HUAC Investigates North Carolina: How Federal Documents Can Help Uncover State and Local History (original) (raw)
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Provenance Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists, 2014
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Liberty and Freedom: North Carolina's Tour of the Bill of Rights
I n western North Carolina, communities hundreds of years old are now under assault. Population growth exceeds the carrying capacity of the land and triggers permanent environmental degradation, while the influx of newcomers swamps local traditions, values, and adaptations to the surrounding ecosystems. Sound bad? It is, but End of Eden offers hope and illustrates a way to communicate effectively about the very real dangers that threaten the communities, human and natural, of the mountains of North Carolina. A poet and environmentalist, Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of twenty books, including Johnson illustrates the beauty and biodiversity of western North Carolina. The first of the book's three sections presents broader perspectives on the ecosystems, history, and cultures of the mountains. The second, a collection of articles and editorials, focuses on local issues and political responses. Crowe concludes with columns from the Smoky Mountain News that capture the vibrancy and promise of the Jackson County Farmer's Market. The farmers market is one traditional organization that is getting much attention now as a sustainable solution to current economic and environmental problems.
Politics of the personal in the old north state: Griffith Rutherford in Revolutionary North Carolina
I would like to thank my committee for their support and suggestions during the writing of my dissertation. As a student, I had the good fortune of taking seminars with each member beginning with my first graduate class at LSU. Mark Thompson became director late in the course of the project and generously agreed to chair the committee during the last semester. Dr. Thompson provided sage advice and helped keep me on task with chapter submissions. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Diane Mac Donald and the late John Mac Donald. During my childhood, our family vacation destinations read like a roll call of famous historical places in the northeast. From the Freedom Trail in Boston to Colonial Williamsburg, our summer adventures aboard the station wagon encouraged my curiosity. Somewhere in between my car ride lectures about the Yorktown campaign and scene setting talks on Cemetery Ridge, they must have realized they created a monster. My wife Anna Tapia endured long months of rarely seeing her husband emerge from his cabinet with the exception of taking meals. Her perceptive inquiries about Rutherford's life helped me clarify points throughout the dissertation. Anna's steadfast patience and sense of humor helps create an oasis of sanity in our home.
The archive lies at the center of our work as historians. We spend months and years in its reading rooms, looking for elusive facts, arcane documents, and obscure stories. The archive defines and differentiates us from fellow humanists, gives credence to our claims for knowledge, and enshrouds our narratives with an aura of truth. Both real and ro-manticized, it is our place of labor and also an emblem of our craft. Yet how often do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the archives we work in? When have we last probed our source material, attempted to investigate the circumstances that brought it into our possession, or examined the structures underlying the collections we use? While influential books such as Bonnie Smith's The Gender of History and W. Fitzhugh Brundage's The Southern Past have investigated the meaning of archival work in particular contexts, historians of the United States tend to look through archives, but rarely at them. 1 This lacuna is particularly glaring considering the predominance of the " archival turn " in other fields of the humanities. Since the 1970s, scholars in a range of disciplines have grown acutely aware of the archive's artificial and constructed nature and of the myriad ways it is shaped by social, political, and cultural forces. As the archival theorists Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook note, " archives have their origins in the information needs and social values of the rulers, governments, businesses, and individuals who establish and maintain them. Archives then are not some pristine storehouse of historical documentation that has piled up, but a reflection of and often justification for the society that creates them. " Moreover, scholarship on archives has also stressed the dialectical relationship between the archive's reflective and constitutive elements. Francis X. Blouin and Charles Rosenberg have summarized this postmodern argument: " the archive itself is not simply a reflection or an image of an event but also shapes the event, the phenomena of its origins. Yael A. Sternhell is an assistant professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is deeply indebted to Daniel Rodgers, Gaines Foster, John Coski, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, and the reviewers and editors at the Journal of Ameri-can History for commenting extensively on earlier drafts of this article. Audiences and commentators at Princeton University , Boston University, Tel Aviv University, and at conferences of
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Frustrated by electoral defeat at the hands of Jefferson and his allies in 1800, North Carolina’s Federalists devised a plan in 1802 to send the Minerva, a Raleigh newspaper edited by William Boylan, to leading Federalists across the state. These Federalist leaders, including Duncan Cameron, William R. Davie, and Alfred Moore, all prominent politicians and lawyers, believed that the public mind had been corrupted by the newspaper propaganda of the Jeffersonian Republicans. The dissemination of the Minerva, however, could restore the public to a deferential position as well as increase their knowledge about the true state of political affairs. Though the newspapers found their way to each judicial district in North Carolina, they failed to transform the public sphere. The editor of the Minerva, William Boylan, increased the rancor of his partisan invective throughout 1802 and 1803, even though Federalist electoral success still remained elusive. Boylan also pursued the position of st...
2019
Writing this paper was an extensive process. It began early in the Spring semester-in ASI 120. From the beginning of the semester the ASI 120 students knew we would be writing a historiography in the realm of Reconstruction. To hone down a more specific topic, we were assigned Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction. By reading his account of Reconstruction, I was able to select a topic: black politicians in South Carolina. Next, a research librarian visited my seminar and introduced us to the research process. From there, I was able to gather sources and begin my annotated bibliography. To complete the annotated bibliography, I took elaborate and detailed notes on the historical interpretation of each author, and then proceeded to summarize each source. From the annotated bibliography, I worked at categorizing the sources and developing my argument for the paper-essentially, arguing for which source is the "best", what is the criteria for being "the best", and why. Once I settled on the criteria, I was able to form a draft of an argumentative historiography paper. I met with both Dr.
North Carolina Today: Contrasting Conditions and Common Concerns
1988
This report is an attempt to provide some basic information for thinking about these decisions. It gives a profile of the state primarily in terms of population patterns, economy, labor force, education, and environment; secondarily in terms of health and social services, infrastructure and aspects of government performance. This profile is based on a variety of sources, largely state arid federal government statistics (like the U.S. Census) but also the results of several specific research projects conducted by academic, basiness and public interest groups within the state. In addition to providing basic data on North Carolina today, the report provides two sorts of context for evaluating the contemporary condition of our state. First, it links our present condition to some recent historical trends and changes; we can judge ourselves in terms of our own past. Second, the report makes a number of comparisons to the rest of the United States, so that readers can understand the meaning of a given statistic by seeing how North Carolina stacks up in a rank order of the U.S. states, in relation to the country as a whole, or in relation to the South as a region. Seeing where we stand is just a start, however; we need also to ask where we are going. Accordingly, this report also suggests some of the issues that are shaping North Carolina's future. These suggestions are based firstly on projections of trends, where these are available and appropriate. But since the future is a matter of decision and action, not just extension of present trends, we must complement this with consideration of the options open to us and the resources we can bring to bear on building our future. Severs.' studies have been conducted on specific areas of our state, on specific issues, and on matters of concern to the state as a whole (e.g. the report of the Commission on the Future of North Carolina, popularly known as "NC 2000"), and on North Carolina as part of the Southern region (e.g. the reports of the Southern Growth Policies Board, an organization representing the governors of twelve southern states and Puerto Rico). Summaries of these reports are used to provide a broader basis for thought and discussion. These studies, and the data presented in this report, reveal a North Carolina rich in possibilities and rife with problems. Just as anyone driving through North Carolina would see a wide range of landscapesmountains, Piedmont and flatlands; forests and beaches; strip mining, skyscrapers, dairy farms and abandoned millsso researchers report enormous diversity. We will focus special attention on this diversity, presenting a number of maps of the state in which shadings indicate differences among counties. Look at Figure 23, for example, and you will be able to trace the 1-85 corridor and locate the state's larger cities by following the darker shadings which indicate higher air pollution levels. Every public policy, government program, private initiative and economic change is likely to affect the citizens of North Carolina in a number of different ways. Our interests vary according to region, class, race, occupation, and a number of other factors. But we have common interests too. We share