Do you ever wonder what college was like back in 1841?
We don’t have a time machine to take us back, but I’ll share UNC’s “Course of Instruction” for the 1841-1842 academic year below to give you a sense of what an undergraduate faced…Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, Livy, Homer…the list goes on!
“The day after [John] Brown’s execution in Virginia, [the Raleigh Register] warned Virginia governor Henry Wise to burn the gallows, lest some enterprising man remove it and ship it north, since ‘The Yankees have no objection to mingling money-making with their grief.’ The idea of memorial services and ‘mock funerals’ rumored in the North irritated the same editor enough to make him suggest that if Northerners were looking for public entertainment, ‘It is a pity they haven’t a witch or two to drown or burn’…
“Angered by [Massachusetts Rep.] Horace Mann’s comments condemning slavery, [Rep. Abraham Venable of North Carolina] lashed out: ‘Let him blush when he speaks of the sins and crimes of any people on earth… no southern calendar of crime can afford such cases as the Salem murders.’ ”
– From “The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America” (2008) by Gretchen A. Adams
“A distinguished company of U. S. educators traveled last week to a long clearing in a fragrant pine forest in North Carolina. There stood the most prodigious new educational project in the land this century — Duke University, now nearly complete though little grass yet grows on its sandy campus, no ivy on its neo-Gothic walls of soft-colored fieldstone.
“The central ceremony was the dedication of Duke’s medical school and hospital, which seem bound to reach maturity and fame before the institution’s other branches. Money can get results faster in medicine than in the less scientific fields of culture. The $40,000,000 which the late tobacco and power Tycoon James Buchanan Duke gave to little Trinity College of Durham in return for taking his name will doubtless turn out many an able doctor before it polishes an important poet, will probably improve physically thousands of lives before it contributes much original thought on the way of life….
“Duke students are not yet distinguishable from their contemporaries at other inland institutions. They paint DUKE on their slickers, have ‘dates’ with the coeds, occasionally buy a fruit jar of corn liquor.”
–From Time magazine, April 27, 1931
The 1920 Yackety Yack, edited by Carolina’s best-known literary alumnus, Thomas Wolfe, is now available online. The energetic Wolfe appears throughout the volume, which includes his senior photo,
fraternity photo, a description and picture from his play “The Third Night”, and one of his early literary works, the poem “1920 Says a Few Words to Carolina”.
“[Critics and CBS] never saw through to the sophistication underlying the show. If the men aren’t wearing Brooks Brothers and the women aren’t wearing the latest hairstyles and fashions and they’re not discussing something terribly chic at cocktails, then it isn’t ’sophisticated.’ Andy felt very strongly about that attitude, really resented it….
“Those other shows ['Green Acres,' 'Petticoat Junction,' 'The Beverly Hillbillies'] were fine for what they attempted, but ours was a different type of show entirely.”
– Producer Aaron Ruben, as quoted in “The Andy Griffith Show” (1981) by Richard Michael Kelly
Ruben, credited by Griffith with “set[ting] the style of this show” in its early years, applied a crucial sensitivity to the subtle interplay between Andy Taylor and Barney Fife. (Just imagine how that could’ve gone amiss!) He died Saturday in Beverly Hills at age 95.
“When I was completely taken in by the Communist agitation at Gastonia in 1929, there wasn’t a bigger jackass or a more gullible sap in the State of North Carolina than I was. I knew absolutely nothing about what I was talking about, as I whooped it up continually in this column in support of the murderous Gastonia defendants. My experience in the bloody Gastonia business is THE thing of all others which has done most to make me distrust so-called ‘liberalism,’ which so often, like mine was then, is not only ignorant and neurotic, but very dangerous.”
– Nell Battle Lewis’s “Incidentally” column in the News & Observer of Raleigh, Dec. 16, 1951 (as quoted in “Battling Nell: The Life of Southern Journalist Cornelia Battle Lewis, 1893-1956″ by Alexander S. Leidholdt [2009]).
When Lewis died, N&O editor Jonathan Daniels, who had served simultaneously as her patron and her archvillain, wrote that “Nell Battle Lewis made for herself a name that will be long remembered in North Carolina.”
Through no lack of effort on her part, it hasn’t turned out that way. Leidholdt’s thoughtful and thorough biography, which details Lewis’s transitions from “most versatile” graduate at St. Mary’s School to daring advocate of the underclass to hard-line segregationist, has gone virtually unnoticed. (Hat tips to exceptions Ben Steelman of the Wilmington Star-News [http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20091114/ARTICLES/911139982?Title=Book-review-Biography-looks-at-a-homegrown-N-C-reformer] and Charles Wheeler of the Greensboro News & Record [http://www.news-record.com/blog/63640/entry/76748].)
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.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, and of the opening of The International Civil Rights Museum, the North Carolina Collection shares this document from its collection.
Take flight into our most recent installment of This Month in North Carolina, which discusses the origins of Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, NC. Tobacco and aviation are linked more closely than I’d ever imagined!
Piedmont Airlines’ inaugural passenger flight took place on Friday, February 20, 1948 at around 7 a.m. It left Wilmington, made several stops along the way to Cincinnati, OH, and then made the return trip home.
The photo above is from the Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs and Film, and shows two of Pidemont Airlines’ DC-3s parked in a WWII hangar they were using as a base. The photo is dated to ca. 1948, the same year as their first passenger flight.
“I hope when I wear them that I do not start counting ten and jump!”
– President Franklin D. Roosevelt, writing on Feb. 2, 1943, to thank N.C. Gov. O. Max Gardner for his Christmas present — pajamas custom-made from nylon parachute cloth manufactured at Gardner’s textile mill in Shelby.
Gardner devised the gift to tout the value of synthetics research, which had invented nylon for parachutes just in time to offset the Japanese monopoly on silk.
