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…
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….
In 2008, I wrote about the Parkway’s impending 75th anniversary for National Parks Traveler. Here, I reflected on a symposium on Parkway history that I helped organize for the celebration: Titled A Living Past on a Borrowed Landscape: The Blue Ridge Parkway at 75, our symposium aimed to focus on the struggles this park…
Point of View article first published in the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, 12 October 2008 The route to buying Grandfather Mountain Anne Mitchell Whisnant and David E. Whisnant Recent reports have brought welcome news that the state will purchase about 2,600 acres of the spectacular Grandfather Mountain for protection as a public park….
Anne Mitchell Whisnant David E. Whisnant Originally published in The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) March 30, 2007 CHAPEL HILL–‘Let’s close the National Parks,” Bernard DeVoto wrote in Harper’s in 1953. Detailing the decay of a park system in crisis as visitation skyrocketed but budgets lagged in the post-World War II years, DeVoto shocked…
By Anne Mitchell Whisnant Originally published in The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) October 15, 2006 I’ve spent 15 years traveling the Blue Ridge Parkway writing “Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History” (University of North Carolina Press). The parkway, Ive learned, has always been a controversial and politically challenging undertaking. Bringing a limited-access…
By Anne Mitchell Whisnant Originally published in The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) May 5, 2006 DURHAM–America’s beloved Blue Ridge Parkway, the scenic road winding through the North Carolina and Virginia mountains, is in crisis. Though it has been the most popular attraction in the National Parks system since the 1950s, and today draws…