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Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 1 Summer 2011 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama Center for the Study of the American South Letter from the Director Summer’s arrival gives the Center for the Study of the American South a welcome opportunity to reach out and share the news of our busy year. The pace never slackens it seems, as the South, the Center, and the University all keep growing with a rapidly changing world. We’re embracing our new opportunities, and we thank all the many friends who are sharing them with us. We hope you’ll agree that the Center is booming. Audiences at our public programs keep growing. Southern Cultures has a steady base of subscribers, 150,000 print and online readers, and nearly 500,000 “hits” since going online. The Southern Oral History Program has won more major funding for its study of the Long Civil Rights Movement and is collecting interviews for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Center scholars continue winning prizes, and with Center support, Carolina students are taking southern studies in dozens of unexpected directions. Thanks to your help, the study of the American South has never been stronger. Inside the Center this year, we have welcomed a new External Advisory Board, headed by Raleigh attorney John S. Russell, and a new strategic plan we prepared at the Board’s suggestion. As the plan is implemented in the months and years ahead, we look forward to even more engagement with southern communities, broader partnerships for interdisciplinary research, and a wider global reach. Some of our biggest news has involved the Southern Oral History Program. In April 2011, Professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, acclaimed founder and director of the SOHP, capped a lifetime of achievement with election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious learned society. Almost simultaneously, however, she saddened us all by announcing her decision to enter phased retirement, stepping down as SOHP director, but remaining as its Senior Research Fellow. In addition, Dr. David Cline, Associate Director of the SOHP, also resigned for an opportunity to teach and create a public history program at Virginia Tech. Fortunately for all of us, Dr. Della Pollock of the Department of Communication Studies will generously serve as interim director of the SOHP. We warmly congratulate Jacquelyn and David for their new milestones, but now we face the challenge of finding their successors. Beside our good news, unfortunately, the realities of hard times and budget cuts still loom across the Center’s path. Carolina’s appropriations have seriously declined in the past two years and will drop by another 20 percent in fiscal 2011–12. Units like CSAS will probably see even greater cuts, as campus leaders rightly shelter classroom teach-ing first. The Center is already working with administrators to find every possible saving. The Center’s programs have always depended on the support of generous friends like you. As state funding recedes, we will rely even more on our friends and supporters to keep moving ahead. Gifts in every amount help to ensure that our support of southern research, education, and culture remains as strong as ever. — Harry L. Watson P.S.Make sure we have your email address as we go green and cut costs by switching from printed newsletters like this one to all-electronic communications! Contact us at csas@unc.edu. welcome Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 1 events CSAS Events and Lectures During the 2010–2011 academic year, the Center continued to bring noted scholars and artists to the attention of broad public audiences. Renowned photographer William Christenberry, former South Carolina congressman John Spratt, noted oral historian Alessandro Portelli, and John Maujewski, chair of the history department at UC Santa Barbara, are but a few of the speakers we have hosted in recent years. Page 2 Center for the Study of the American South events Hutchins Lectures Our Hutchins Lecture series, generously supported by the Hutchins Family Foundation, brings scholars in southern studies from around the county to our campus. This year, we were delighted to host many distinguished speakers, including Trudier Harris, recently retired from Carolina after a celebrated career of 29 years, who offered a provocative interpretation of James Baldwin’s complicated relationship with the South; and Tom Rankin, director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, who shared photographs from over 20 years of documenting the sacred landscapes and spiritual traditions of the Mississippi Delta. We are now taping our Hutchins lectures. If you missed any of our wonderful speakers this year, please visit our Vimeo channel at www.vimeo.com/uncsouth. Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 3 The Love House and Hutchins forum has provided a gracious backdrop for regular art exhibitions, including Donn Young’s haunting portraits of post-Katrina New Orleans, Jeff Whetstone’s large-scale images of modern cave graffiti, and Jimmy William’s evocative portraits of blues musicians. In spring 2011, Robert Stone’s photography exhibit of Sacred Steel musicians and Theresa Gloster’s imaginative paintings of rural African American life graced our gallery. events And we continued our popular Music on the Porch series at the Love House, featuring musical styles ranging from Hindustani-bluegrass fusion to acoustic rock to hip-hop. Our artists have included Catherine Edgerton of Midtown Dickens, Pierce Freelon, Mandolin Orange, Ryan Gustafson, and Phil Cook. Subtitled “Southern Music Shaken and Stirred,” the series offers an opportunity to reflect on both the rich history and continuing evolution of Southern music, while having a great time. Page 4 Center for the Study of the American South Scholarship and the Community Over the past year we hosted several special one-time events. “Hurricane Katrina Five Years Later” brought together various campus organizations, including the UNC School of Law, the Center for Hazards and Natural Disasters, the School of Government, and the Gillings School of Global Public Health, to reflect upon the personal and public policy impacts of the storm. We celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with a screening of the film at the Varsity Theatre on Franklin Street. The sold-out screening was followed by a discussion with writers Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Randall Kenan, Minrose Gwin, and Jaki Shelton Green, moderated by law professor Gene Nichol. Guests enjoyed the post-film reception at the Ackland Museum, featuring period southern cakes. We also honored the memory of civil rights leader Pauli Murray on the 100th anniversary of her birth with a panel discussion focusing on the denial of her application to attend Howard Odum’s program in applied social work in 1938–39 and the attendant issues of institutional discrimination. This event, conducted in collaboration with Duke’s Pauli Murray Project, the Southern Historical Collection, the Stone Center, the Women’s Center, and the School of Information and Library Science, was standing-room only. Our lunchtime seminar series, “Tell About the South,” continues to bring faculty, graduate students, and scholars together for discussions of original research about the South. Appearing together, for example, were Faith Holsaert, a veteran member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and co-editor of Hands On the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, and Professor Pat Parker of the Department of Communication Studies, who carries the work forward with the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community, an organization committed to empowering women and girls who live in Chapel Hill public housing. events Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 5 Awards For two years in a row, former CSAS Postdoctoral Fellows have won the prestigious Lillian Smith Book Award for their work at the Center. Established by the Southern Regional Council to recognize the finest new work on civil rights, social justice, and a changing South, the Lillian Smith Award for 2010 went to Amy Louise Wood for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (UNC Press, 2009). In 2011, Danielle L. McGuire won the same prize for her own path-breaking study, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Knopf, 2010). Most recently, SOHP staffer Jessie Wilkerson won the Gender & History Graduate Student Paper Prize for her paper “Where Movements Meet: Generations of Women’s Activism in the Appalachian South” at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in June 2011. SOHP Founder and director Jacquelyn Dowd Hall was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s most distinguished learned society, in the spring of 2011. A year earlier, CSAS Senior Associate Director William R. Ferris accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. In October, Center Director Harry Watson delivered his presidential address, “The Man With the Dirty Black Beard: Race, Class, and Herrenvolk Democracy in Antebellum Southern School Reform,” to the Historical Society of North Carolina Students and Fellows The Center’s summer research grants have been awarded to UNC doctoral students pursuing topics ranging from eighteenth-century Charraw Indians to the women leading the eugenics movement in early twentieth-century North Carolina to Confederate veteran remembrances. Jennifer Dixon’s grant enabled her to travel to Charleston, South Carolina, to perform archival and oral history research on black women involved in the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike. Vincent Joos’s grant helped him conduct research in the Moldovian region of Romania, looking at the American influence on the emancipation of Romany slaves in 1855; he interviewed community leaders, historians, and inhabitants of the region. We bade farewell to the outstanding post-doctoral fellows of 2010 –11, Tammy Ingram and Scott Matthews, and welcome our 2011–12 fellows LaKisha Michelle Simmons, and Anderson H. Blanton. During her fellowship, La Kisha will be working on her book, “Within the Double Bind: Black Girlhood and Sexuality in Jim Crow New Orleans, 1930–1954.” Anderson, an anthropologist specializing in the material conduits of prayer and faith healing within the charismatic Christian context in the American South, will be focusing on revisions to his manuscript, “Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: The Materialities of Faith and Divine Communication in Southern Appalachia.” events Page 6 Center for the Study of the American South The Long Civil Rights Movement: The Women’s Movement in Appalachia Historians at the Southern Oral History Program have spent years studying the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” SOHP Director Jacquelyn Hall’s conception of a civil rights movement that was deeper, longer, and more diverse than the story many of us learned about in high school. This concept introduces new ideas and actors into the civil rights story, has begun to change popular notions about the movement, which stretched back long before Rosa Parks and extends beyond the well-known travails and triumphs of the 1960s. The latest phase of our work has led us to seek out a group of civil rights pioneers who do not appear in many history textbooks: the women of eastern Tennessee. We wanted to know how civil rights activism worked in a rural environment; what inspired women to bond together across racial lines; and how these activists saw their mission in relation to the broader civil rights movement. Latest News • We won a $150,000 contract from the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress to conduct a series of interviews with Civil Rights Movement veterans that will become part of an exhibition in the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. • We will share a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue work with UNC Press and UNC Libraries on the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” Project. The grant includes money to digitize the remainder of the SOHP’s collection of audio cassettes, making the SOHP the only oral history program to offer its entire library online. • This summer, we begin work on “Breaking New Ground,” a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project documenting the history of black land ownership in the South. Southern oral history program Sociologist Helen Lewis is a long-time social justice activist. In this excerpt, Lewis responds to a question from SOHP Research Assistant Jessica Wilkerson about whether she saw herself as part of the women’s movement. “I’m a part of the ‘long women’s rights movement,’ I’d say. I wanted to live in the 1830s and to have been at Seneca Falls. I really sort of identified with all those early abolitionist women. I just felt like that is where I should have been, that’s who I was. But I was in the 1940s and 50s by then. So when the women’s movement began I just fell right in. The new women’s movement. So I think that I was one of those hanger-oners that kept something going, at least in myself, during a period when there wasn’t, as you would say, much of a movement.” Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 7 Southern oral history program Building a women’s movement in rural Tennessee was a real challenge. Activists faced the usual obstacles, such as entrenched customs and discriminatory laws, but in the rural South isolation played an even bigger role. Activists were simply so far away from one another that many of them labored alone, out of touch with other women in the struggle. Some remedied their isolation by moving to urban centers like Knoxville, but others, like Marie Cirillo, set out to build a network. A former Catholic nun, Marie Cirillo left the Church after 18 years in order to work directly with the people of Appalachia, primarily on environmental issues and rural development. She spoke with SOHP Associate Director David Cline about forming the Mountain Women’s Exchange collaborative in the late 1970s in order to connect grassroots women in Tennessee and Kentucky. “We had our first meeting down in Newcomb with seven nonprofit groups that were run by women in this immediate area. One was a childcare, one was a land trust, one was the Native American Association, three of them were basically used clothing and crafts kind of things. I’ll never forget that first meeting … These women were so excited to meet other women that were doing things that you could hardly hear yourself talk … So we ended up having meetings I think once every three months. We started in the morning and went through the afternoon and used the song ‘Bread and Roses’ as our theme. We decided that the morning was going to be the bread — the work — and then from lunch on would be the roses. After a couple of years we decided that the one thing we all wanted that we had tried and couldn’t do was a development education, so they decided they would form a nonprofit, and they called it Mountain Women’s Exchange, because we were learning through this exchange.” Page 8 Center for the Study of the American South Southern oral history program This summer, SOHP Associate Director David Cline traveled to Kenya, where he co-led a Burch Honors Seminar for exceptional Carolina undergraduates. With Della Pollock, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies here at UNC, and Peter Wasamba of the University of Nairobi Department of Literature, David used oral history to engage Carolina students in the challenges facing the rural poor of Kenya. After an intensive study of Kenyan culture and oral history methodology in Nairobi, the students recorded interviews in the Coast Province, where the incursion of large-scale mining and agriculture is threatening a long standing tradition of family farming and a distinctive Swahili culture. This seminar took place in an exhilarating space between the gathering of history and the use of history. By collecting oral testimonies and amplifying them with performances for and with community members, students experienced how oral histories provide unique insights to academics and policy makers, and created a platform for locals to express satisfaction, frustration, and new perspectives on specific policy outcomes. These oral records will provide researchers with much needed data about the efficacy of environmental and industrial policies, while documenting deep historical background on the people of one of Kenya’s most fascinating and culturally rich regions. UNC and the University of Nairobi will be sharing the completed materials. Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 9 Read The Photography issue online, order it in print, or download the eBook at www.SouthernCultures.org Southern cultures Milestone: Students and Scholars Acces Southern Cultures Online half a Million Times Worldwide Readership Soars for the Center’s Flagship Publication Soon this year, readers from hundreds of colleges and universities and over a hundred countries will open Southern Cultures for the 500,000th time, using Project Muse and other Internet archives. On the verge of closing in 1998, our award-winning journal now boasts thousands of loyal print and eBook subscribers and a booming online audience. Page 10 Center for the Study of the American South Southern cultures The Council of Editors of Learned Journals has called Southern Cultures “indispensable to a number of fields” and “a hallmark of what ambitious journals should be attempting in the 21st century.” The quarterly covers all aspects of the region’s mainstream and marginalized cultures through interviews, essays, articles, personal reminiscences, and surveys on contemporary trends. Southern Cultures has published numerous theme issues (which often include free CDs or DVDs) on such topics as southern biography, sports, politics, tobacco, food, Hurricane Katrina, the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans, and the Global South, as well as four editions entirely devoted to music. This year brings new theme issues on the South and the Irish, photography, memory, and music, and 2012 will include special issues devoted to food, politics, and music. In over sixty issues across seventeen volumes Southern Cultures has published an extensive array of award-winning scholars, authors, and icons. In addition to interviews with Walker Evans, Alex Haley, B.B. King, Pete Seeger, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, William Christenberry, and Robert Penn Warren, the quarterly has published writing from Doris Betts, David Cecelski, James C. Cobb, Peter Coclanis, Pat Conroy, Hal Crowther, Drew Gilpin Faust, William Ferris, Allan Gurganus, Sheldon Hackney, Trudier Harris, Fred Hobson, Doug Marlette, Melton McLaurin, Michael McFee, Robert Morgan, Michael O’Brien, Michael Parker, Tom Rankin, Shannon Ravenel, Louis D. Rubin, Anne Firor Scott, David Sedaris, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, Henry Taylor, Timothy Tyson, Charles Reagan Wilson, C. Vann Woodward, and many others, as well as the original letters of Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner. The quarterly occupies a unique position among publications about the South by targeting both an academic and an educated lay audience, and over the last decade Southern Cultures has expanded its circulation in large part due to its emphasis on reader-friendliness. According to the CELJ, “The rich array of photographs and graphics, and the sincere and effective attempt at readerly appeal, go well beyond what is attempted by most journals. This dimension of Southern Cultures is truly impressive.” The quarterly’s editorial philosophy and its online availability have made it a staple of classrooms worldwide and a favorite among students. Through the READ page at www. SouthernCultures.org, visitors can search the quarterly’s contents by subject area. As a result, online readership includes scholars and students of history, labor, sociology, politics, literature, photography and art, music, women and gender studies, economics, environment, oral history, religion, sports, African American studies, American Indian Studies, and many other subjects. All of Southern Cultures’s last decade of essays, interviews, and features are available through the website for classroom use, research, and more. Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 11 Southern cultures Photograph by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Library of Congress. The work of Walker Evans — along with that of William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Susan Harbage Page, Michael Carlebach, and others — appears in the Southern Cultures special summer issue on photography. Visit www.SouthernCultures.org. Subscribe to Southern Cultures today. visit www.SouthernCultures.org call 1-919-962-4201 email UNCPRESS_Journals@unc.edu Page 12 Center for the Study of the American South facts By the numbers… 4,500 1,000+ 150,000 22,000 35 65 3,500 100 plus 16 interviews in SOHP collection videos played on our video channel since November 2010 readers of Southern Cultures online visitors to the Center’s website in the past year public events and performances per year issues published by Southern Cultures since the first one in 1993 average number of attendees of our events annually countries that have accessed SOHP oral histories online Fellowships or grants made per year Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 13 staf Center for the Study of the American South Harry L. Watson, Director William R. Ferris, Senior Associate Director Sally Greene, Associate Director Lisa Beavers, Events and Communications Manager Dana Di Maio, Office Coordinator and Assistant to the Associate Director Emily Wallace, Assistant to the Senior Associate Director Robin Samuels, Business Manager Southern Cultures Harry L. Watson and Jocelyn R. Neal, Editors Dave Shaw, Executive Editor/CSAS Publications Director Ayse Erginer, Deputy Editor Michael Chitwood, Poetry Editor Aaron Smithers, Music Editor John Shelton Reed, Founding Editor Emeritus Southern Oral History Program Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Director, Southern Oral History Program David Cline, Associate Director Beth Millwood, Director of Outreach Seth Kotch, Coordinator of Oral History Digital Initiatives Support the Center We cannot do what we do without you. Please support our commitment to the university and the region with a donation today. Please see the enclosed envelope to send your donation, or visit www.uncsouth.org/content/support. the center for the study of the american south (919) 962-5665 (phone) | (919) 962-4433 (fax) | www.uncsouth.org http://www.facebook.com/UNCSouth Nonprofit Org US Postage PA I D Chapel Hill, NC Permit no. 177 410 East Franklin Street Campus Box 9127 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127 www.uncsouth.org To sign up for Sharing the South, our electronic e-newsletter, please go to www.uncsouth.org and click on the sign-up link, located on the left-hand side of our homepage. http://twitter.com/uncsouth on the cover: Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama. The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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Title | Center for the Study of the American South : newsletter |
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Full Text | Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 1 Summer 2011 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama Center for the Study of the American South Letter from the Director Summer’s arrival gives the Center for the Study of the American South a welcome opportunity to reach out and share the news of our busy year. The pace never slackens it seems, as the South, the Center, and the University all keep growing with a rapidly changing world. We’re embracing our new opportunities, and we thank all the many friends who are sharing them with us. We hope you’ll agree that the Center is booming. Audiences at our public programs keep growing. Southern Cultures has a steady base of subscribers, 150,000 print and online readers, and nearly 500,000 “hits” since going online. The Southern Oral History Program has won more major funding for its study of the Long Civil Rights Movement and is collecting interviews for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Center scholars continue winning prizes, and with Center support, Carolina students are taking southern studies in dozens of unexpected directions. Thanks to your help, the study of the American South has never been stronger. Inside the Center this year, we have welcomed a new External Advisory Board, headed by Raleigh attorney John S. Russell, and a new strategic plan we prepared at the Board’s suggestion. As the plan is implemented in the months and years ahead, we look forward to even more engagement with southern communities, broader partnerships for interdisciplinary research, and a wider global reach. Some of our biggest news has involved the Southern Oral History Program. In April 2011, Professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, acclaimed founder and director of the SOHP, capped a lifetime of achievement with election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious learned society. Almost simultaneously, however, she saddened us all by announcing her decision to enter phased retirement, stepping down as SOHP director, but remaining as its Senior Research Fellow. In addition, Dr. David Cline, Associate Director of the SOHP, also resigned for an opportunity to teach and create a public history program at Virginia Tech. Fortunately for all of us, Dr. Della Pollock of the Department of Communication Studies will generously serve as interim director of the SOHP. We warmly congratulate Jacquelyn and David for their new milestones, but now we face the challenge of finding their successors. Beside our good news, unfortunately, the realities of hard times and budget cuts still loom across the Center’s path. Carolina’s appropriations have seriously declined in the past two years and will drop by another 20 percent in fiscal 2011–12. Units like CSAS will probably see even greater cuts, as campus leaders rightly shelter classroom teach-ing first. The Center is already working with administrators to find every possible saving. The Center’s programs have always depended on the support of generous friends like you. As state funding recedes, we will rely even more on our friends and supporters to keep moving ahead. Gifts in every amount help to ensure that our support of southern research, education, and culture remains as strong as ever. — Harry L. Watson P.S.Make sure we have your email address as we go green and cut costs by switching from printed newsletters like this one to all-electronic communications! Contact us at csas@unc.edu. welcome Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 1 events CSAS Events and Lectures During the 2010–2011 academic year, the Center continued to bring noted scholars and artists to the attention of broad public audiences. Renowned photographer William Christenberry, former South Carolina congressman John Spratt, noted oral historian Alessandro Portelli, and John Maujewski, chair of the history department at UC Santa Barbara, are but a few of the speakers we have hosted in recent years. Page 2 Center for the Study of the American South events Hutchins Lectures Our Hutchins Lecture series, generously supported by the Hutchins Family Foundation, brings scholars in southern studies from around the county to our campus. This year, we were delighted to host many distinguished speakers, including Trudier Harris, recently retired from Carolina after a celebrated career of 29 years, who offered a provocative interpretation of James Baldwin’s complicated relationship with the South; and Tom Rankin, director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, who shared photographs from over 20 years of documenting the sacred landscapes and spiritual traditions of the Mississippi Delta. We are now taping our Hutchins lectures. If you missed any of our wonderful speakers this year, please visit our Vimeo channel at www.vimeo.com/uncsouth. Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 3 The Love House and Hutchins forum has provided a gracious backdrop for regular art exhibitions, including Donn Young’s haunting portraits of post-Katrina New Orleans, Jeff Whetstone’s large-scale images of modern cave graffiti, and Jimmy William’s evocative portraits of blues musicians. In spring 2011, Robert Stone’s photography exhibit of Sacred Steel musicians and Theresa Gloster’s imaginative paintings of rural African American life graced our gallery. events And we continued our popular Music on the Porch series at the Love House, featuring musical styles ranging from Hindustani-bluegrass fusion to acoustic rock to hip-hop. Our artists have included Catherine Edgerton of Midtown Dickens, Pierce Freelon, Mandolin Orange, Ryan Gustafson, and Phil Cook. Subtitled “Southern Music Shaken and Stirred,” the series offers an opportunity to reflect on both the rich history and continuing evolution of Southern music, while having a great time. Page 4 Center for the Study of the American South Scholarship and the Community Over the past year we hosted several special one-time events. “Hurricane Katrina Five Years Later” brought together various campus organizations, including the UNC School of Law, the Center for Hazards and Natural Disasters, the School of Government, and the Gillings School of Global Public Health, to reflect upon the personal and public policy impacts of the storm. We celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with a screening of the film at the Varsity Theatre on Franklin Street. The sold-out screening was followed by a discussion with writers Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Randall Kenan, Minrose Gwin, and Jaki Shelton Green, moderated by law professor Gene Nichol. Guests enjoyed the post-film reception at the Ackland Museum, featuring period southern cakes. We also honored the memory of civil rights leader Pauli Murray on the 100th anniversary of her birth with a panel discussion focusing on the denial of her application to attend Howard Odum’s program in applied social work in 1938–39 and the attendant issues of institutional discrimination. This event, conducted in collaboration with Duke’s Pauli Murray Project, the Southern Historical Collection, the Stone Center, the Women’s Center, and the School of Information and Library Science, was standing-room only. Our lunchtime seminar series, “Tell About the South,” continues to bring faculty, graduate students, and scholars together for discussions of original research about the South. Appearing together, for example, were Faith Holsaert, a veteran member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and co-editor of Hands On the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, and Professor Pat Parker of the Department of Communication Studies, who carries the work forward with the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community, an organization committed to empowering women and girls who live in Chapel Hill public housing. events Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 5 Awards For two years in a row, former CSAS Postdoctoral Fellows have won the prestigious Lillian Smith Book Award for their work at the Center. Established by the Southern Regional Council to recognize the finest new work on civil rights, social justice, and a changing South, the Lillian Smith Award for 2010 went to Amy Louise Wood for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (UNC Press, 2009). In 2011, Danielle L. McGuire won the same prize for her own path-breaking study, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Knopf, 2010). Most recently, SOHP staffer Jessie Wilkerson won the Gender & History Graduate Student Paper Prize for her paper “Where Movements Meet: Generations of Women’s Activism in the Appalachian South” at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in June 2011. SOHP Founder and director Jacquelyn Dowd Hall was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s most distinguished learned society, in the spring of 2011. A year earlier, CSAS Senior Associate Director William R. Ferris accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. In October, Center Director Harry Watson delivered his presidential address, “The Man With the Dirty Black Beard: Race, Class, and Herrenvolk Democracy in Antebellum Southern School Reform,” to the Historical Society of North Carolina Students and Fellows The Center’s summer research grants have been awarded to UNC doctoral students pursuing topics ranging from eighteenth-century Charraw Indians to the women leading the eugenics movement in early twentieth-century North Carolina to Confederate veteran remembrances. Jennifer Dixon’s grant enabled her to travel to Charleston, South Carolina, to perform archival and oral history research on black women involved in the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike. Vincent Joos’s grant helped him conduct research in the Moldovian region of Romania, looking at the American influence on the emancipation of Romany slaves in 1855; he interviewed community leaders, historians, and inhabitants of the region. We bade farewell to the outstanding post-doctoral fellows of 2010 –11, Tammy Ingram and Scott Matthews, and welcome our 2011–12 fellows LaKisha Michelle Simmons, and Anderson H. Blanton. During her fellowship, La Kisha will be working on her book, “Within the Double Bind: Black Girlhood and Sexuality in Jim Crow New Orleans, 1930–1954.” Anderson, an anthropologist specializing in the material conduits of prayer and faith healing within the charismatic Christian context in the American South, will be focusing on revisions to his manuscript, “Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: The Materialities of Faith and Divine Communication in Southern Appalachia.” events Page 6 Center for the Study of the American South The Long Civil Rights Movement: The Women’s Movement in Appalachia Historians at the Southern Oral History Program have spent years studying the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” SOHP Director Jacquelyn Hall’s conception of a civil rights movement that was deeper, longer, and more diverse than the story many of us learned about in high school. This concept introduces new ideas and actors into the civil rights story, has begun to change popular notions about the movement, which stretched back long before Rosa Parks and extends beyond the well-known travails and triumphs of the 1960s. The latest phase of our work has led us to seek out a group of civil rights pioneers who do not appear in many history textbooks: the women of eastern Tennessee. We wanted to know how civil rights activism worked in a rural environment; what inspired women to bond together across racial lines; and how these activists saw their mission in relation to the broader civil rights movement. Latest News • We won a $150,000 contract from the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress to conduct a series of interviews with Civil Rights Movement veterans that will become part of an exhibition in the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. • We will share a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue work with UNC Press and UNC Libraries on the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” Project. The grant includes money to digitize the remainder of the SOHP’s collection of audio cassettes, making the SOHP the only oral history program to offer its entire library online. • This summer, we begin work on “Breaking New Ground,” a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project documenting the history of black land ownership in the South. Southern oral history program Sociologist Helen Lewis is a long-time social justice activist. In this excerpt, Lewis responds to a question from SOHP Research Assistant Jessica Wilkerson about whether she saw herself as part of the women’s movement. “I’m a part of the ‘long women’s rights movement,’ I’d say. I wanted to live in the 1830s and to have been at Seneca Falls. I really sort of identified with all those early abolitionist women. I just felt like that is where I should have been, that’s who I was. But I was in the 1940s and 50s by then. So when the women’s movement began I just fell right in. The new women’s movement. So I think that I was one of those hanger-oners that kept something going, at least in myself, during a period when there wasn’t, as you would say, much of a movement.” Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 7 Southern oral history program Building a women’s movement in rural Tennessee was a real challenge. Activists faced the usual obstacles, such as entrenched customs and discriminatory laws, but in the rural South isolation played an even bigger role. Activists were simply so far away from one another that many of them labored alone, out of touch with other women in the struggle. Some remedied their isolation by moving to urban centers like Knoxville, but others, like Marie Cirillo, set out to build a network. A former Catholic nun, Marie Cirillo left the Church after 18 years in order to work directly with the people of Appalachia, primarily on environmental issues and rural development. She spoke with SOHP Associate Director David Cline about forming the Mountain Women’s Exchange collaborative in the late 1970s in order to connect grassroots women in Tennessee and Kentucky. “We had our first meeting down in Newcomb with seven nonprofit groups that were run by women in this immediate area. One was a childcare, one was a land trust, one was the Native American Association, three of them were basically used clothing and crafts kind of things. I’ll never forget that first meeting … These women were so excited to meet other women that were doing things that you could hardly hear yourself talk … So we ended up having meetings I think once every three months. We started in the morning and went through the afternoon and used the song ‘Bread and Roses’ as our theme. We decided that the morning was going to be the bread — the work — and then from lunch on would be the roses. After a couple of years we decided that the one thing we all wanted that we had tried and couldn’t do was a development education, so they decided they would form a nonprofit, and they called it Mountain Women’s Exchange, because we were learning through this exchange.” Page 8 Center for the Study of the American South Southern oral history program This summer, SOHP Associate Director David Cline traveled to Kenya, where he co-led a Burch Honors Seminar for exceptional Carolina undergraduates. With Della Pollock, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies here at UNC, and Peter Wasamba of the University of Nairobi Department of Literature, David used oral history to engage Carolina students in the challenges facing the rural poor of Kenya. After an intensive study of Kenyan culture and oral history methodology in Nairobi, the students recorded interviews in the Coast Province, where the incursion of large-scale mining and agriculture is threatening a long standing tradition of family farming and a distinctive Swahili culture. This seminar took place in an exhilarating space between the gathering of history and the use of history. By collecting oral testimonies and amplifying them with performances for and with community members, students experienced how oral histories provide unique insights to academics and policy makers, and created a platform for locals to express satisfaction, frustration, and new perspectives on specific policy outcomes. These oral records will provide researchers with much needed data about the efficacy of environmental and industrial policies, while documenting deep historical background on the people of one of Kenya’s most fascinating and culturally rich regions. UNC and the University of Nairobi will be sharing the completed materials. Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 9 Read The Photography issue online, order it in print, or download the eBook at www.SouthernCultures.org Southern cultures Milestone: Students and Scholars Acces Southern Cultures Online half a Million Times Worldwide Readership Soars for the Center’s Flagship Publication Soon this year, readers from hundreds of colleges and universities and over a hundred countries will open Southern Cultures for the 500,000th time, using Project Muse and other Internet archives. On the verge of closing in 1998, our award-winning journal now boasts thousands of loyal print and eBook subscribers and a booming online audience. Page 10 Center for the Study of the American South Southern cultures The Council of Editors of Learned Journals has called Southern Cultures “indispensable to a number of fields” and “a hallmark of what ambitious journals should be attempting in the 21st century.” The quarterly covers all aspects of the region’s mainstream and marginalized cultures through interviews, essays, articles, personal reminiscences, and surveys on contemporary trends. Southern Cultures has published numerous theme issues (which often include free CDs or DVDs) on such topics as southern biography, sports, politics, tobacco, food, Hurricane Katrina, the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans, and the Global South, as well as four editions entirely devoted to music. This year brings new theme issues on the South and the Irish, photography, memory, and music, and 2012 will include special issues devoted to food, politics, and music. In over sixty issues across seventeen volumes Southern Cultures has published an extensive array of award-winning scholars, authors, and icons. In addition to interviews with Walker Evans, Alex Haley, B.B. King, Pete Seeger, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, William Christenberry, and Robert Penn Warren, the quarterly has published writing from Doris Betts, David Cecelski, James C. Cobb, Peter Coclanis, Pat Conroy, Hal Crowther, Drew Gilpin Faust, William Ferris, Allan Gurganus, Sheldon Hackney, Trudier Harris, Fred Hobson, Doug Marlette, Melton McLaurin, Michael McFee, Robert Morgan, Michael O’Brien, Michael Parker, Tom Rankin, Shannon Ravenel, Louis D. Rubin, Anne Firor Scott, David Sedaris, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, Henry Taylor, Timothy Tyson, Charles Reagan Wilson, C. Vann Woodward, and many others, as well as the original letters of Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner. The quarterly occupies a unique position among publications about the South by targeting both an academic and an educated lay audience, and over the last decade Southern Cultures has expanded its circulation in large part due to its emphasis on reader-friendliness. According to the CELJ, “The rich array of photographs and graphics, and the sincere and effective attempt at readerly appeal, go well beyond what is attempted by most journals. This dimension of Southern Cultures is truly impressive.” The quarterly’s editorial philosophy and its online availability have made it a staple of classrooms worldwide and a favorite among students. Through the READ page at www. SouthernCultures.org, visitors can search the quarterly’s contents by subject area. As a result, online readership includes scholars and students of history, labor, sociology, politics, literature, photography and art, music, women and gender studies, economics, environment, oral history, religion, sports, African American studies, American Indian Studies, and many other subjects. All of Southern Cultures’s last decade of essays, interviews, and features are available through the website for classroom use, research, and more. Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 11 Southern cultures Photograph by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Library of Congress. The work of Walker Evans — along with that of William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Susan Harbage Page, Michael Carlebach, and others — appears in the Southern Cultures special summer issue on photography. Visit www.SouthernCultures.org. Subscribe to Southern Cultures today. visit www.SouthernCultures.org call 1-919-962-4201 email UNCPRESS_Journals@unc.edu Page 12 Center for the Study of the American South facts By the numbers… 4,500 1,000+ 150,000 22,000 35 65 3,500 100 plus 16 interviews in SOHP collection videos played on our video channel since November 2010 readers of Southern Cultures online visitors to the Center’s website in the past year public events and performances per year issues published by Southern Cultures since the first one in 1993 average number of attendees of our events annually countries that have accessed SOHP oral histories online Fellowships or grants made per year Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 13 staf Center for the Study of the American South Harry L. Watson, Director William R. Ferris, Senior Associate Director Sally Greene, Associate Director Lisa Beavers, Events and Communications Manager Dana Di Maio, Office Coordinator and Assistant to the Associate Director Emily Wallace, Assistant to the Senior Associate Director Robin Samuels, Business Manager Southern Cultures Harry L. Watson and Jocelyn R. Neal, Editors Dave Shaw, Executive Editor/CSAS Publications Director Ayse Erginer, Deputy Editor Michael Chitwood, Poetry Editor Aaron Smithers, Music Editor John Shelton Reed, Founding Editor Emeritus Southern Oral History Program Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Director, Southern Oral History Program David Cline, Associate Director Beth Millwood, Director of Outreach Seth Kotch, Coordinator of Oral History Digital Initiatives Support the Center We cannot do what we do without you. Please support our commitment to the university and the region with a donation today. Please see the enclosed envelope to send your donation, or visit www.uncsouth.org/content/support. the center for the study of the american south (919) 962-5665 (phone) | (919) 962-4433 (fax) | www.uncsouth.org http://www.facebook.com/UNCSouth Nonprofit Org US Postage PA I D Chapel Hill, NC Permit no. 177 410 East Franklin Street Campus Box 9127 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127 www.uncsouth.org To sign up for Sharing the South, our electronic e-newsletter, please go to www.uncsouth.org and click on the sign-up link, located on the left-hand side of our homepage. http://twitter.com/uncsouth on the cover: Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama. The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. |
OCLC number | 433520971 |