Listen to Jacquelyn Hall on "All Things Considered."

Read press coverage about Jacquelyn Hall and the other National Humanities Medal winners.

Read the News & Observer's profile of Jacquelyn Hall.




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SOHP Director Wins National Humanities Medal (1999)

Jacquelyn Hall Receives Medal from President Clinton
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, founder and director of the Southern Oral History Program, was one of eight 1999 recipients of the National Humanities Medal, awarded annually by the National Endowment for the Humanities to "individuals or groups whose work has deepened the understanding and broadened the public's engagement and access to important resources in the humanities." Hall received her award from President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at a ceremony on the stage of Constitution Hall on September 29, 1999. Her fellow honorees included Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion," PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer, playwright August Wilson, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, political philosopher John Rawls, librarian Patricia M. Battin, and writer Taylor Branch.

In his remarks about Hall and her work at the SOHP, President Clinton said, "Anyone who grew up in the South knows that no book can capture the color and vibrancy you hear in the everyday conversations on Main Street, in general stores, on the front porches and the back yards. So all of us, whether we are from the South or not, can say thank you, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, for capturing that unique and wonderful voice, for recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing, for making history."

In conjunction with the award, Hall served as a panelist at the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman's Forum for National Humanities Medallists, and was interviewed about the SOHP for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Stories on the medallists appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and a lengthy feature about Hall and the SOHP ran in the Raleigh News & Observer.

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The Southern Oral History Program
Center for the Study of the American South
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410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH
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