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Thanks to our spectacular partners at Queens University of Charlotte, DigitalNC is pleased to announce a brand new collection of scrapbooks, newspapers, and newsletters are now available online! The records stretch from as far back as 1921 to as recent as 2005, and encompass a vast experience of student life at one of Charlotte’s most historic campuses. Two hundred issues of student newspapers will join a pre-existing collection already hosted online at NC Digital, extending our digital coverage of the publication by almost a decade!
The newspaper, then known as the Queen’s Blues, span from 1920 to 1931, during the period when Queen’s University was a private Christian woman’s school. Both the paper’s articles and advertisements position themselves at this historic intersection, serving the needs of yesteryear’s college girl. Front-pages are often arranged in order to feature articles on Sunday seminars alongside opera reviews, and ads for charity-drives frequently feature alongside flash sales for the fanciest flapper fashions. A Queen’s girl is portrayed as both demure and mindful, but also modern and urbane. Of particular interest is the Queens Jester section on the back page of each issue, which includes a column of student-submitted jokes and humorous observations. While some may not have aged well, many still elicit a sensible chuckle.
Issues of The Queen’s Chronicle are also included in this collection. These are fourteen issues of student newsletters published nearly eight decades after issues of Queens Blues. Ranging from 2002 to 2005, the pages of the newsletter reflect the similarities and differences of student life at Queens’ campus through the decades. Particularly noticeable is the addition of male students’ voices featured within the newsletters’ pages, as well as an increased focus on sports such as lacrosse, soccer, and basketball.
You can read issues of both The Queens’ Chronicle and Queens’ Blues, as well as five new scrapbooks, online now at DigitalNC. Interested in learning more about Queens University? You can find their partner page online at DigitalNC here, or navigate to the university’s website here. Thanks again to our amazing partners for making this collection possible.
Excerpt from the Carolinian on the origins of the Greensboro Sit-in. Contributed by the Olivia Raney Local History Library.
In addition to our recently developed WWII primary source sets, we are introducing two sets on the history of Jim Crow in North Carolina and a set centering on the community organizing in response to this racial oppression. Included in the source sets are 15 primary sources to explore, along with various discussion questions to kick start an analysis of the sources and additional resources related to the sets. These sets feature a variety of materials, including newspapers, photographs, oral histories, and films, among others.
The set also provides general background information on the history that led to the Jim Crow era of the South and a brief review of this time in history and the legacy of organizing for racial justice. Each primary source has received a brief context statement, some including links to learn further about specific events or people mentioned in the primary source. The sources can be arranged on a timeline with additional dates of major events mentioned in the background information and that were impactful for North Carolinians in relation to Jim Crow, Southern organizing, and life in North Carolina. Due to this, there is harmful and disturbing content and references to racial violence in these sources, please proceed with care when examining sources and see DigitalNC’s Harmful Content statement for further information. Below are brief description of each primary source set in this series.
Pictured is a classroom at the Hill Street School shared by two teachers in Asheville, NC. Contributed to DigitalNC by the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
This set covers the realities of life in North Carolina post-Civil War as the area transitioned from the Reconstruction Era to the Jim Crow South period. While the time post-Civil War did see some social progress, it also saw the rise of white supremacist groups and quickly building racial violence in response to the beginning of an integrated society. A stark example of this is Wilmington Massacre, extreme acts of white supremacist violence upon the Wilmington community in response to a newly elected interracial town government. This set features reports from historically Black newspapers, white-run newspapers, photographs, a scrapbook, and a poll tax receipt to show the lives and beliefs of people in North Carolina during the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1930’s.
This photograph of Bernice Sills Britt accompanied her oral history interview, which detailed her memories of growing up in rural North Carolina during Jim Crow. Contributed to DigitalNC by Braswell Memorial Library (Rocky Mount, N.C.).
A collection of photographs, newspaper articles, oral histories, a book, and blueprints show how Jim Crow operated in North Carolina during the 1930’s-1950’s. In addition to historically Black newspapers, this set provides records of segregationist efforts to divide public spaces, like with the park now known as the William B. Umstead State Park. Thew two oral histories included in this set describe the lives of people who lived through Jim Crow and they help us to remember the individual impacts of these racist policies and racial violences. They also describe how communities came together to withstand and push back during these times.
This photograph circa 1965 shows protesters against segregation and Jim Crow marching in Winston-Salem, NC. Contributed to Digital NC by Winston Salem African American Archive.
While the other source sets describe efforts during their time period for organizing against Jim Crow, this set focuses its attention on understanding the Civil Rights Movement in the context of the Southern Freedom Movement in North Carolina during the mid-1950’s to the early 2000’s. While many people think of the Civil Rights Movement as officially concluded, these efforts were part of a broader social movement for racial, economic, and social justice in the South, and that social movement continues to organize against white supremacy and racial violence today. This set includes videotapes, newspaper articles, photographs, oral histories, and a presentation on the conditions of this time, the individuals and organizations working for racial justice, and the legacy of these efforts. It also covers how Black liberation movements connect to other oppressed groups and social justice movements, like Indigenous communities and anti-war movements.
These primary source sets can be found on our resources page, along with our other primary sources sets and resources for teaching with primary sources, managing digital collections, and contributing materials to DigitalNC. Feedback on these primary source set can be submitted through our contact form.
Thanks to our partner, Bessemer City History and Art Society, a batch containing an additional 3,500 pages of TheBessemer City Record and The Tri-City Record are now available on DigitalNC! These issues span from 1984-1985 and 1987-1989 and focus heavily on highlighting local news, events, and scenes about town. The issues in this batch published near Halloween feature fabulous costumes worn for the “Halloween social season” along with spookily decorated yards.
Bessemer City Record editor Lois Smith is seen here in her Egyptian Queen costume along with “Witch” Hazel Harmon, Ernie Kincaid as a California raisin, and first place costume winner Mrs. Florence Gossage. Mrs. Gossage, dressed as a flapper girl, designed and decorated her outfit with numerous handmade motifs.
In 1985, the title of Halloween House was given to a residence on Iowa Avenue in Bessemer City. The yard featured “everything that could be thought of with a Halloween theme” — which included a pumpkin man, corn stalks, jack-o’-lanterns, as well as a witch and some ghosts suspended from the roof. Featured in both 1987 (below) and 1989 (disgusted ghost), the residence at the corner of Texas and 11th Street appears to have taken the title of Halloween House.
With the help of our partners at Transylvania County Library, we are excited to announce that new issues of the Olin News (Brevard, N.C) are now available on DigitalNC. Adding to our preexisting digital collection, which has issues from September 1967 to October 1979, this new batch includes 129 issues dating from November 1955 to July 1967.
Olin News was the publication of the Ecusta Paper Corporation, the first paper mill to manufacture cigarette papers in the United States. Located along the Davidson River in the Pisgah Forest, the Ecusta Paper Corporation was founded by Henry Straus in 1939 and became a major source of employment in Transylvania County. Before the company was sold to the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation in 1949, the first iteration of the Ecusta Paper Corporation’s newspaper called The Echo, was published in February of 1940. After acquiring the Pisgah Forest plant, the new ownership maintained the tradition of publishing monthly newspapers for its employees with the Olin News.
Factory newspapers like the Olin News are often overlooked, yet uniquely rich resources for community news. Alongside the growth of the Ecusta Paper Mill, Olin News records the history of the Brevard, N.C. community that is inseparably connected with the successes, challenges, and life history of its local mill. The Ecusta Paper Mill brought families to Brevard and supported generations of residents as a major employer in the area. The mill’s monthly publication included the recurring section “Look Who’s Here,” which welcomed the arrival of Brevard’s newest residents who were born to families employed by the company. The company awarded scholarships to local students and announced the achievements of its employee’s children. Additionally, the newspaper routinely published an opinion section, prompting employees across different departments to share their thoughts on specific questions like “When you have a bad day, what do you do to get it off your mind?” and “Who has the hardest job, the housewife or the breadwinner?“.
The Ecusta Paper Corporation also ran Camp Straus, a company park named after its founder. The company park was open to employees and their families, as well as local community groups for special events. Amenities included swimming and fishing areas, a central lodge, a small golf course, and outdoor sports courts. Community members from Brevard gathered here for events like the annual company picnic, seasonal youth and adult sports leagues, community swimming and sports lessons, and simply just beat the summer heat. A favorite spot for many, the activities of Camp Straus are extensively chronicled throughout issues of Olin News. While the site of Camp Straus has been mostly demolished and repurposed as a housing development, pictures of the lodge and a sketch of the park’s original layout can be found on DigitalNC here.
Although the sun might have set on Camp Straus and the Ecusta Paper Mill, which closed operations in 2002, the long history of the company and its tight-knit community continue to live on through resources like DigitalNC’s collection of the Olin News and photographic collections from the Transylvania County Library. For DigitalNC visitors with family ties to Brevard or the Ecusta Paper Mill, or visitors simply interested in learning more about the community members of this factory town, DigitalNC allows users to easily find material related to specific individuals through our searchable text technology. Visitors can access this feature to search across issues of the Olin News by using the “Keyword(s)” search bar found here, and can learn more about this technology from a blog post found here.
Visitors can view more issues of the Olin Newshere.
More information about our partner, Transylvania County Library, can be found here.
More materials, including scrapbooks, yearbooks, photographs, maps, and six other newspaper titles can be found on Transylvania County Library’s contributor page linked here.
Visitors can browse Transylvania: The Architectural History of a Mountain County, a digital exhibit featuring a curated selection of items from our partner here.
Thanks to our partners at both the Pettigrew Memorial Library and Perquimans County Library, over 100 more issues of the Perquimans Weekly are now on DigitalNC. The newest batch includes papers published from 2021-2023. The papers will extend DigitalNC’s collection of The Perquimans Weekly an additional three years, stretching all the way back to the paper’s debut issue in 1934 and joining a collection of over four thousand issues!
This astonishing temporal range allows for some truly amazing comparisons between the newspapers of today and those of centuries’ past.
Newer editions of The Perquimans Weekly also display many modern-day advancements in newspaper organization. While newspapers of century past arranged many articles closely together in defined and rigid columns, contemporary issues of The Perquimans provide margins between columns and articles, which are easier for the average readers’ eyes to follow. Articles are no longer rigidly slotted together, but are stacked and layered artfully with an eye for the overall composition of each page. The sections of each issue, too, are more defined and arranged. This century’s journalists have provided Perquiman County readers with signposted guardrails such as “Opinion,” “Sport,” and “Religion.” Gone are the days where letters to the editor had to fight for space with front page columns. Now is the time of reason, art, and effectively displayed journalism!
Interested instead in reading the paper’s previous pages from the twentieth century? Read each issue of The Perquimans online at DigitalNC here, or find their website online here.
Thanks to a North Carolina Community partner, a new newspaper title is now on DigitalNC, the Boonville Herald. One issue of the paper, from 1911 was sent to us for digitization.
The Foole in question
This issue was the third published by The Boonville Herald, and its pages reflect the paper’s desire to serve the community of Boonville and its surrounding area. Stories featured in the daily news section involve personal updates from citizens of Boonville, as well as global news from the far-flung metropolises of London and New York. Updates on New York being attacked by locusts are nestled between updates on Mr. Graham Holcomb’s sawmill and the singing at Mrs. Wile’s. Though only a brief four pages, the paper’s balance between local and global focus reflects a desire to expand its readership by serving as many interested readers as possible. A highlight of the issue is the jester on the last page, advertising a year-long subscription to the Herald for only 50 cents!
To view more newspapers from across small North Carolina towns like Boonville, visit our North Carolina Newspapers page.
It’s time for our annual round of microfilmed newspaper digitization! As in previous years, we’re asking cultural heritage institutions in North Carolina to nominate papers from their communities to be digitized. We’re especially interested in:
newspapers covering underrepresented regions or communities, and
newspapers that are not currently available in digital form elsewhere online.
If you’re interested in nominating a paper and you work at a cultural heritage institution that qualifies as a partner, here’s what to do:
Check out our criteria for selecting newspapers, listed below.
Verify that the newspaper you’d like to see digitized exists on microfilm*. Email us (digitalnc@unc.edu) if you’re not sure.
Be prepared to talk with the rights holder(s) to gain written permission to digitize the paper and share it online. We can give you advice on this part, if needed.
Review the Criteria for Selecting Newspapers to Digitize from Microfilm listed below.
Nominations will be taken on an ongoing basis, however don’t wait! We typically get many more requests than we can accommodate. Please contact us at digitalnc@unc.edu with questions. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
Criteria for Selecting Newspapers to Digitize from Microfilm
Titles to be digitized will be selected using the following criteria:
Does the newspaper document traditionally underrepresented regions or communities?
Does the newspaper include significant coverage of the local community or largely syndicated content?
Does the newspaper come from an area of the state that has little representation on DigitalNC? (Titles that have not previously been digitized will be given priority. Here’s a title list and a map showing coverage.)
Is the institution willing to obtain permission from the current publisher or rights holder(s) to digitize issues and make them freely available online?
* What about print newspapers? These are much more costly to scan – we only work with a very limited number. Information about capacity for print newspapers can be found here.
Thanks to our partners at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, we are excited to announce a new batch of student newspapers available online. Spanning from June 1981 to April 1982, these 49 freshly digitized issues of The Carolina Journal are a great addition to our digital collection of this student newspaper. With this new addition, 629 issues from 1947 to 1982 are now available on DigitalNC.
Although our digital collection of The Carolina Journal spans across times of intense change, the curiosity, creativity, and ambition of students at UNC Charlotte remain a timeless fixture across 35 years of issues from this student newspaper. Our new batch from the ‘81-‘82 school year reflects how students made sense of the world around them and fought for a better future during a time when rekindled Cold War tensions stoked the fear of nuclear war and cuts to the federal education budget threatened to slash aid for college students.
Amongst the insightful headlines, op-eds, and cartoons that feature students’ opinions on the issues of nuclear war and education budget cuts, student newspaper staff also highlight the accomplishments and fun shared by students at UNC Charlotte. From snow day parties and free beer at concerts to the basketball team’s spectacular season start and the debate team’s award-winning performance, The Carolina Journal captures students’ commitment to find moments of fun and reasons to celebrate even when faced with uncertain times.
Visitors can view more issues of The Carolina Journalhere.
More materials, including photographs, catalogs, yearbooks, and directories can be found on the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s contributor page here.
More information about the University of North Carolina at Charlotte can be found on their website available here.
To browse our entire collection of student newspapers, select the “Student Papers” filter on our “Newspaper Titles” search page linked here.
Most of the newspaper issues available on DigitalNC are digitized from microfilm. While runs can be very comprehensive, there are often missed issues. We love it when those missed issues get filled in so we were especially excited when staff at Appalachian State University’s library offered to gather and digitize fill-in issues of Blowing Rock’s wonderfully named Blowing Rocket newspaper.
Issues were provided for digitization from App State, Blowing Rock Community Library, Blowing Rock Historical Society, and Watauga County Historical Society. You can easily see the new issues in this search, as they are in full color. The issues include the first issue of the paper, shown above, and scattered issues through 1948. You can view all of the newspapers available on our site at the newspapers home page.
Our partners at Methodist University in Fayetteville, N.C. have contributed a large addition to their pre-existing collection on DigitalNC, and we are thrilled to make it available on the site! The first set of materials is related to Carolina College, a Methodist college for women that operated from 1912-1926 in Maxton, N.C. After the closure of the Carolina Military Academy, which operated at the former site of Carolina College, the Carolina College Alumni Association (CCAA) began meeting at Methodist University. Methodist University, which opened in Fayetteville in 1960, also became the home of the Carolina College archives when alumni entrusted their documents to the university’s archives. This most recent batch includes Carolina College’s original bond note, as well as several carefully-preserved scrapbooks containing event programs and photographs like the one below. See all of the Carolina College records on our site here and read more about Methodist University’s Carolina College collection on their website.
Also included in this addition are 417 issues of the Methodist University student newspaper, spanning 1961 to 2015. These pages record nearly the entirety of the institution’s history and provide insight into issues affecting the student body almost up to the present day. Reactions to historical events and national news are also documented in the newspaper, such as in the following excerpted tribute to President John F. Kennedy after his assassination on November 22, 1963, written by religion and philosophy professor Dr. Samuel J. Womack.
Visitors to the site can peruse the Methodist University student newspaper here. View all of our materials from Methodist University at their contributor page here and read more about the university’s history on their website.
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.
![People are shown marching together as a demonstration in the street, in front of a public building. Signs are shown that read ‘Join our March For Freedom’ and ‘Black and W[hite] Together.’ Protesters are wearing business attire and coats.](https://www.digitalnc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/wsaaa_civilrights_DSC01782-1024x694.jpg)
