Featured Exhibit

Masters of Our Own Domain

Struggle, pragmatism, spirituality, and humor weave themselves into the stories of African American farmers and fishermen in the South. No one tells those stories better than the families who have lived the experience of these heritage industries.

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Digital Exhibits

UNC Food Workers Strikes of 1969

In 1969, UNC food workers participated in work strikes that showed the intersection of labor rights, women's rights, and African American rights. Check out the map to learn the history of the strike, and also listen to the audio documentary.

Southern Surfing

In the summers of 2017 and 2018 Dr. Steve Estes, chair of the History department at Sonoma State University, traveled nearly 2500 miles along the coast from Houston, Texas through Ocean City, Maryland in search of the stories of Southern surfers. Dr. Estes grew up surfing at Folly Beach, South Carolina in the 1980s and has since then surfed all over ...

Crest Street Community History Project

Durham's Anti-Expressway Organizing In 1959, a four-lane expressway was making its way through the heart of Durham, North Carolina. Riding on the coattails of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act and adopting city revitalization techniques pioneered by urban renewal leaders a decade earlier, the East-West Expressway, now known as Highway 147, triggered 30 years of business- and automobile-oriented redevelopment throughout Durham,  fragmenting the city and ...

Masters of Our Own Domain

The Simmons Family. Photo by Melody Hunter-Pillion. Struggle, pragmatism, spirituality, and humor weave themselves into the stories of African American farmers and fishermen in the South. No one tells those stories better than the families who have lived the experience ...

African American Credit Unions

In 2012 and 2013, the SOHP conducted a project on early African American credit unions in North Carolina. Community leaders established their own credit unions as an alternative means of saving and borrowing money during the Jim Crow era. The ...

The Legacy of William C. Friday

In the spring of 2012, the Southern Oral History Program celebrated the remarkable life and achievements of William C. Friday, President Emeritus of UNC, and the conclusion of our oral history project dedicated to documenting that life and legacy. The ...

Feminism and Conservative Women

From 2009 to 2014, the SOHP conducted over 150 interviews for the Long Women's Movement in the American South. In 2014 and 2015, field scholar Evan Faulkenbury contributed to the project by focusing on conservative women activists. Speaking with fourteen women in North ...

George Stoney: Carolina Roots

The late filmmaker George C. Stoney had strong, multifold, connections to the Southern Oral History Program's mission. These connections are place-based and practice-based. Not only did he attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), he wrote and ...