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Hall, Glass in Key National Leadership Posts (2003)

In 1975, as the two year-old Southern Oral History Program began to gain momentum, founding director Jacquelyn Hall named Brent D. Glass, then completing his doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill, as the Program's first assistant director. Working together, Hall and Glass launched the SOHP's first major research initiative, a study of the South's industrial revolution. A gifted fieldworker and administrator, Glass contributed eighteen oral history interviews to the "Piedmont Industrialization" series, as well as a number of other key interviews, including one with former Gov. Terry Sanford. The Hall-Glass partnership set the course for the SOHP across ensuing decades. Now, nearly thirty years later, Hall and Glass have each assumed national leadership positions.

In April 2003, Jacquelyn Hall was installed as president of the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional organization devoted to the study of American history and publisher of the Journal of American History. During 2002-2003, Hall similarly served the Southern Historical Association as president; her outgoing SHA presidential address, "Women Writers, 'The Southern Front,' and the Radical Imagination," placed women and the South at the heart of Depression-era culture and called for a decompartmentalization of both Southern and American history [Journal of Southern History 69 (Feb. 2003): 3-38]. During 2000-2001, she was founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association. Well established after just three years,


SOHP director Jacquelyn Hall, now the president of the Organization of American History

 


Dr. Brent D. Glass, director of the National Museum of American History.
LAWCHA sponsors panels and programs, offers grants and graduate student prizes, and fosters cooperation between historians and labor organizations.

All members of the extended SOHP family, and indeed all friends of the humanities, have cause to celebrate Brent D. Glass's October 2002 appointment as director of the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, where he will shape the future of the nation's premier museum of history and the stories it presents to more than five million visitors each year. Given the museum's impact on how Americans understand their history, it is understandable that some now refer to Glass as "the nation's historian." Glass comes to the National Museum of American History with impeccable credentials as an advocate for public humanities programming. While earning his Ph.D. in history at UNC-Chapel Hill, Glass served not only as assistant director of the SOHP but also as deputy state historical preservation officer in the state Division of Archives and History, and then as director of the North Carolina Humanities Council. From 1987 to 2002, he directed the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.








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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