Month: January 2010

When Elizabeth met Eustace

The first of Elizabeth Gilbert’s nonfiction books — before the enormously popular memoirs “Eat, Pray, Love” and now “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage” — was “The Last American Man,” a 2002 bio of Eustace Conway, who lives neck-deep in nature on a 1,000-acre preserve near Boone.

“The Last American  Man” may lag her later work in sales, but Gilbert won’t easily top this for a visceral opening line: “By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree.”

NC Collection Online Resources: Index to Helms versus Gantt Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Over the next year or so, we are going to point out some of our online resources (guides, indices, etc.) that were created way back when, but maybe you haven’t seen them before or used them in a while. Let us know if you have questions!

2010 is the 20th anniversary of the epic Jesse Helms vs. Harvey Gantt senatorial race in North Carolina, so let’s start with the following:

Index to Helms versus Gantt Newspaper and Magazine Articles

This index is a listing arranged by volume and date of newspaper and magazine articles relating to the 1990 North Carolina Senate race between Jesse Helms and Harvey Gantt.

The call number for bound volumes in the North Carolina Collection is CB H481j2. Xerographic copies of clippings can be purchased; font sizes for these paper copies are small, however, because of significant image reduction.

Click here for more information.

Visualizing NC’s Literary Landscape

UNC Greensboro and the North Carolina Center for the Book have collaborated to develop their new Web-based tool, A Literary Map of North Carolina.  You can use the map to browse by geographic location, author, or genre.

literarymap

The comprehensive project includes works (fiction, biographies, histories, poetry, plays, and children’s literature) written about North Carolina, works set in North Carolina, and works by authors who were born in North Carolina, who live or have lived in North Carolina, or who have written about North Carolina.

…  And don’t forget to visit NCM’s sister blog, Read North Carolina Novels!

Smith Bagley, Tar Heel in absentia

Bagley_1

Death noted: Smith Bagley, Reynolds tobacco heir and Democratic Party fundraiser, at age 74 in Bethesda, Md., after a stroke. Though born in Manhattan, reared in Greenwich, Conn., and educated at Washington & Lee, Bagley considered himself sufficiently rooted in North Carolina to run for Congress in the Fifth District in both 1966 and 1968.

Bagley_2

Pictured: Pinback buttons from the collection for Bagley’s campaigns. Does anybody know which years they represent?

Check out what’s new to the North Carolina Collection.

Several new titles just added to “What’s New in the North Carolina Collection?” To see the full list simply click on the link in this entry or click on the “What’s New in the North Carolina Collection?” link under the heading “Pages” in the right column. As always, full citations for all the new titles can be found in the University Library Catalog and they are all available for use in the North Carolina Collection Reading Room.

The Bowfin

One of my favorite exhibits at the North Carolina Zoo features freshwater fish found in our state. Why do I like that exhibit? It’s because it includes one of the more unusual of our native fishes…the bowfin.

bowfin

After my last visit to the Zoo, I came back to the NCC to see what we had on the bowfin and this is what I found in the catalog:

Food habits of bowfin in the Black and Lumber rivers, North Carolina : final report / Keith W. Ashley, Robert T. Rachels. C48 109: F68

The bowfin : an old-fashioned fish with a new-found use. Cp378 UMc68.3 [Image of bowfin above comes from this pamphlet.]

Haven’t heard of the bowfin? Then take a look at the Wikipedia entry on the fish at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowfin

Oral Roberts — Back in North Carolina

We recently added a blog entry concerning Oral Robert’s first job as a preacher: Oral Roberts In Fuquay Springs, North Carolina. The entry is just text since I could not find an image to go along with the posting.

However, the NC Collection continues to amaze me! As our photographic archivist was looking through some postcards today, I noticed the following image:

oral

I can’t tell if the image was made in North Carolina (I suspect it was not), but the message on the back is:

“Greetings from the Greensboro N.C. meeting. The services are very good.” [April 15?, 1961?]

The postcard comes from the Durwood Barbour Postcard Collection, and will be added to the North Carolina Postcards website in the near future.

What money couldn’t buy Louis Armstrong

“The [road] manager and I were the only two white guys in the organization, and here’s Louis with five or 10 grand in his pocket, his wife with a $20,000 mink coat, and [in the 1950s] they both had to sleep in a gymnasium in North Carolina because they couldn’t find any accommodations. That was a killer. It takes the heart out of a man.

“I used to ask Joe Glaser [Armstrong’s manager] why he booked us down South. He never answered, but I knew the answer: He wanted the money, and Louis Armstrong never complained.”

–Drummer Barrett Deems of the All Stars band, as quoted in “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” by Terry Teachout (2009)