North Carolina Miscellany

There are a lot of curiosities in the old newspapers we’re digitizing, but rarely do I come across any complete mysteries like this ad, which I found in the Fayetteville Observer from January 8, 1863. Do any of you know anything about Blue Mass?

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Does this sound familiar? The most odious feature in this system is that it robs the MANY, imperceptibly, to enrich the FEW;–It clothes a few wealthy individuals with power not only to control the wages of the laboring man, but also at their pleasure to inflate or depress the commerce and business of the whole […]

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Many of the issues of the Southern Pines Pilot from the mid-1930s include a cartoon by Murray Jones, Jr. called “Caro-Graphics,” featuring odd and interesting facts and legends from North Carolina history. Here’s an example, from the October 15, 1937 paper: I thought I’d see if any Miscellany readers knew any more about these. I […]

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We’ve just added two early Charlotte newspapers to the North Carolina Newspapers digital collection. The Catawba Journal (1824-1828) and the Miners’ and Farmers’ Journal (1830-1835) document life in a town that was very different from today’s thriving metropolis. The Catawba Journal covered news of national and local importance, and printed some of the early discussions […]

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Over 200 city directories from 34 different cities and towns are now available to search and browse on DigitalNC: http://digitalnc.org/collections/north-carolina-city-directories. Most of the directories in the digital collection are from the North Carolina Collection, with a few contributed by the Durham County Library and the Forsyth County Public Library. We are planning to add more […]

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I was testing out the keyword search function of the ever-growing North Carolina Newspapers collection by searching for Thomas Wolfe and found this amusing piece from the Southern Pines, N.C., paper The Pilot from February 5, 1937: When the author of “Of Time and the River” and other famed best sellers, Thomas Wolfe, was in […]

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Early issues of Black Ink, the newspaper of the Black Student Movement at UNC-Chapel Hill, are now available online through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. Dating back to 1969, Black Ink documents the experience of and issues related to African American students at UNC. The paper provides especially good coverage of student protest movements […]

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