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SOHP Home > NewsRipple Effects: SOHP Efforts Foster Research, Scholarship (2003)A steady stream of books, articles, and research projects confirms the SOHP’s “ripple effect” on historical scholarship and inquiry. Scholars travel to the UNC campus to conduct research in the Southern Oral History Program Collection; student interns use the collection and seek our support while completing independent research projects; community groups launch oral history projects after consulting with our staff or attending our workshops; and members of the SOHP diaspora continue to shape the field.• Scholars and journalists who have drawn upon the Southern Oral History Program Collection in recent years include Howard Covington and Marion Ellis, eds., The North Carolina Century: Tar Heels Who Made a Difference, 1900-2000 (Charlotte: Levine Museum of the New South, 2002; distributed by UNC Press); and Nancy MacLean, “Redesigning Dixie with Affirmative Action: Race, Gender and the Integration of the Southern Textile Mill World,” in Gender and the Southern Body Politic, ed. Nancy Bercaw (Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2000). Additionally, Raleigh News & Observer reporter Rob Christensen drew upon the SOHP Collection for a recent series on North Carolina political history and is now adapting that material for a new book. • UNC Professor of Law Walter Bennett’s The Lawyer's Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), “an eloquent, compelling and compassionate call to action for the legal profession to live up to its highest ideals,” showcases oral history interviews conducted with members of the North Carolina bar. The SOHP collaborated with Bennett on the design and execution of the oral history research and helped to train law school student interviewers. The resulting interviews and transcripts are a part of the SOHP Collection. • David Cecelski has been reappointed as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair in Documentary and American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University for fall 2003. He will offer an oral history seminar on the North Carolina freedom struggle. His current book project, a study of coastal North Carolina’s homefront experience during World War II, draws on more than one hundred oral history interviews completed by the SOHP in the mid-1990s. Cecelski’s monthly Raleigh News & Observer oral history feature, “Listening to History,” which grew out of the SOHP’s Listening for a Change initiative, is now in its sixth year. • SOHP alumna and independent historian Pamela Grundy has won a bevy of recent prizes. Her Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in Twentieth-Century North Carolina (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001) earned the 2002 Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association for best book by an historian outside or academia and the 2001 North American Society for Sport History Book Award. “From Amazons to Glamazons: The Rise and Fall of North Carolina Women's Basketball, 1920-1960,” Journal of American History 87 (June 2000), won annual article prizes from both the Oral History Association and the History of Education Society. Grundy, who directed the “Race and Desegregation: West Charlotte High School” component of the SOHP’s Listening for a Change initiative, is presently writing a book about women’s basketball. • Lu Ann Jones, professor of history at East Carolina University and co-author with Jacquelyn Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, and Christopher Daly of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, has just published Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002). Building on evocative oral accounts, Jones helps us understand her subjects not as oppressed, isolated individuals but as consumers, producers, and agents of economic and social change. Jones was interviewed by NPR Weekend Edition’s Karla Davis on Sept. 15, 2002, and was featured on WUNC’s public affairs program, “The State of Things.” Drawing on oral histories, Jones has also recently published scholarly and popular articles in John Egerton, ed., Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002); Southern Cultures (Fall 2002); and Carolina Country (Sept. 2002). Jones and fellow SOHP alumna Kathryn Nasstrom are program committee co-chairs for the Oral History Association 2004 Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. • Robert Korstad, associate professor of public policy and history at Duke University and co-author of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, recently published Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003). Korstad’s account of a radical working-class challenge to political and industrial power in the 1940s has been hailed as a “breathtaking account of how black tobacco workers joined forces with the organized left to create an amazingly resilient labor movement in one of the most powerful companies in the South.” In June 2003, Civil Rights Unionism was celebrated at a series of public events in Winston-Salem. • Cliff Kuhn, past president of the Oral History Association, associate professor of history at Georgia State University and former assistant director of the SOHP, published Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Altanta's Fulton Mills (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001), a deeply researched account of a bold but ultimately failed effort to organize industrial workers in the New South. • Natalie Fousekis, who is now teaching U.S. history at California State University at Fullerton, and sister UNC-Chapel Hill alumna Cora Granata were recently appointed co-associate directors of CSUF’s Center for Oral and Public History. • SOHP alumna Kathy Newfont, assistant professor of history at Mars Hill College, is collaborating with the American Chestnut Foundation on a study of the loss of the American chestnut to imported blight in the century’s early decades, a critical event in North American ecological history. Newfont’s spring 2002 oral history course involved students in this effort, and together they presented research findings at the Appalachian Studies annual meeting. • UNC folklore MA Bryson Strauss followed an SOHP lead to a summer 2002 Oral History Internship at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, where he developed the institution’s oral history database, revised their archival and accession practices, and interviewed numerous country music performers. Now assistant curator at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, Strauss has been charged with creating a new oral history program for the Museum. • Sayoko Uesugi, who earned her master’s degree under Jacquelyn Hall, won the 2000 Robert D. Connor Award for the best article in the North Carolina Historical Review. Uesugi’s “Gender, Race, and the Cold War: Mary Price and the Progressive Party in North Carolina, 1945-1948,” which appeared in the July 2000 issue, drew on interviews with Price family members in the SOHP Collection. • “Sonic History: The Making of Lost and Found Sound,” an engaging online feature by the Journal for MultiMedia History (www.albany.edu/jmmh), explores the work of Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, a.k.a. “The Kitchen Sisters,” who co-produce the popular Lost and Found Sound series for National Public Radio. The site includes full audio from the talk Nelson and Silva delivered at the 2000 Oral History Association annual meeting in Durham. SOHP director Jacquelyn Hall served as an advisor to Lost and Found Sound. • Chris Myers, history doctoral student at UNC, founded the Sunflower County Freedom Project (SCFP) in 1999. Begun as a summer program modeled on the “freedom schools” of the civil rights era, SCFP has grown into a year-round program that provides challenging courses and college preparatory work otherwise unavailable to students in the impoverished public schools of the rural Delta. During the summers, SCDP offers these students a program of courses ranging from oral history to computer science at the University of Mississippi. Advanced students are eligible for summer internships and housing in Washington, DC. For more, visit www.sunflowerfreedom.org. • Novelist Pamela Duncan published Plant Life (Delacorte Press, 2003). Acting on a tip from writer Lee Smith, Duncan drew on interviews with textile mill workers in the SOHP Collection, as well as on Jacquelyn Hall, et al.’s Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (reissued 2000 by UNC Press) for inspiration while crafting this fictional tale of three generations of women workers in a North Carolina cotton mill. • Talented young scholars continually seek out the SOHP for oral history training. In recent months we have worked closely with four interns. North Carolina State University graduate student Ray Christian, recent UNC graduate Christopher McGinnis, and Yale undergraduate Andy Horowitz, completed oral history research projects focusing, respectively, on the African-American “Triple Nickel” paratroop company from World War II, the history of the Triangle’s gay community, and local activist Al McSurely. McGinnis drew on his work for a lead feature, “The Civil Righteousness of Quinton Baker,” in the Feb. 1, 2003 (Charlotte, NC) Q-Notes. Horowitz is currently seeking funding to launch a community oral history program in New Haven, CT. As a 2002 summer intern, UC-Berkeley undergraduate Claire Snell-Rood completed several interviews for our “Women’s Leadership” series. We also worked closely with four undergraduate honors students: Barbara Copeland completed an oral history of African-American women in the Mormon Church while earning honors in Religious Studies; Eric Johnson earned highest honors for an oral history project supervised by Jim Leloudis; Jasmine McGhee wrote a history honors thesis under Jacquelyn Hall on African American migrants to Durham, NC, for which McGhee drew on interviews with family members and additional interviews in the SOHP Collection; and, under David Griffith’s direction, Derek Vanderpool completed a summer undergraduate research fellowship during which he used oral history to document Communist resistance in the Dordogne. |
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 The Southern Oral History Program Center for the Study of the American South Love House and Hutchins Forum 410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127 (919) 962-0455 info@sohp.org | |||||||||
