Originally published in the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer Sunday, October 20, 2013 Point of View National parks need funding help By Anne Mitchell Whisnant As a historian of the national parks, I followed with interest stories of how the government shutdown – thankfully concluded now – played out in the parks. From…
In 2012, I participated in a working group at the National Council of Public History meeting called “Visualizing the Past: Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Imagining the Future of Public Interfaces to Cultural Heritage Collections.” Each of the working group members wrote a blog post reflecting on our own experiences developing digital humanities projects. My…
Submission for “I Found It in the Archives” contest, UNC Libraries Anne Mitchell Whisnant 2/10/2011 Almost everything good that has happened to me in the past twenty years came from one afternoon in an archive. A purple spiral notebook that I treasure holds handwritten notes on a story that began on August 31, 1991…
In 2010, as part of the UNC Library’s larger project to digitize and put online many images from the Hugh Morton Collection, I wrote an essay entitled “Roads Taken and Not Taken: Images and the Story of the Blue Ridge Parkway ‘Missing Link’” for the Library’s “View to Hugh” blog. I’m linking it here…
(Originally posted to Virtual Blue Ridge’s Blue Ridge Parkway Blog, December 1, 2009) My husband David and I are pleased to announce that we have just written and published the first-ever children’s book about the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is something we’ve had in mind for years, ever since we realized that there was…
In 2009, when I was involved (as a board member for Blue Ridge Parkway 75) in planning the celebration of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75th anniversary celebration, I wrote a reflection on “Conundrums of Commemoration: Blue Ridge Parkway’s Seventy-fifth Anniversary” for an issue of Sitelines: A Publication of the Foundation for Landscape Studies (vol. V, no….
(Originally posted on Virtual Blue Ridge’s Blue Ridge Parkway Blog, July 16, 2009) This post isn’t specific to the Blue Ridge Parkway, but I thought readers might be interested in a project that I’m involved in that is taking a comprehensive look at the state of history in the National Parks. Here’s our official…
(Originally posted on Virtual Blue Ridge’s Blue Ridge Parkway Blog, June 24, 2009) I’m delighted to announce that a new digital publishing project I’ve been working on with colleagues at the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (part of the UNC-Chapel Hill Library system) has been funded (to the tune of $150,000 total over two years) by…
(Originally posted to Virtual Blue Ridge’s Blue Ridge Parkway Blog, June 12, 2009) The nonprofit organization planning the celebration of the Parkway’s 75th Anniversary in 2010 has released the call for proposals for Part I of our two-part 75th Anniversary Symposium, “Imagining the Blue Ridge Parkway for the 21st Century.” Part I of the symposium,…
(Originally posted on Virtual Blue Ridge’s Blue Ridge Parkway Blog, May 8, 2009) I have just had time to review the promotional video for the proposed “Blue Ridge America” project that Florida-based developer Larry Vander Maten is planning for a site just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, at what has for the last decade or so…
