Viewing entries posted in August 2015

Early Issues of The Salemite, Salem College’s Student Newspaper, Now On DigitalNC

salemiteillustrationIn partnership with Salem College’s library, hundreds of early issues of The Salemite, the school’s student newspaper, are now available on DigitalNC.

The Salemite has been published continuously under that name from 1920 until the present day. We’ve just finished digitizing issues from 1920 through 1948. These early issues of the paper include school news, advertisements from local merchants hoping to attract the business of the student body, and announcements of events both on campus and in the surrounding Salem community. As with many school papers, social anecdotes and inside jokes abound.

Formed by Moravians in 1772, the school now known as Salem College is recognized as one of the oldest women’s colleges in the nation. We have also partnered with Salem College to digitize their yearbooks and other historic items. You can view all of these, along with The Salemite, at DigitalNC.


Fourteen North Carolina Film Board Films on DigitalNC

Film still from The Road to Carolina

Film still from The Road to Carolina

In the early 1960s, North Carolina’s state government created a Film Board to “portray and illuminate the people, problems, themes, and life of the State” (Oettinger 1964/1965, p. 1). Championed by Governor Terry Sanford, the Board operated from 1962-1965 and created 19 films. As part of our recent audio-visual project, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library contributed eight of these films for digitization.

During the Board’s operation, “ideas and requests for the films came from various state departments, individuals on the Governor’s staff or historical associations from around the state” (Ferrara 1981, p. 23). Production costs for each film averaged $30,000. James Beveridge, a filmmaker from Canada, was brought in to head the Board. (The State Archives has shared film clips from Beveridge online as well.)

The Board aimed to produce films that were documentary in nature, looking at different industries, locations, or segments of the population. Some addressed politically charged issues; the Minority Report series is a stark exploration of race relations. “Goodbye to Carolina,” was coordinated with the help of the Intercollegiate Council for Human Rights, chaired by then A&T student Jesse Jackson.

Below is a list of the films produced by the Board that are currently available on DigitalNC*:

Film still from Welcome to Work

Film still from Welcome to Work

  • The Ayes Have It (1963) A behind-the-scenes look at the North Carolina General Assembly.
  • Minority Report: A Series Stating the Opinions and Experiences of Negro Students in North Carolina
    • Goodbye to Carolina (1964) Interviews with North Carolina A&T College (now University) about their reasons for seeking jobs outside of North Carolina.
    • A Knocking at the Gate (1964) Interviews with North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) students about civil rights.
  • North Carolina’s Tribute to President John F. Kennedy (1964) Covers the memorial ceremonies for the late President held at UNC-Chapel Hill.
  • The Road to Carolina (1963) Commissioned by the NC Tercentenary Commission and created for eight graders, this illustrated film recounts the first hundred years of the state’s colonial history.
  • The Search for Excellence (1965) Follows rural residents’ experiences as communities around the state were consolidating educational resources and schools to a centralized model.
  • The Vanishing Frontier (1963) The state’s Appalachian communities are documented through first-hand accounts with citizens, revealing the area’s “poverty and promise” (Ferrara, p. 28).
  • Welcome to Work: The Siler City Story (1964) Describes the changes in Siler City as it transitioned from an agricultural-based to an industrial-based economy.
  • Updated March 21, 2019

It’s interesting to see the film topics chosen during this time period. Instead of shying away from hot button issues or glossing over the widespread demographic, economic, and social changes of the era, the Film Board tackled them with a freer hand than might be expected. Such ambitious and frank efforts eventually contributed to the Board’s dissolution.

You can view additional items on DigitalNC from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Notes

*The other films are: Land of Beginnings; Minority Report: Vote and the Choice is Yours; Minority Report: We’re Not Alone; Nine Months To Go; The Outer Banks (possibly lost, according to Ferrara)

References

Ferrara, Susan E. “The Demise of the North Carolina Film Board: Public Policy Implications.” M.A. thesis., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1981.

Oettinger, Elmer. “The North Carolina Film Board: A Unique Program in Documentary and Educational Film Making.” The Journal of the Society of Cinematologists 4/5 (1964/1965): p. 55-65.


New Materials from the Montgomery County Public Library now on DigitalNC

The Montgomery County Public Library recently provided the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center with a wide variety of materials to digitize and publish on DigitalNC. Coming directly from the library is a photo album from the 1980s depicting the library’s various activities and programs, including arts and crafts, a quiz bowl, summer reading programs, and a library luncheon.

Summer reading program--"Book a Trip to Africa"

Summer reading program– “Book a Trip to Africa”

In our Images of North Carolina collection, we also recently added a few maps and blueprints of various areas of interest around Montgomery County, pictures related to prominent members of the community, and four photographs from Candor School of Miss Elizabeth Currie and her fellow faculty members and pupils. In the North Carolina Memory Collection there are two more items related to Miss Currie: a music recital program and a piano recital program. Also from a school in Montgomery County are two play programs put on by a class in Troy Elementary.

Survey map for land dispute

Survey map for a land dispute between Matilda Owens and Elijah Needham

Jewel Callicutt

Jewel Callicutt and friends outside of one of her greenhouses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A number of election returns from Montgomery County in the 1880s were included, and they show how the districts in Montgomery voted on such matters at what to do about public debt and who to elect for president, representation, and state officials.

Election returns

Election returns from Montgomery County for State Officials

 

Furthermore, we have added booklets written by local historian Catherine Watkins McKinnon: History of Sharon and First Presbyterian Church, Mt. Gilead, 1795-1970 and The History of Big Oak Christian Church in Eagle Springs. For a bit of more recent history, we have a copy of a booklet printed by the American Legion listing all of the service men and women from Montgomery County who served in the World Wars. Also added in this batch are some items about the various activities of some of the clubs in Montgomery County. A number of yearbooks from the Woman’s Club of Biscoe list their events and programs throughout the year, and each one contains a copy of both their constitution and bylaws. There is also a program from the Charter Night for the Rotary Club of Star, North Carolina, sponsored by the Troy division of the Rotary Club.

Woman's Club of Biscoe Yearbook

Woman’s Club of Biscoe Yearbook, 1942-1943

Finally, the Montgomery County Public Library provided issues from the 1960s of The Smoke Signal (West Montgomery High School’s student newspaper), two funeral programs (for Othar C. Hunsucker and Juanita Auman Wallace) and some newspaper clippings about the town of Troy winning the Sandhills Area Development Association’s community development contest. For more information about the Montgomery County Public library and their materials, visit their contributor page on DigitalNC, the library’s website, or see these previous blog posts from DigitalNC.


North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Part 3: This is How We Do It

Greensboro Daily News Ad, March 2, 1934

Greensboro Daily News Ad, March 2, 1934

Like “Jeopardy!,” I want to tell you the answer before I get to the question.

Following a newspaper digitization and markup standard helps us plan for the future and makes it easier for us to work with vendors, open-source software, and other libraries and archives.

I say this up front, because when we explain how we digitize and share newspapers the frequent response is to ask why we do it the way we do. I think this is because our process is more labor intensive than people expect. It’s definitely not the only way, but we’re committed to this path for right now because it accommodates multiple formats (microfilm, print, born-digital), fits our current digitization capacity, and results in a system we think is flexible and extensible.

That standard I mentioned above comes out of the Library of Congress’ National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). All of our newspaper work is NDNP compliant, which means we follow that project’s recommendations for how to structure files, the type of metadata to assign to those files, and also the markup language that tells the computer where words are situated on each page (very helpful for full-text search).

I’ll give you a broad outline of our workflow and the tools we use. However, if you want more specific technical details, head over to our account on GitHub.

Screenshot of PaperBoy!

Screenshot of PaperBoy!

Let’s say one of our partners is interested in having us digitize a print newspaper. We’ll start by scanning each page separately on whichever machine works for the paper’s size. Because the NDNP standard requires page-level metadata, we’ve created a lightweight piece of software that helps us take care of some of that while we scan. Affectionately dubbed “PaperBoy,” this program allows the scanning technician to track page number, date, volume, issue, and edition for each shot. While it slows down scanning a little bit, it speeds up post-processing metadata work quite a lot.

Once the scanning’s complete, we process the files to create derivatives that serve different needs. We use ABBYY Recognition Server to get those multiple formats:

  1. a JPEG2000 image that’s excellent quality yet small in file size
  2. an XML file that includes computer-recognized text from the image along with coordinates that indicate the location of each word on that image
  3. a .pdf file that includes both the image and searchable text.

Now that we have the derivatives, we begin filling out a spreadsheet with page-level metadata. We first add the metadata created using Paperboy and then we run through the scans page by page, correcting any mistakes found in the Paperboy output and adding additional metadata. This also helps us quality control the scans and gives us a chance to find skipped pages.

How much metadata do we do? You can download a sample batch spreadsheet from GitHub, if you’re interested in the specifics, but it includes the PaperBoy output as well as fields like Title, our name (Digital Heritage Center) as batch-creators, and information about the print paper’s physical location. A lot of those fields stay the same across numerous scans or can be programmatically populated with a spreadsheet formula, to help make things go faster.

Once we have the spreadsheet and scans complete, scripts developed by our programmer (also available on GitHub) use those spreadsheets to figure out how to rearrange the files and metadata into packages structured just the way the NDNP standard likes them. The script breaks out each newspaper issue’s files into their own file folder, renaming and reorganizing the pages (if needed). The script also creates issue-level XML files, which tag along inside each folder. These XML files describe the issue and its relation to the batch, and include some administrative metadata about who created the files, etc.

Newspaper files before processing (left) and after (right).

Newspaper files before processing (left) and after (right).

The final steps are to load our NDNP-compliant batches into the software we use to present it online, and to quality control the metadata and scans.

If you think about it, newspapers have a helpfully consistent structure: date-driven volumes, issues, and editions. But there isn’t much else in the digital library world quite like them, so more common content management systems can leave something to be desired for both searching and viewing newspapers.  Because of this, and because there’s just so MUCH newspaper content, we use a standalone system for our newspapers: the Library of Congress’ open source newspaper viewer, ChronAm. It’s named as such because it also happens to be the one used for the NDNP’s online presence: the Chronicling America website.

While not perfect, this viewer does really well exploiting newspaper structure. It also allows you to zoom in and out while you skim and read, and it highlights your search terms (courtesy of those XML files created by ABBYY). Try it out on the North Carolina Newspapers portion of our site.

“Can’t you just scan the newspaper and put it online as a bunch of TIFs or JPGs?” Sure. That happens. But that brings me back around to the why question. We love newspapers (most of the time) and love making it as easy and intuitive to use them as we can. We think it’s important to exploit their newspapery-ness, because that’s how users think of and search them.

We also believe that standards like the one from NDNP are kind of like the rules of the road. While off-roading can be fun, driving en masse enables us to be interoperable and sustainable. Standards mean we have a baseline of shared understanding that gives us a boost when we decide we want to drive somewhere together.

This post’s bird’s eye view (perhaps a low-flying bird) doesn’t include more specific questions you may be asking (“What resolution do you use when you scan?” “You didn’t explain METSALTO!”) I also just tackled our print newspaper procedure, because it’s the most labor intensive. When we work with digitized microfilm and born-digital papers the procedure is truncated but similar.

I hope this post as well as part 1 and part 2 of this series give you a sense of what’s involved in our newspaper digitization process and why we do it the way we do. As always, we’re happy to talk more. Just drop us a line.


Looking for Discrimination in old North Carolina Classified Ads

After reading a recent Washington Post story about the discovery (in digitized newspapers!) of old classified ads with “No Irish Need Apply” statements, and seeing a tweet of a “No Scandinavians Need Apply” ad, I wondered about similar discriminatory statements in old North Carolina newspapers on DigitalNC.

Not surprisingly in a state with such a large population of migrants from Ireland and Scotland, the only mention of “No Irish Need Apply” was either in comic stories reprinted from other papers or news of discrimination in other cities.

It’s difficult to do a keyword search like this without a specific phrase to search for. I tried searching for the phrase “need apply” and got plenty of hits, but nearly all of these were for ads specifying experience or qualities they were looking for in the applicants: “None but experienced men need apply.”

I had a much easier time finding discrimination in ads that said who was eligible to apply. Most ads stated the gender of the applicant they were looking for:

The Pilot (Southern Pines, N.C.), October 27, 1944.

The Pilot (Southern Pines, N.C.), October 27, 1944.

Hickory Democrat, January 13, 1916.

Hickory Democrat, January 16, 1913.

Even more common were ads that specified the race and gender of the applicant. These ads span several decades, demonstrating that in North Carolina there was a clear racial divide in employment throughout much of the twentieth century.

Waynesville Mountaineer, June 4, 1946.

Waynesville Mountaineer, June 4, 1946.

The Enterprise (Williamston, N.C.), October 28, 1904.

The Enterprise (Williamston, N.C.), October 28, 1904.

The News Journal (Raeford, N.C.), April 7, 1955.

The News Journal (Raeford, N.C.), April 7, 1955.

The Duplin Times (Warsaw, N.C.), October 31, 1947.

The Duplin Times (Warsaw, N.C.), October 31, 1947.

The Danbury Reporter, January 28, 1925.

The Danbury Reporter, January 28, 1925.

 


Dog Days of Summer: DigitalNC Edition

After seeing excellent “Dog Days of Summer” blog posts from our friends at NC State and Duke, we couldn’t resist following up with a few of our favorites from the many dog photos on DigitalNC.

No North Carolina-related dog feature would be complete without a Plott Hound. This photo from the Haywood County Public Library shows not just any Plott Hound, but the original: “Dan” was the first Plott Hound to be registered after the United Kennel Club recognized the breed in 1946.

Dan_the_First_Registered_Plott_Hound


The prize for cutest dog photo on DigitalNC has to go to this one, puppies in a basket, from the William Hoke Sumner collection at UNC-Charlotte.

Puppies_in_a_basket


This young man with a pack of Basset Hounds is heading to a dog show in Pinehurst in 1935. Photo from the Tufts Archives.

Dog_Show


No hunting party would be complete without a dog. This photo, from the Davie County Public Library, shows a group at the Coollemee Plantation.

Cooleemee_Plantation_Hunting_Dogs


As this 1951 photo from the Braswell Memorial Library in Rocky Mount attests, there is no better reading companion than a dog.

Young_Girl_Sits_with_Picture_Book_and_Dog

 


And no dog loved books more than Jim the Library Dog, a fixture on the front seat of the Rockingham County Bookmobile as it traveled around the county in the 1930s. Photo from the Rockingham County Public Library. You can see Jim in action in the silent film showing the bookmobile that we recently shared online.

Bakers_cross_roads_bookmobile_stop_1

 


But our favorites have to be the dogs we spot occasionally in old yearbooks. Apparently UNC-Chapel Hill was a hotbed of canine education in 1977. We found two dogs in the Yackety Yack from that year. The photo at top is identified as Sarah Abercrombie, a senior from Dixmont, Maine, while the bottom photo shows Poco Medford, a graduate student from Carrboro. We trust that both Sarah and Poco put their education to good use and went on to long and distinguished careers.

sarahpoco

 


North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Part 2: The State of the State

Sign pointing microfilm users to different online resources. Taken in Wilson Library's North Carolina Collection Reading Room, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Sign pointing microfilm users to different online resources. Taken in Wilson Library’s North Carolina Collection Reading Room, UNC-Chapel Hill.

[This post updated July 2017.]

Newspaper digitization is challenging for a number of reasons (refer to our previous post). Although we’re biased, if you’re interested in accessing North Carolina newspapers online you’re actually pretty lucky; North Carolina is positioned well ahead of many other states. Below we’ve listed, in descending order of size, all of the major historic online newspaper databases sponsored by North Carolina institutions that are on our radar.

Name: Newspapers.com
Dates: 1751-2000
Coverage: Statewide
Amount Online: 3,500,000+ pages
Details: The North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill Library recently partnered with Newspapers.com to digitize millions of pages of North Carolina newspapers. These are accessible for free at the State Archives of North Carolina or UNC-Chapel Hill’s Library, or you can view them anywhere at newspapers.com for a monthly fee. As of July 2017, NC LIVE also makes these papers available to member libraries and their card holders. While there are other vendors out there with historic North Carolina newspapers, this is the most comprehensive to date.

Name: The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center
Coverage: Statewide
Dates: 1824-2013
Amount Online: 640,000+ pages
Details: Each year we receive LSTA funding from the State Library of North Carolina to digitize newspapers. Part of that funding goes toward papers on microfilm, for which we ask for title nominations from libraries and archives. We also digitize some newspapers from print (mostly college and university student newspapers) as well as small runs of community papers that have not been microfilmed.

Name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, National Digital Newspaper Program Grant Award
Coverage: Statewide
Dates: 1836-1922
Amount Online: 100,000+ pages
Details: UNC-Chapel Hill is currently in its second round of providing selected historic newspapers for digitization and sharing through the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website. These issues are searchable along with a selection of titles from other states.

Name: University of North Carolina at Greensboro Library / Greensboro Museum
Dates: 1826-1946
Coverage: Town of Greensboro and surrounding area
Amount Online: 5,000+ issues
Details: The Greensboro Historical Newspapers collection includes a variety of papers from that area, including World War II military base papers.

Name: The State Archives of North Carolina
Dates: 1752-1890s
Coverage: Statewide
Amount Online: 4,000+ issues
Details: The State Archives of North Carolina actively preserves, microfilms, and digitizes newspapers. While most of these are not currently available online, they have shared some of the earliest on their website.

Name: East Carolina University Library
Dates: 1887-1915
Coverage: Town of Greenville and surrounding area
Amount Online: 1,800+ issues
Details: ECU’s Digital Collections include The Eastern Reflector, a community paper published in Greenville.

While more focused, college and university papers (especially earlier issues) often included local community news. In addition to those featured on DigitalNC, here’s a list of other school papers online:

This isn’t to say others aren’t scanning their local newspapers – we know some heard of local entities (businesses and libraries) working toward that goal. But this post was intended to list the largest, statewide, and (mostly) freely searchable endeavors. Know of others? Tell us.

In Part 3 of this Newspaper Digitization series, we’ll get technical and describe how we digitize newspapers here at the Digital Heritage Center.


Two related notes:

  1. Looking for a newspaper that isn’t online (yet)? Through your local public library, you can most likely loan and view newspaper microfilm from the State Library of North Carolina. This Newspaper Locator may be helpful if you want to determine some of the titles published in a specific area.
  1. North Carolinians are heavily involved in efforts to preserve born-digital news. The Educopia Institute, located in Greensboro, is spearheading a conversation that brings in news producers and cultural heritage professionals to talk about our disappearing journalistic heritage.  At their website you can learn more about the Memory Hole events and read a white paper on Newspaper Preservation.

North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Part 1: Why Isn’t It All Online Already?

Carrier boy with newspapers. 1965, Courtesy East Carolina University Digital Collections

Carrier boy with newspapers. 1965, Courtesy East Carolina University Digital Collections

Here’s what we know:

  1. Researchers love newspapers.
  2. Libraries and archives love newspapers.
  3. North Carolina has produced a lot of newspapers.
  4. No, really. There. are. a. lot.

Well, we do know a little bit more than that, but those are the Cliff’s Notes of our newspaper story. Because we work with so many papers, we try and stay on top of what’s happening with newspaper digitization in the state and around the country. We thought we’d write a few blog posts to share some of what we’ve seen and are seeing in that area, and to help get the word out that there’s a lot happening in this space in North Carolina.

So, why is digitizing and sharing newspapers online so tough?

Quantity

There are a lot of them. We’re saying it once more simply because it is the most costly factor in digitization and preservation. Let’s take, for example, a weekly newspaper published from 1870-1920. That’s over 2,500 issues. Say each issue is 8 pages long. Now we’re up to 20,000+ pages. And let’s say there’s one of those types of papers in every county. We’re already at 2 million pages for the state, for only 50 years. This is hugely conservative, considering many counties had more than one paper. And we didn’t even talk about papers published by schools, companies, or ambitious individuals. Or about dailies…

By our estimation, digitization of just the microfilmed newspapers located in the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill would result in over 40 million pages, which means 40 million digitized images. That could be upwards of 180 TB of data. For JUST storage (not including serving this up to the web, maintenance, staff) you’d pay a paltry $6,000 per month*.

We kid you not.

Size

Beside quantity, the remaining challenges look petite. Broadside newspaper pages need a larger scanner than most institutions can afford, especially if the papers are bound. Tabloid sized pages won’t fit on typical flatbed scanners either, and we rarely recommend flatbeds for something like this because they’re just too slow.

Material

Although uniform, which is a plus, historic newspapers can be fragile, friable, and fiddly. The more carefully you have to handle material when you digitize, the more time you’re going to need.

Text-Heavy

Having images of newspapers is really helpful. It’s portable, physically compact, and easier to copy. But the true advantage of a digital version is when it’s full-text searchable. Full-text searchability across large quantities of files requires indexing and search software, and enough IT infrastructure to make that happen.

Rights

While most newspapers published before 1923 can be safely shared online, those published in the years since can have attendant rights issues (pun intended). The massive changes in newspaper ownership over the last 20 years can make institutions wary about publishing a paper from 1924 or 1994.

Oh My.

Hopefully it’s clearer now why more historic newspapers aren’t yet freely available online. Albeit daunting, the challenges mentioned above are all surmountable with enough resources (money and expertise) and time. In our next blog post we’ll highlight where you can find historic North Carolina newspapers online right this very minute.


* We’re quoting Amazon S3 storage here, but YMMV.


History of Rockingham County Families, Baseball, and More Published Online

From the booklet celebrating the 150th year of Madison, NC.

From the booklet celebrating the 150th year of Madison, NC.

The Digital Heritage Center just finished digitizing a large batch of materials from Rockingham County Public Library as part of the collaborative Rockingham County Legacy project, which gathers materials from various contributors relating to the history and heritage of the county.

Chief among the items are local and family histories. One volume, entitled Roots and Branches, contains research from the Genealogical Society of Rockingham & Stokes Counties on various families in the region. However, the majority of the research was conducted and collated by local historian John T. Dallas.

Several new family histories have been added as well. The Alcorn/Alcon, Blair, Dallas, Downs, Gates, Grubb and Settle, Jarrell, Stephens, Thomas, and White families all have newly published volumes containing a profusion of Rockingham/Stokes county genealogical research.

Numerous advertisers dressed up in historic clothing to celebrate Madison's long history.

Numerous advertisers dressed up in historic clothing to celebrate Madison’s long history.

Several town and other regional histories have also been published: Smithtown, Draper, Leaksville, Spray, the Mont View/Galloway Farm, and Sugartree Primitive Baptist Church in Virginia, which also contains information on the Dallas family and Wesley Chapel Church. Additionally, there is a Rockingham County employee directory from 1960, a book of employees of Marshall Field and Company Manufacturing Division who served in World War II, and the fifth volume of the history of Wentworth High School series. The booklet celebrating the 1968 sesquicentennial celebration of the town of Madison (pictured above) showcases the rich history of the town and includes many excellent historic photographs.

There is also a booklet on the history of the Saura, a small Siouan tribe who lived in the Rockingham and Stokes counties area. The booklet was written as an introduction to the Native American tribe for students in Rockingham county schools. The volume, though slightly dated, is nevertheless a useful resource for both the history of the tribe and as a record of how the history of Native people was taught to students in that time. The tribe itself is no longer extant but persists at least in name in the Sauratown mountains of Stokes county; the range includes the popular destinations Pilot Mountain and Hanging Rock State Park. For more information about the Saura, also known as the Cheraw, visit the NCpedia page.

Lastly, baseball! John Dallas compiled a two-volume history of Reidsville, NC’s short-lived minor league baseball team, the Luckies. They are also mentioned in the Sugartree Church volume, linked above.

To explore more items from the Rockingham County Legacy project, please see the exhibit page.


Scrapbooks and Newspapers from the High Point Museum Added to DigitalNC

Ten new scrapbooks by the High Point Woman’s Club and a number of Point-Crest Newspapers, a periodical published by the High Point Weaving Company and Hillcrest Throwing Company, have been digitized and uploaded to DigitalNC. The scrapbooks give details of the club’s activities throughout the years 1957 to 1958 and 1961 to 1971.

High Point Woman's Club Scrapbook

Cover of the 1970-1971 High Point Woman’s Club Scrapbook

The High Point Woman’s Club took part in a wide variety of activities and made it a point to become involved in a number of local and even international issues that were of great importance at the time. They hosted a number of speakers, including Ralph Nader, who discussed a variety of issues such as homeland security, national affairs, and travel. The group was also involved with the United Nations, and UNICEF in particular.

Club Delegates To Consider Obscenity, Air Pollution, Arts

Newspaper clipping about some of the Club’s various activities

The Point-Crest newspapers cover the years 1945 to 1947 and, as the product of the companies listed above, much of the content is related to the textile industry and the doings of these particular companies. However, the newspaper is not all business and work. The paper notes extracurricular activities in which the companies were involved as well, such as the Hillcrest Girls’ Softball Team, who won their league championship.

Picture from the Point-Crest Newspaper featuring war materials

Picture from the Point-Crest Newspaper featuring war materials

For more information about the High Point Woman’s Club and the other materials that DigitalNC has digitized from them and the High Point Museum, see this previous blog post.


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