Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
A faithful NCM reader pointed out this digital project created by the North Carolina State Library:
Up & Out: Urban Development in North Carolina
The site “houses around 500 documents created throughout the 1960s that speak to future town planning and urban development of North Carolina counties, cities, neighborhoods, and lakes.” They will be adding more reports in the future, so after you look at it today be sure to keep checking it out for updates.
“In North Carolina, the crimes of murder, arson, burglary and rape are punishable by death. Fourteen-year-old Negro Ernest Brooks committed two of them. One night he broke into a Wilmington home, raped a woman eight months pregnant. Caught the next day, Negro Brooks confessed, was sentenced to death.
“Last week Governor R. Gregg Cherry commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Said he, in a statement rare for a Southern governor: ‘The crimes are revolting, but a part of the blame . . . arises from the neglect of the State and society to provide a better environment. . . . Our public schools, equipped with capable teachers . . . [and] an effective compulsory-attendance law, would do much to correct delinquency among all races.’ Rarer still, in all North Carolina there was no outcry.”
— From Time magazine, Jan. 7, 1946
Until recently I knew only about Charlotte’s Brooklyn neighborhood, not about Raleigh’s or Wilmington’s. Is this nomencluster anything more than coincidence? Does the name appear elsewhere in North Carolina? (If so, it avoided Michael Hill’s exhaustive expansion of the Gazetteer.)
The Brooklyn (New York) Public Library offers this entertaining look at its “Brooklyn (non New York)” files, but no mention is made of North Carolina neighborhoods.
None of these, of course, is North Carolina’s most famous Brooklyn.
Can anyone identify this famous North Carolinian? Here are two clues: the photo shown here is from the 1959 Pine Burr, the Campbell College yearbook, and the subject of the photo went on to write a book called Me and the Spitter: An Autobiographical Confession.
Learn the answer to this question (and much more!) on Digital North Carolina, the new blog of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. Visit often to find fun and interesting highlights from the collections available online at DigitalNC.org.
The UNC Photo Lab collection in the Photographic Archives includes over 3,000 pictures of Carolina Playmakers productions from 1946-1984, a rich visual history of Southern theater.
The UNC Photographic Laboratory collection spans over forty years of university history, and that includes a faithful photographic representation of many major productions of the Carolina Playmakers Repertory Company. The collection, housed in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, includes over 3,000 photos of Playmakers productions, from 1946 to 1984, offering a vivid glimpse of Southern theater history in the twentieth century.
Many of these photos are for publicity purposes, including posed character photos used for promotional posters or programs, stills of dramatic moments during a play, and important persons (such as visiting artists and speakers) and moments (cast and crew of a show about to go on tour). Many of these were used in the school yearbook, the Yackety Yack, and student publications as well as publicity materials. There are also a number of behind the scenes and candid photos, including shots of sets being built, playwrights at work, students being taught to apply stage makeup, rehearsals, cast awards and dinners, and displays of props, programs, and posters.
Southern plays and writers are well-represented, especially UNC students and alumni (Andy Griffith appears here, as well as a number of Broadway stars), while new nationally-recognized and prize-winning shows appear soon after their New York or London debuts. Popular mainstream spectacles and musicals are produced in the same season as cutting-edge, experimental dramas, and the names of student writers appear on posters next to Shakespeare, Miller, Shaw, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
In these photos, visible changes in culture and American theater can be traced. Clear changes in racial attitudes can be seen, from the use of blackface makeup in early photos to inter-racial casting increasingly common after the mid-1960s. Plays with greater numbers of female roles or with stronger focus on gender, racial, and cultural issues also become more common in later years. Equally clear is that the Playmakers have a strong and lengthy tradition of producing challenging plays – also included are a number of pictures of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, an allegory of McCarthy-ism and communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s, which was produced in 1954 – just one year after its Broadway premier and still very much in the midst of the politically charged atmosphere that inspired it.
What is most apparent in this group of photographs is how much is here for any scholar or student of the theater as well as any fan of the stage.
— NPR discovers the struggle over how to pronounce Lejeune.
— Cache of Outer Banks photos, circa 1900, includes rare shot of Kitty Hawk weather bureau.
— Downtown Wilmington landmark is on the move.
— Score one for preservation: New role planned for outmoded but still handsome Yadkin River bridge, opened in 1924.
— Should a 150-year-old Stokes County country store be allowed to continue its sandwich-making without complying with health department rules? (And if North Carolina had a state cheese, would it be pimiento?)
I just got back from a vacation, but I’m ready to head back to the beach and take part in this:
Climbing the Cape Lookout Lighthouse
I’ve been to this lighthouse several times before, but never inside of it. If you go (or have already been), please let us know about it.
This month, Documenting the American South highlights the historical development of railroads in North Carolina, beginning with several key events in 1828.
Check it out at: Railroads in North Carolina
“During a rain delay in a [1997] game against the Phillies, a security guard approached me on the bench. ‘There is someone here to see you,’ he said….
“I took one step toward the locker room, and there was Michael Jordan. Yes, that Michael Jordan.
“Three years earlier, during the one season Jordan played professional baseball, he played for the Birmingham Barons and I played for the Orlando Cubs, both in the Double-A Southern League. As opponents we came to know each other. My mother’s family hailed from [Rocky Mount] North Carolina, so we had plenty to talk about….
“Michael had been in a skybox at Wrigley until the rain delay. Remarkably, he said he had been following my career…. Then he said I should call him to link up.
“When I returned to the dugout, you could hear a pin drop. Glanville knows Jordan? How can that be? He just got to the big leagues.
“A few days later, [Cubs star Sammy Sosa] approached me in the locker room. This time he didn’t ask me to fetch him a cup of water. Instead he asked if I’d like him to bring me to the ballpark in his luxury SUV [and] to hang out with him from time to time.
“Sammy began to ask me all the time for his fellow superstar’s phone number…. I never gave it to him.
“Maybe if he’d brought me some water.”
— From “The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View” by Doug Glanville (2010)
— North Carolina’s infamously swiped copy of the Declaration of Independence, which rated a chapter in “Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures,” graduates to a whole book in “Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic.” (Coming soon, a major motion picture?)
— UNC Chapel Hill historian Marcie Cohen Ferris and Durham author Eli Evans are among those weighing in on the question “Did Harper Lee Whitewash The Jewish Past?”
— Death noted: Alton Stapleford, creator of Kinston’s CSS Neuse II.
— Controversy over a dormitory at the University of Texas at Austin named for a Klansman recalls a similar issue at Chapel Hill.
— Can’t pass up a chance to mention Frying Pan Shoals, especially when the link includes such comments as “An offshore light that resembles a drill rig is not a prime sale item” and “One of the nice things about living in America is that an average guy like me can take on a half-crazy project like this.”