On October 29, 2021 I gave the presentation below, “Black Lives, Whitened Stories: A Journey Through Three North Carolina National Parks,” as my presidential address for the Historical Society of North Carolina. The talk focuses on my recent work (2015-21) on Black history, whiteness, and race on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Carl Sandburg Home…
I presented the webinar below about Black History on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation in June of 2021.
This Adobe Spark presentation includes the images that accompany a talk I have given a couple of times titled “The Transparent Box: The National Park Service and Public History.”
This video uses historic maps digitized, georeferenced, and available on the Driving Through Time site to illustrate the mid-20th-century debate about the Parkway route at Grandfather Mountain, NC.
This video draws upon historic maps digitized, georeferenced, and available on the Driving Through Time site to discuss the 1934 battle between North Carolina and Tennessee over the southern end of the Parkway.
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…