teachers Association are standard publications called the Teachers Record that document notable events and accomplishments of Black educators in North Carolina along with their annual conventions. The history of North Carolina Teachers Association was gathered from NCpedia.
You can also browse through materials from historically black churches in and around the region.
Thanks to our partner, Graham Historical Museum, a Sanborn Insurance Map of Graham, North Carolina, a program from the 1963 Miss Graham pageant, along with six scrapbooks that chronicle Jeanne Flinn Swanner’s Miss North Carolina appearances, telegrams, and Graham’s trek to Atlantic City to cheer her on at the Miss America 1963 pageant are now available to view on DigitalNC!
In 1963, Jeanne Flinn Swanner was named the winner of the Miss North Carolina crown. During the pageant, Swanner quickly became a favorite, winning the swimsuit competition and receiving a standing ovation for her performance of original songs on the ukulele. In the same year, she competed in the Miss America pageant held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She did not win the Miss America crown, but was voted Miss Congeniality.
Following the completion of the pageants, Swanner returned to Auburn University and completed a bachelors degree in physical education. After receiving her degree, she started teaching during the week while giving speaking engagements on weekends. After nearly a decade of teaching, Swanner decided to pivot her career into professional speaking full-time. She credits the year following her Miss North Carolina win, when she traveled to nearly every corner of the state giving over 500(!) speeches, for her career as a professional humorist.
Miss Jeanne Swanner pictured in the Graham High School yearbook, The Wag [1961]
About two years ago, we had the honor of hosting a group of students from Wilmington who were studying one of the most politically and socially devastating moments in the state’s history–the Wilmington Coup and Race Riots of 1898. Their efforts centered around locating and studying the remaining issues of the newspaper at the center of that event, the Wilmington Daily Record. Owned and operated by African Americans, this successful paper incited racists who were already upset with the political power held by African Americans and supporters of equality. During the Coup, the Record’s offices were burned and many were killed. Thanks to these students, their mentors, and cultural heritage institutions, you can now see the seven known remaining issues of the Daily Record on DigitalNC.
Our main contact on this project has been John Jeremiah Sullivan, a well known North Carolina author and editor. He originally approached us back in 2017 to enlist our help and, since then, has been working with a cohort of supporters, volunteers, and students to dig deeper into the Daily Record and to raise further awareness of its history. Today we’re excited to share the Project’s latest efforts in Sullivan’s own words below.
Daily Record Project Historians, taken by Harry Taylor in May 2017 at the Cape Fear Museum
Highlights
Over the past few years, Wilmington middle school students have been combing through newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, and other publications contemporaneous with The Daily Record searching for content from the Record that is quoted in those sources.
Their efforts yielded numerous quotes, which have been assembled into what they’re calling a “Remnants” issue of the Record.
Literary content, biographical information about the Record’s editors, Wilmington political news and more can be found in this issue.
For the first time in one place you can read content that was published in issues of the Record that may no longer exist.
The Daily Record Project
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
“For the past four years, Joel Finsel and I, in conjunction with the Third Person Project, have been meeting weekly with groups of Wilmington 8th-graders to learn as much as we can about the Wilmington Daily Record, the African American newspaper destroyed at the start of the race massacre and coup d’état that turned Wilmington upside down in November of 1898. At the heart of the original Daily Record Project was an attempt to locate any surviving copies of the paper. Books and essays about the massacre always include a sentence along the lines of, ‘Sadly no copies remain,’ but it seemed impossible that they could all have disappeared. After three years’ hunting, we were able to identify seven copies–three in Wilmington, at the Cape Fear Museum (the staff historian there reached out to make us aware of their existence), three at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, and one at the State Archives of North Carolina in Raleigh. (The latter is a mostly illegible copy of the issue containing Alex Manly’s editorial of August 18, 1898, the article seized on by white supremacists as a pretext for stirring up race-hatred in the months before the massacre.) These seven copies, thanks to the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, can now be examined online by anyone with an Internet connection. For the first time in more than a hundred years, it is possible to read one of the most famous and important African American newspapers of the late-nineteenth century.
“When those seven copies had been thoroughly read through and annotated, and it did not seem that any more were going to surface (at least not in the near future), we found ourselves faced with the question of “What next?” Should we discontinue the project? We had no desire to do that—it had been too much fun and we were learning too much. We had developed rewarding relationships with the three middle schools that sent their students to study with us: Williston School, D.C. Virgo Preparatory Academy, and the Friends School of Wilmington. The Daily Record Project had become a kind of field laboratory for excavating more information about the events of 1898 and Wilmington history more largely. The last thing we wanted was to shut that down.
John Jeremiah Sullivan addressing the Daily Record Project class at DC Virgo Preparatory Academy, 2019
“We had noticed, in the course of studying the seven copies, that there did exist, in various sources from that period, isolated fragments of text from various issues of the Record that may no longer exist. We were finding these fragments in other newspapers. Just as publications do today, papers were reprinting one another’s material. Sometimes it was in the form of a quotation—several paragraphs, or even just a sentence. Sometimes whole articles were being re-published. In a couple of cases, the text survived by way of advertisement: a traveling circus, for instance, had liked what the Record said about it when it passed through Wilmington, and used that paragraph in announcing future appearances. We started wondering how many of these “ghost” stories might exist. The more we looked, the more we found. We enlisted the 8th graders to help us search. They turned up even more stuff. The range of sources we were using expanded. From old newspapers we moved on to magazines and books and pamphlets and letters. Often the writers or editors doing the quoting were critical of, or even hostile to, the Record and its politics. In attacking pieces from the Record that had offended them, they were unwittingly preserving more of that newspaper’s copy for future generations.
“By the time it was over, we had a folder containing scores of these “remnants,” as we were calling them, enough to create an entire new issue–a “ghost issue”–of the Daily Record, and that is what we have done.
“To create the actual issue, we worked with a brilliant graphic designer in New York named Stacey Clarkson James, who for many years had been the Art Director at Harper’s Magazine. I had worked with Stacey at Harper’s many years ago and have collaborated with her many times since. She exceeded even our high expectations by designing a newspaper issue that is not so much an imitation of the original Daily Record as a resurrection. She went in and crafted, by hand, a typeface that matches the now-extinct one used by Alexander Manly and the original editors. Then she laid out the pages according to the old 1890s press-style, even dropping in advertisements that we knew to have appeared in the Record. At the top it says REMNANTS. We gasped when we saw it.
“On the second page, above the masthead, can be seen a list of sources we used. There are a lot of them. The very size and range of the list shows the scope of the Record’s notoriety in its day. It was being read in many parts of the country.
“Maybe the most interesting thing about this issue is that, because it consists only of material that other publications found interesting enough to re-print, it winds up forming a kind of Greatest Hits compilation (though all of these “hits” have been buried in other papers until now). It’s a fascinating issue to read. There are articles on politics, culture, and social life, as well as strange unplaceable pieces, like the one about a man in Arkansas who caught fire in his orchard and just kept burning. No one could put him out. We still aren’t sure what that one means.
“Two of many things worth highlighting within the “Remnants” issue:
Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles Chesnutt Collection, Fayetteville State University Library.
“First–at the center of the issue is Charles Chesnutt’s short story, “The Wife of His Youth.” Chesnutt was, of course, one of the first great African-American fiction writers, and the novel that many consider to be his greatest work, The Marrow of Tradition, is a re-telling of the events of 1898, set in a fictionalized Wilmington that he calls Wellington. Chesnutt had many and deep ties to this city, more than most scholars are aware. (His cousin, Tommy Chesnutt, was the “printer’s devil” or apprentice at the Daily Record–you can find his name on the masthead on page 2.) “The Wife of His Youth” is probably Chesnutt’s best-known story. What’s curious is how we learned that it ran in the Daily Record. In Chesnutt’s published correspondence, there is a letter to Walter Hines Page, his editor at the Atlantic Monthly. It’s basically a letter of complaint: Chesnutt is telling Page that Alex Manly had reprinted the story (serially) in the Record, without having asked permission. At the time of that writing the Record had already been burnt and Manly had fled Wilmington, so Chesnutt essentially says, I guess we can give him a pass… But the complaint contained valuable information, because it tells us that the Record had an ongoing literary dimension. Manly was likely running stories and poems quite frequently—one of the seven surviving copies also contains a short story, “The Gray Steer” by one Frank Oakling. It’s on page 3 of the August 30th, 1898 issue.
Alexander Manly, in the John Henry William Bonitz Papers #3865, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Second–readers will notice that at the end of the “Remnants” issue, in the last couple of columns on the last page, there is a series of articles from not the Wilmington Daily Record but the *Washington* Daily Record. These represent probably the most exciting discovery we made during this most recent session of the Daily Record Project. The way the story of 1898 traditionally gets told, the massacre and coup d’état marked the end of the Manly brothers’ journalistic careers: they left the city, their ambition blighted, and sank into relative obscurity. The reality could not have been more different. It turns out that the Manlys went almost immediately to Washington, D.C., and re-established the Daily Record there. Before a year was out, they had the press up and running. They operated the Daily Record for four more years in the capital, then handed it off to another editor, who ran it for another six or seven. One of their articles included here is a stirring anti-imperialist denunciation of American military intervention in the Philippines. Another describes the renaissance in African-American literary activity that was felt to be happening around the turn of the century. As far as we can determine, these few pieces represent the only extant copy from the *Washington* Daily Record, for its entire decade-long run.
“There is much more worth unpacking, but we want to allow visitors to the NC Digital Heritage Center’s website to have the fun of doing that themselves.
“Long live the Daily Record. Thank you for reading.
“There are a lot of people to thank. First, the incredible 8th-grade students participated in the “Remnants” session of the Daily Record Project. It was a privilege to work with them and be around their energy:
Ridley Edgerton
Bella Erichsen
Dymir Everett
Love Fowler
Malakhi Gordon
Heaven Loftin
Katy McCullough
Juan Mckoy
Shalee Newell
Isis Peoples
Nakitah Roberts
Gabe Smith
Maria Sullivan
Latara Walker
Ramya Warren
“Second, the adults (teachers, administrators, chaperones, donors, friends, and Third Person Project members) who contributed every week to making this year’s work possible:
Rhonda Bellamy
Dan Brawley
Laura Butler
Stacey Clarkson James
Michelle Dykes
Clyde Edgerton
Brenda Esch
Joe Finley
Cameron Francisco
Sabrina Hill-Black
Mariana Johnson
Trey Morehouse
Tana Oliver
Donyell Roseboro
Elliot Smith
Beverley Tetterton
Larry Reni Thomas
Candace Thompson
Leyna Varnum
Tony Ventimiglia
Florence Weller
The Cape Fear Museum
NC State Archives
The Schomburg Center
“And finally, a shout-out to the Digital Heritage Center. Thanks to you, more than 120 years after white supremacists tried to erase the Daily Record, people are reading it again.”
School bulletins and catalogs for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) dating from 1965-2002 are now available on DigitalNC. UNCSA, located in Winston-Salem, serves high school and college students around North Carolina and offers programs in areas such as dance, visual art, drama, and music. The bulletins and catalogs include descriptions of course offering and requirements for each area of study, faculty bios, entrance requirements, a section on the school’s history and purpose, and different rules and regulations of the institution.
Student smoking regulations in the 1965/1966 bulletin.
Looking back through the bulletins gives an interesting peek into life at UNCSA through the years. The 1965/1966 bulletin includes detailed information about aspects of student life such as how often students could leave campus, when high school students were expected to be in their dormitories, and who could smoke on campus and where. Later bulletins focus more on course offerings, with the scope and number of courses offered growing throughout the years with the growth of the school.
To check out all of the new and previously digitized bulletins, catalogs, and yearbooks from University of North Carolina School of the Arts, click here. To learn more about UNCSA visit their partner page or take a look at their website.
A painting by student Jennifer Jeong in the 2009 UNCSA yearbook
Yearbooks from our partner, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, are now up on DigitalNC. These yearbooks span the years 1972 to 2016. Located in Winston-Salem, the UNC School of the Arts (UNCSA) is an arts conservatory that is part of the University of North Carolina public university system and serves high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. These yearbooks pertain specifically to high school program at UNSCA.
Over the years UNCSA has explored a variety of aesthetics for their yearbooks. The yearbook from 1972 is reminiscent of an art catalog and features full-page black and white photographs of student art pieces and performances. The most recent yearbooks are more traditional and include student portraits, photos of student clubs and activities, and senior superlatives along with images of student art.
To browse the UNCSA yearbooks, click here. To learn more about the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and see more materials, visit their partner page, or website.
Mascots are a complicated phenomenon. They inspire a spectrum of reactions: ridicule, ambivalence, or fierce loyalty. With thousands of yearbooks online, all of us here at the Digital Heritage Center have probably spent more time looking at yearbooks than anyone else you’re likely to meet. Mascots are a common theme.
I’ve been working on today’s post for quite some time; unable to find a history or comprehensive list of mascots in North Carolina I decided to compile one myself. So here’s a stab at a college mascot overview, drawn from yearbooks and other campus publications. Let me know what I’ve missed or gotten wrong!
Children
In the early 20th century, schools frequently chose children as mascots or sponsors, whether for a sports team or for a particular class. The earliest example we’ve found on DigitalNC is from a 1910 publication by Atlantic Christian College (now Barton College) in Wilson, which shows Elizabeth Settle Caldwell as the Senior Class sponsor.
Elizabeth Settle Caldwell, First North Carolina Mascot? From the 1910 Pine Knot yearbook, Atlantic Christian College.
Ms. Caldwell was the daughter of Jesse Cobb Caldwell, the college president. From what we’ve been able to tell, children mascots were frequently younger siblings of students, teachers, or others associated with the school. Students mention that Ms. Caldwell brought “solace to many a lonely, homesick heart” and this may be why children were chosen – to foster a feeling of family and comfort among students. We’ve seen several references to mascots being elected or being chosen through competition, although what this might be we haven’t been able to discover. The trend of choosing children as mascots seems to continue through the 1960s. The latest one we found is Dawn, the Senior Class mascot at Peace College (now William Peace University) in 1966.
Animals
Animal mascots span schools across the state, whether it’s Rameses at UNC-Chapel Hill or WCU’s Catamount. The bulldog and different types of cats win out as most frequently adopted. Pictures of live animal mascots start to appear in yearbooks in the early 1900s, and continue today although much less frequently. For a variety of reasons, including concerns expressed by animal rights activists, schools have shifted away from actual animals to students dressing up like animals, as you’ll see later on in this post.
“Buc” is described here as East Carolina University’s first mascot. From the 1959 Buccaneer yearbook.
Characters
While about half of the four-year college mascots in North Carolina are animals, most of the others are characters that are historic, mythical, or extraordinary in nature. From what I’ve seen in NC yearbooks, humans dressing up as the school mascot really got traction in the 1960s. Initially, these costumes weren’t the fuzzy creations we think of today, but rather less complicated ensembles where the mascot’s identity (his or her face and body) was often apparent. Yosef the Mountaineer, beloved icon of Appalachian State University, was created sometime around 1942 and looked like this in the 1960s:
Yosef the Mountaineer, aka James Randle Tedder (we think). From the 1969 Rhododendron yearbook, Appalachian State University.
One of my favorites has to be this picture of Duke Blue Devil, from 1950:
The Blue Devil. From the 1950 Chanticleer yearbook, Duke University.
Perhaps it was too hard to maintain a degree of consistency as students graduated over the years, and mascot anonymity seemed like a better idea. Whatever the reason, you start to see fuzzy, oversized costumes with gigantic headpieces in the late 1970s.
The Big Costumes
Whether animal or character, plush mascots that include a single piece body suit with a large plastic or cloth-covered head is something most Americans can identify with, thanks to professional sports. Colleges in North Carolina really embraced these costumes through the 1980s. Here’s what the UNC-Wilmington Seahawk looked like in 1987:
The Seahawk. From the 1987 Fledgling yearbook, UNC-Wilmington.
Some schools have developed multiple mascots dedicated to different audiences. It seems like the difficulty with these types of costumes is how to pull off a fierce facial expression that doesn’t come off as goofy or too scary for children. I think this picture from Davidson College sums it all up:
The Davidson Wildcat and … friends. From the 1983 Quips and Cranks yearbook.
I will also take this opportunity to mention a mascot that routinely makes the “wait … what?” list – the Campbell University Fighting Camels:
The Campbell Camel. From the 1983 Pine Burr yearbook.
Even the humans and human-like creatures are clothed in oversized costumes these days. Wake Forest University’s Deacon is a dapper chap:
Wake Forest’s Deacon poses with fans. From the 1985 Howler yearbook.
In addition to the Demon Deacons and the Blue Devils, North Carolina boasts a number of other spiritual mascots: North Carolina Wesleyan’s Battling Bishops, Belmont Abbey’s Crusaders, and Guilford College’s Quakers. Meredith College’s teams are known as the Avenging Angels (formerly just the Angels). While Elon University’s mascot is now the Phoenix, before 2000 they were the Fighting Christians:
The Elon Fighting Christian mascot with cheerleaders. From the 1986 Phi Psi Cli yearbook.
Two schools break with the animal/human tradition in North Carolina. The Brevard College Tornadoes and the Louisburg College Hurricanes. Weather phenomena mascots are always difficult to pull off. I couldn’t find one for Brevard, but Louisburg, which currently has a bird mascot, had “Louie” up until 2006:
Louie, the former Louisburg College Hurricanes mascot. From the 1996 The Oak yearbook.
Who knows when the next mascot sea change will happen. Below is a list of mascots in North Carolina; let us know if we got anything wrong. Which one is your favorite?
The quote in this post’s title comes from a student who participated in a 1989 protest at UNC-Chapel Hill, pictured below.
One of the most historic student protests in the United States happened on this day in 1960 right here in North Carolina. NC A&T students protested segregation by sitting down at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. The first images in this post were taken at that event and come from the 1960 Ayantee yearbook. Other images come from schools in all parts of the state, and date from 1960 through 2012.
North Carolina college students have passionately protested a variety of issues and events over the years. Looking back through yearbooks and student newspapers, you’ll find editorials with strong opinions and photographs of students standing up and speaking out in this most public of ways. Today we’re sharing the tradition of protest by students over the years, as reported in their own media.
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, 1960, Segregation (Woolworth’s Lunch Counter, Greensboro)
North Carolina Central University, 1960, Segregation (Woolworth’s Lunch Counter, Durham)
Here at the Digital Heritage Center, we’re able to scan or photograph almost all kinds of two dimensional items and even a goodly number of those in three dimensions. However, audiovisual materials are sent off site for digitization to a vendor and, as such, it’s a service we’ve only been able to offer annually. We just concluded our second round of audiovisual digitization and, like last year, our partners came forward with a wide variety of film and audio nominations. This is the second in a series of posts about the accepted nominations, with links to the items in the Sights and Sounds collection.
State Archives of North Carolina
One of the best parts of “Wildlife Babies” is the footage of baby ducks jumping out of their bird house into a lake.
Appropriate for this election season, the State Archives has shared a number of short spots from the 1968 Governor’s race in which Robert W. Scott compares his policies and campaign tactics to those of his opponent, Jim Gardner. Scott’s criticisms of Gardner and his campaign echo some of what we hear today, and are also reflective of pressing issues in the state at the time, ranging from criticisms about Gardner’s attendance record to “misleading” campaign literature in which Scott was shown standing next to an African American man. There is also footage of a campaign speech made by Scott in Greenville, North Carolina, shortly before election day.
In addition to these are shared a number of films from the Wildlife Resources Commission. Many show both freshwater and saltwater fishing, both for sport and science. If you need your baby animal fix, you can check out “Wildlife Babies,” an award-winning feature that shows baby birds and mammals of North Carolina.
Mauney Memorial Library
We are always pleased to uncover and make available more films by H. Lee Waters, and during this round of digitization the Mauney Memorial Library came forward with two such films from Kings Mountain, N.C. These two most recent films are similar in style to the many produced by Waters, available both here and through an astounding collection at Duke University Libraries. There are many shots of school children walking in front of the camera, sometimes shy, sometimes silly. Some notable features include an aerial view of Kings Mountain, views inside local stores, and a product demonstration of a refrigerator (minute 26).
We’ll be posting several more blog posts in the coming weeks which will introduce the other films from our partners now viewable on DigitalNC.
More yearbooks from Campbell University have been digitized and added to DigitalNC. The yearbooks, titled “Pine Burr,” are from 2010-2015. These join 93 other yearbooks from Campbell University, the earliest from 1912, as well as 27 course catalogs. These yearbooks include student pictures of undergraduates and the Business, Divinity, Education, Law, and Pharmacy schools as well as photos from sports, arts, sciences, and student life.
Campbell University was founded in 1887 in Buies Creek, N.C. You can view more items from Campbell University on their contributor page, or head over to their Digital Collections to see numerous campus publications.
Governor Robert W. Scott receives a “Bob Jr.” license plate in this footage of his inauguration and subsequent celebrations. Contributed by the State Archives of North Carolina.
Almost one year ago, we asked our partners for nominations of audio and video media from their collections to digitize, using funding from the Digital Public Library of America. From all corners of North Carolina came suggestions for moving images and sound. Some items were well documented, with descriptions or finding aids [?] in tow. Others were accompanied with the words “We think this is … but we really have no idea.” Thanks to George Blood, L. P., who digitized these items for us, and Andrea Green, our former Community Digitization Manager, we ended up with over 140 physical items digitized from 11 institutions.
Here’s an overview of what’s been added to DigitalNC to our new Sights and Sounds collection (some of our partners will be posting their digitized media on their own digital collection sites instead). Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more posts taking a closer look at some of our favorites.
Braswell Memorial Library
Throughout the 1990s, Mary Lewis Deans spearheaded an ambitious and well-documented oral history campaign in Nash County. She and her colleagues spoke with long-time residents about rural farming life, military service during World War II, segregation, and family traditions. Deans was businesslike yet friendly, no-nonsense and yet genuine. Listen to and read Deans’ oral histories.
From Davie County Public Library comes a two-part series on Davie County History, and a home video of local personality Louise Graham Stroud, who performed monologues as her self-created character, “Miss Lizzie.”
Cynthia Watts (left) interviews actress Joan Bennett in one of the Arts in Durham films contributed by the Durham Public Library.
Durham Public Library
Love Durham? Love the Arts? Love the late 70s? Some of our staff favorites come from Durham Public Library’s collection of “Arts in Durham” films. Produced by the Durham Arts Council, these films showcase local bands, dance groups, visual artists, and more. We’ll definitely be blogging about our favorite moments. Durham Public Library also contributed a taped lecture by Dr. Charles Watts on the history of Lincoln Hospital, and two-part coverage of the Durham County Centennial Parade of 1981.
Edgecombe Memorial Library
Tobacco Perspectives is an amateur recording of a two-night event in the early 1980s during which a historian, a political scientist, and representatives from farm, industry, and public health agencies lectured on the tobacco industry both past and present.
Rockingham County Public Library
We’ve already announced the bookmobile film from Rockingham County, but we’re still looking for someone who can identify the school that’s shown. In this film boys and girls eagerly peruse and check out books from local librarians. It’s even got Jim, the library dog.
State Archives of North Carolina
We were pleased to join for the first time with the State Archives during this project, as they chose a number of films that document the state’s history. Among the films from the Archives that we’ve added online are coverage of Governor R. W. Scott II’s inauguration and U. S. Coast Guard Appreciation Day (1970).
No Handouts for Mrs. Hedgepeth, 1968, documented a Durham family living below the poverty line. Contributed by the North Carolina Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
From 1962-1965, the North Carolina Film Board produced films tackling some of the most pressing issues in North Carolina: race relations, education, and economic opportunity. Eight of those films join others from the North Carolina Collection and Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill on DigitalNC. As might be expected, some are about UNC and Chapel Hill. Fans of the Hugh Morton Collection will also see several films believed to have been filmed by Morton or his colleagues. There’s even footage of Mildred the Bear.
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
In 1960, Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey became the first chair of what is now the Department of Africana Studies at UNC-Charlotte, which contributed three items related to her career. A scholar, educator, and community icon, one of these shows children in a classroom being taught by Maxwell-Roddey’s students. The others show a night of live poetry and music.
This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
