Viewing entries posted in 2021

100 Counties! New Materials from the Camden County Museum Heritage Museum Now Online

Table with scanners and a laptop inside a brightly lit museum space with one person seated and scanning and two people standing and looking at a book

L-R Ashlie Brewer (NCDHC) scans while Lisa Gregory (NCDHC) looks at materials with Brian Forehand (Camden County Heritage Museum)

We have an exciting milestone to announce – with the addition of the Camden County Heritage Museum  and the Dismal Swamp Canal Welcome Center we have now worked with at least one partner organization in all of North Carolina’s 100 counties. NCDHC staff received a warm welcome in Camden County at the end of August when we traveled there to scan materials for both of these organizations.

Black English text on beige paper advertisin typhoid fever and diptheria vaccines in Camden CountyOur post today shares the materials we scanned from the Museum (stay tuned for a future post about the Welcome Center’s materials). From photos to maps to brochures to handwritten research notes, the Museum selected a variety of items that document important aspects of the county’s history. Some of the longer and more detailed items are mentioned below:

We were especially interested to read the typhoid fever and diptheria vaccine announcement shown to the right, which seems especially timely during the current pandemic. Note that the author called out the races separately and that people had to go to a specific location based on their assigned race.

You can view all of the items from the Camden County Heritage Museum on the Museum’s contributor page, or all of the materials we have related to Camden County on the Camden County page on our site.


This Week’s 25 New Newspaper Titles – New Bern, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Goldsboro

Header for Wilmington, N.C. newspaper The Carolina Farmer & Morning star, August 26, 1870

Over the next year, we’ll be adding millions of newspaper images to DigitalNC. These images were originally digitized a number of years ago in a partnership with Newspapers.com. That project focused on scanning microfilmed papers published before 1923 held by the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library. While you can currently search all of those pre-1923 issues on Newspapers.com, over the next year we will also make them available in our newspaper database as well. This will allow you to search that content alongside the 2 million pages already on our site – all completely open access and free to use. 

Here are this week’s additions:

If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.


New Items from Gates County now on Digital NC

 

Sunbury High School

Sunbury High School Pamphlet from the 1908 – 1909 school year. Sunbury High School was a former high school in Gates County.

 

Digitial NC now has new materials thanks to our partner Gates County Public Library, including the Gates County Index newspaper and memorabilia from Sunbury High School. This addition makes Gates County our 99th county towards our mission of making North Carolina history accessible to all.

The Gates County Index ranges from November 1942 to February 1956 and covers local stories from Gates County and surrounding areas. The Sunbury High School Pamphlet dates back to 1908 and gives an overview of the upcoming school year, including moving into the new school building.

To see all the materials from Gates County Public Library, visit them here.

To access our North Carolina newspaper collection, visit here.

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52 Newspaper titles from NDNP available on DigitalNC

The header for a Raleigh, N.C. newspaper from 1865 titled Journal of Freedom.

This week we are sharing the second installment of titles on DigitalNC that were brought to us by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) in a cooperative effort with the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries.

The NDNP is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress with the intention of creating a vast, searchable database of newspapers and other historical documents. You can currently search all of the NDNP issues on the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website. Those same issues will be available on our newspaper database, allowing you to search that content alongside the other papers on DigitalNC.  The week’s titles are the following:

This concludes the list of newspapers that we are sharing from the NDNP. If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.


Contributions of Vance County People of Color now available on DigitalNC

The book Contributions of Vance County People of Color by Ruth Anita Hawkins Hughes is now available on DigitalNC.  Thanks to a request from a community member, the folks at Granville County Public Library, and UNC Libraries, we were able to digitize this book.  

Four black and white photographs, top left is a woman in a large white dress who is sitting posed, top right is a child in a white dress standing posed, bottom left is a woman on the phone and the bottom right is a woman in a white nursing outfit holding a dog

Photographs of people discussed in the book are included

Written in 1988, the book contains vignettes about many Black residents of Vance County during the 20th century.  The book is broken up into chapters about farm families, and town families, and then by different occupations in the county.  An amazing resource particularly for genealogists, Contributions… is full text searchable, making it easy to search names quickly!  

To view more materials about the Black community in North Carolina, visit our African American newspapers collection and our general collection here.


The Star of Zion newspaper now on DigitalNC

Thanks to funding from the North Caroliniana Society and from the UNC Libraries IDEA grants, one of the oldest African American newspapers in North Carolina, and the longest continuously published, is now online.  The Star of Zion, which is still published today, began publication in 1876 by the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church.  Issues covering 1884 through 1926 are now on DigitalNC, digitized from microfilm.  The earliest years we digitized are published in a few different places, including Petersburg, Va. and Salisbury, NC.  Beginning in 1896, the paper moved publication to Charlotte, NC where it is still published today.  

Front page of the Star of Zion paper, features several formal posed photographs

Issue highlighting the 1923 graduates of students at schools affiliated with the AME Zion Church

The topics covered by the paper are heavily focused on church activities, including reports from pastors across the country about their localities.  Other topics are also covered, including commentary on political issues of the day.  The papers in 1884 feature the full Republican ticket for the presidency and down, which the editors heartily supported.  The issues in the later years have a wider focus on both issues of the day and church news. 

Quote from Star of Zion paper

An editor’s note from the November 19, 1986 issue.

A rather interesting feature that also pops up often in the paper is a presence of a real rivalry with other denomination based African American publications in the state.  One particularly humorous note was posted by the editor in the November 26, 1896 issue of the paper, noting that the Africo-American Presbyterian was lauding the honorary degree Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University) had conferred on George White, elected to serve in the 2nd Congressional District from NC (and the last Black Congressman to serve before Jim Crow).  The editors of the Star noted that Livingstone College, the AME Zion affiliated school in North Carolina, had already given one to him in May of that year.  College and religious rivalries are timeless. 

Screenshot of text from a newspaper editorial.

 Note from the Editor of the Star of Zion in the November 26, 1896 issue

To view more North Carolina African American newspapers, visit our exhibit.  To view more projects supported by the UNC Libraries IDEA Action grants, visit these posts.  


33 Titles from NDNP now available on DigitalNC

The title image for the Progressive Farmer, a farming weekly based out of Raleigh, N.C.

Starting this week, we will have an update every Friday on new titles being added to our newspaper collection during a year-long project to bring already digitized content from the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) and Newspapers.com onto the DigitalNC newspaper platform. 

This week we are sharing a list of the many new titles on DigitalNC that were brought to us by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) in conjunction with the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries. The NDNP is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress with the intention of creating a vast, searchable database of newspapers and other historical documents. While you can currently search all of the NDNP issues on the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website, adding those same issues to our  newspaper database will allow you to search that content alongside the other papers on DigitalNC.  The titles in this batch include:

Over the next few weeks we will be uploading more newspapers from NDNP. If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.


Microfilmed Newspaper Nominations Selected for Digitization, 2021-2022

Back in August, we announced our annual call for microfilmed newspaper digitization. We asked institutions throughout North Carolina to nominate papers they’d like to see added to DigitalNC. As it is every year, it was an incredibly tough choice – we are typically able to choose between 40-60 reels out of over 300+ nominated. This year we’ve chosen the following titles and years.

Title Years Nominating Institution
The Alleghany Times / News / Star-Times (Sparta, N.C.) 1933-1947 Alleghany County Public Library
The Charlotte Labor Journal and Dixie Farm News (Charlotte, N.C.) 1939-1953 UNC Charlotte
The Daily Record (Dunn, N.C.) 1963-1965 Campbell University
The Eagle (Cherryville, N.C.) 1942-1954 Cherryville Historical Museum
The Highlander (Highlands, N.C.) 1937-1978 Highlands Historical Society
The Kings Mountain Herald (Kings Mountain, N.C.) 1958 Mauney Memorial Library
North Carolina Catholic (Nazareth, N.C.) 1946-1968 Catholic Diocese of Raleigh
The Roanoke News (Weldon, N.C.) 1923-1944 Halifax County Library System
The Valdese News (Valdese, N.C.) 1938-1950 Burke County Public Library
The Yadkin Ripple (Fort Bend, N.C.) 1893-1944 Yadkin County Public Library

For our selection criteria, we prioritize newspapers that document underrepresented communities, new titles, papers that come from a county that currently has little representation on DigitalNC, and papers nominated by new partners. After selection, we ask the partners to secure permission for digitization and, if that’s successful, they make it into the final list above.

We hope to have these titles coming online in the first half of 2022. 


St. Andrews University Yearbooks now available on Digital NC

Digital NC is happy to announce the 2012 – 2014 additions of the St. Andrews University Yearbooks. The yearbooks detail student club life, such as the Forensics Club, and student-athletes such as Women’s Basketball.

St. Andrews University is located in Laurinburg, North Carolina. The university was established as a merger in 1958 between two schools and has since grown to now include a graduate degree program.

Women's Basketball

Women’s Basketball at St. Andrews University

To view from St. Andrews University, including additional yearbooks and student newspapers, visit them here.

To view our collection of North Carolina Yearbooks, visit here.


New Additions of the Green Line Newspaper Now Available!

GreenLine Newspaper

Title of GreenLine Newspaper

Digital NC is happy to announce the new additions of the Green Line Newspaper, 1987 – 1994. The Green Line newspaper was a local newsletter in Asheville, North Carolina, part of the North Carolina Green Party for the Western NC Green Movement. While many of their initiatives surrounded environmental causes within the community and the state and aligned with the NC Green Party, the newsletter was editorially independent. Within the newsletter, stories ranged from discussing the local election and potential candidates to environmental issues such as water issues and conservation within the community.

The newsletter was released once a month to interested parties. Individuals could also write into the newsletter and submit their thoughts and questions as part of the “The Green Line Effect.” The newsletter was free to individuals in 70 different locations or could be mailed for the year.

To learn more about the Green Line Newspaper, check them out here. To view more newspapers, visit our North Carolina Newspaper Collection.

Special thanks to our partner, the Buncombe County Public Library. To view more from Buncombe County Public Library, please visit their partner page.


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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.

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