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REFERENCE, INSTRUCTION, AND OUTREACH
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Reference and Instruction: The Manuscripts Department's collections are, with a few exceptions, open and available to all persons who complete a brief registration form and sign a research agreement. Persons over 18 years old should present a valid photo ID. The reference staff is always happy to assist walk-in patrons in locating relevant manuscripts, and no appointment is necessary. |
In addition, we are pleased to offer the following special reference and instructional services:
Please contact the Head of Public Services (919-962-1345 or mss@email.unc.edu) to schedule a presentation or tour or to make an appointment with a librarian.
Public Programs and Exhibits:
We offer a variety of public programs, including exhibit openings, lectures, roundtables, and informal discussions led by researchers and visiting scholars. We regularly showcase unique holdings both in library exhibit spaces and online at the Department's web site.
PAST EVENTS:
The Untamed World: Photographs by Robert Bolton, 1964-1969
Curated by Kirston Johnson.
Manuscripts Department, Fourth Floor, Wilson Library
31 August through 31 December 2006
The City That Care Forgot: The Southern Remembers New Orleans
Curated by Laura Clark Brown, with the assistance of Nathalie Wheaton.
Manuscripts Department, Fourth Floor, Wilson Library
Through 31 July 2006
Southern Sources: A Symposium Celebrating Seventy-Five Years of the Southern Historical Collection
March 18-19, 2005, Pleasants Family Room, Second Floor, Wilson Library
Some of the most distinguished historians of the American South presented
papers on archival sources for the ante-bellum era, the Civil War, the New
South, the Jim Crow South, and the South since 1954.
Dynamic Legacies Symposium: Charlie Poole and the Evolution and Transmission of the Southern String Band Tradition
April 8, 2005, Pleasants Family Room, Second Floor, Wilson Library
Morning sessions featured student papers on string band traditions. Discussant was Alan Jabbour, former director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Afternoon sessions featured a panel discussion on Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers.
Searching for "Our Family Black & White," or Why I've Lived in the Cameron Papers for 25 Years
Informal discussion with Professor Sydney Nathans, Department of History, Duke University, 29 April 2004
Professor Nathans has been researching in the Cameron Family Papers, one of the most extensive plantation collections extant, in the Southern Historical Collection for 25 years. He discussed his efforts to understand the dynamics of relationships in this family, among themselves and with some of their more than 1,000 slaves. He focused particularly on efforts he has made to follow some of the descendants of those once enslaved by the Camerons and the challenges he has faced in his research over the years.
Walter Lenoir: Explaining an Antislavery Confederate
Informal discussion with Professor William Barney, Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill, 4 March 2004
Professor Barney is "using the Lenoir Family Papers, and especially the Civil War experience of Walter W. Lenoir, to explore the question of why white southerners who were quite ambivalent about slavery, nonetheless became ardent supporters of the Confederacy. Walter is a particularly fascinating example of this phenomenon. He acknowledged the evils of slavery, intended to divest himself of his inherited slaves, strongly opposed secession, and was planning on moving to Minnesota in the free North when the Civil War broke out. Yet he was hardly a Unionist. He enlisted in the Confederate army in January 1862 and supported the cause until the very end. Why? That's the question I'm asking."
Crowning Glory: An Exhibit Celebrating the Graduate School Centennial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Exhibit reception hosted by the Manuscripts Department and the Friends of the Library, 21 October 2003
With materials drawn from the University Archives, the Southern Historical Collection, and the North Carolina Collection and Photographic Archives, the exhibit highlighted the history of graduate studies and research at Carolina through photographs, books, original letters and documents, and University publications. It also celebrated the long collaboration between the University Library and graduate education on our campus. Deputy University Librarian Larry Alford and University Archivist Janis Holder made brief welcoming remarks. The reception was followed by a lecture presentation by Laura Micheletti Puaca, author of Pioneer to Powerhouse: The History of Graduate Education at Carolina; Graduate School Dean Linda Dykstra introduced the program.
Hillbilly Sources and Symbols: Country Music, Cultural Brokerage and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Symposium, 5 April 2003
The conference was organized to celebrate the publication of Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (SFC/JEMF, 2002) by Guthrie T. Meade, Jr., with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade. Distinguished speakers and panelists explored the resurgence of interest in traditional music and its representation through popular culture. Speakers included Robert Cantwell, William Ferris, Archie Green, Alan Jabbour, Jocelyn Neal, David Sanjek, and Dick Spottswood.
African American Family History and Genealogy
Roundtable, 16 January 2002
The discussion featured three speakers. Dr. Barnetta McGhee White is a retired professor from the School of Education at North Carolina Central University and an avid researcher of African American family history and genealogy about which she has written numerous books. Dorothy Spruill Redford is the executive director of the Somerset Place historical site in Creswell, N.C., and author of Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage, a painstakingly researched book that led Redford to Somerset Place, where her ancestors were slaves. Dr. Edward E. Baptist taught in the Department of History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. Baptist curated the Stony the Road They Trod: Forced Migration of African Americans in the Slave South, 1790-1865 exhibit.
