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Sharing the South
News from the Center for the Study of the American South
Summer 2010

The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination, and the homeland for an array of Americans who consider themselves southerners. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends.  -- Bill Ferris

In This Issue
Summer Grant Awards
Director's Update
2010-11 Southern Studies Fellows
Southern Oral History Program
Southern Cultures
2010 Summer Research Grant Awards

O. Jennifer Dixons project focuses on black female hospital workers involved in the 1969 Charleston hospital workers strike. This summer she will be in Charleston, South Carolina, conducting both archival research at local repositories and oral interviews with members of the community who were directly and indirectly associated with the strike.

Bradley Proctor will spend his summer researching his dissertation project on the Ku Klux Klan in North and South Carolina during Reconstruction. Bradley will spend much of his time in the county court records in Raleigh, but will also spend the early weeks of August in Columbia, South Carolina. The archives in Columbia hold South Carolina county court records as well as the minutes from a major federal trial involving Klansmen. He will also research the manuscript collection at the South Caroliniana Library, which holds numerous journals and correspondences by both Klan members and sympathizers.

Heather Branstetter will be working on her dissertation about the persuasive strategies of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, a radical lesbian-feminist organization active from 1972-1994, based in Atlanta, Georgia, which worked for women's liberation and gay civil rights. The ALFA's goals were to provide educational outreach, social networks, and political reforms. Heather will travel to Atlanta to explore the neighborhood where they founded their organization, and will also be working on chapters about their media strategies and their newsletter's content and audience.

Vincent Joos will be in the Moldovian region of Romania looking at the American influence on the emancipation of Romany slaves in 1855. He will conduct interviews with community leaders, historians, and inhabitants of the region.

Erin Stevens will be traveling to Parchman Place, a 15th-century archaeological site located near present-day Clarksdale, Mississippi.  Utilizing geophysical survey techniques and targeted excavations of domestic refuse, she will examine similarities and differences among three residential neighborhoods at the site.  Her research will focus particularly on defining chronological relationships among residential areas, understanding the organization of community space within and between neighborhoods, and exploring the ways people used food and food-related activities to express particular social identities.

Anna Krome-Lukens will be traveling to Sleepy Hollow, New York, for research at the Rockefeller Archive Center. The Center has records pertaining to the Rockefeller Foundation's public health and social science projects in North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s, including correspondence and project records.  This research is part of her dissertation project, which explores the ways in which white middle-class women in early-twentieth-century North Carolina drew on eugenics ideology as part of broad social reform efforts.

Mary Beth Fitts is organizing an archaeological survey of Charraw Town, the physical remains of a village inhabited by members of the Catawba Indian Nation during the mid- eighteenth century. The Charraw Town site is located near Fort Mill, South Carolina and was discovered using a map of Catawba settlements drawn during the Seven Years War (1756-1763). A preliminary visit has resulted in the recovery of a lead ball, standard ammunition for that time period.


Kate McFarland is traveling the country this summer to attend LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) Pride parades and interview marchers and spectators. Her travels will take her to Salt Lake City, New York City, San Diego, Burlington (VT), Fargo (ND) and finally, Atlanta. Her interviews in Atlanta will look specifically at how participants create and manage identities as both southern and gay-identities that are often seen as conflicting at this annual event.
 
Will Boone will be working with musicians in large, predominantly African American churches in Houston, Texas, researching how religious music plays a role in the performance of middle-class black identity in the urban south, and the ways in which music and spiritual experience intertwine in mass-mediated environments. The title of his paper is, "Sing Unto Him A New Song: Contemporary African American Praise and Worship in the Urban South."
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 Greetings!

Welcome to summer! Grab a glass of lemonade and find out what we have been up to here at the Center and what we have planned.

Congratulations to Dr. Bill Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and our senior associate director here at the Center. He was recently chosen to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. The Vicksburg Post wrote a wonderful piece about Bill and the award.
Director's Update

When summer comes to Chapel Hill, visible activities at the University change their pace, as most students leave town and faculty scatter to their research projects.

Here at the Center for the Study of the American South, the "study" part of our work intensifies. Student researchers are using Center grants to pursue multiple topics, from eighteenth-century Charraw Indians to gay pride in Atlanta to Confederate veterans. We
bid farewell to the outstanding fellows of 2009-10 Zoe Trodd and Blake Gilpin, and welcome new postdoctoral fellows, Tammy Ingram and Scott Matthews. And with CSAS support, faculty members in the new UNC Southern Studies program are planning courses for Carolina undergraduates.

We're especially pleased that the Southern Oral History Program continues its work in the "Long Civil Rights Movement Project." While maintaining a very lively interview schedule in diverse locales, SOHP and their partners have now launched the Voice website which facilitates scholarly discussion around book and online content related to the Long Civil Rights Movement. 

The Center now has an exciting program of speakers and exhibits lined up for the fall. You'll be getting announcements as the time draws near, and we look forward to seeing you at the Love House and Hutchins Forum once again.

Harry Watson
Director and Professor of History

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2010-11 Southern Studies Post-Doctoral Fellowship Awards

The Center's was pleased to award the 2010-11 Southern Studies Post-Doctoral Fellowships to
Tammy Ingram and Scott Matthews. 

tammy ingramTammy Ingram received her Ph.D. from Yale University. She has
spent the past three years as the James T. and Ella Rather Kirk Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Agnes Scott College. She recently accepted a tenure track position at the College of Charleston. Her book manuscript, under contract with UNC Press, is tentatively titled Dixie Highway: Road Building, State Building, and the Origins of Modern Conservatism. It explores the political and economic motives behind the nation's first interstate highway system, a 5000-mile network of dirt roads between Chicago and Miami, as well as the consequences of vastly expanding the power of the state in order to create new economic opportunities for small farmers and big business alike. As part of her fellowship year, she will complete her manuscript.

Scott Matthews worked last year as a lecturer in the history department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. His dissertation examined how twentieth-century documentarians, photographers, filmmakers, sound recorders, social scientists, and nonfiction writers used modern representational strategies to overturn old regional myths about the South while creating new, enduring ones in the process. During his time as a fellow, Scott looks forward to revising his manuscript, teaching a class on the history of documentary expression in the South, and collaborating with the CSAS community.
SOHP Mic Logo
SOHP was honored to attend the 50th anniversary of the StudentSNCC logoNonviolent Coordinating Committee, the hugely influential activist organization that used brains and bravery to empower black communities in the South. SNCC (pronounced "snick") was founded at Shaw University in 1960 and when former members gathered there again in April, the SOHP documented the event. We interviewed sixteen SNCC veterans, who recalled their work in such places as Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Washington, D.C. One particular highlight was a long interview with Martin Luther King biographer Taylor Branch about his own experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. Our friend Sue Thrasher wrote a beautiful piece on the reunion that's really worth reading.
 
In May,SOHP Acting Director David Cline led an oral history team into the field to talk to women in Tennessee about grassroots activism. In their first of two rounds of interviews in Appalachia, David and SOHP researchers Jennifer Donnally and Jessica Wilkerson spoke with twenty-five women and men in and around Knoxville. They interviewed participants about women's involvement in electoral politics; the development of consciousness-raising groups; the creation of rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters, and other programs; the involvement of churches in social causes; the relation of women's movement activism to economic, racial justice, and environmental justice, and more. The team will head back for more stories in August.
 
Speaking of research, the oral histories conducted as part of our "Listening for a Change" project, were featured in Robert Korstad and James Leloudis's new book, To Right These Wrongs, which was released by UNC Press in April.To Right These Wrongs tells the story of the North Carolina Fund, a pioneering anti-poverty organization that fought the good fight before the War on Poverty began. Bob and Jim are also working on "Poverty in North Carolina: The Moral Challenges of Poverty and Inequality," a project that's part education and part activism. Interviews with North Carolina Fund volunteers and others, along with videos from the documentary, Change Comes Knocking, donated to the SOHP by Video Dialog, Inc., will be available to researchers in the next few months.
 
Our work on the Long Civil Rights Movement publishing project continues. Our partner, UNC Press, unveiled "Voice" an online space to read and comment on scholarly books, articles, and other materials. Our goal is to test the capacity of this kind of collection to become a window to a growing body of knowledge. We are also interested to see whether participants might form communities around books, enrich these books by providing contextual information and links to other resources, and in short, make academic scholarship more compelling. Right now, there are more than thirty books available and fully searchable. Take a look at the project here.
 
In April, Digital Coordinator Seth Kotch appeared again on WUNC's The State of Things in connection with the SNCC reunion, this time joining Duke historian William R. Chafe to chat about SNCC and play audio from SOHP's interviews with SNCC's dynamic founder, Ella Baker, and its communications director, Julian Bond. Listen to the show here.
Southern Cultures

Southern Lives Small CoverHot off the press is the Southern Cultures Summer 2010 issue, "Southern Lives." This issue has a wonderful collection of stories that showcase the people of the South, including: 

  • Billy Carter dresses for all occasions
  • Virginia Foster Durr opens her home to recently released Civil Rights prisoners
  • Michael McFee tours the Billy Graham Library
  • A Southerner serving in Iraq pens a spectacular poem
This fall brings the highly anticipated Southern Cultures Special Roots Music issue. In partnership with the North Carolina Humanities Council's "New Harmonies" Music Tour, it features:
  • B.B. King on Bukka White's legacy
  • The Top Ten Folk Singers of All Time
  • Bob Dylan backstage in '63 and other rare photographic gems
  • Swamp bluesman Jimmy Anderson's first published interview in the U.S.
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd vs. the Allman Brothers
  • Pete, Peggy, & Mike and all the rest that Charles Seeger gave to music
  • And a sneak peek at NASHVILLE CHROME, the sizzling new novel from Rick Bass.  
The Roots Music Issue also comes with a classic FREE CD full of great roots musicians, including BUKKA WHITE, ETTA BAKER, THE BYRDS' ROGER MCGUINN, WILLIE LOWERY, IDYLL SWORDS, ALABAMA SLIM & LITTLE FREDDIE KING, JIMMY ANDERSON & THE MOJO BLUES BAND, MICHAEL HURLEY, FILTHYBIRD, MEGAFAUN, PRESTON FULP, JOE BROWN, AND MORE OF THE SOUTH'S BEST. Read more at www.southerncultures.org