Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Receives PEN Award
The Center for the Study of the American South congratulates Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, the founder of the SOHP, for being awarded a 2020 PEN America Literary Award! Her book Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America received the Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award For Biography. Sisters and Rebels follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood.
Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.
Bookmark Rachel Seidman’s New Book
The College of Arts and Sciences highlights new books published by UNC faculty and alumni. The latest feature is by Rachel Seidman, Director of the Southern Oral History Program. Seidman’s new book is Speaking of Feminism: Today’s Activists on the Past, Present and Future of the U.S. Women’s Movement. In the latest “Bookmark This” feature, learn more about this book and its collection of stories in an interview with Seidman.
In Action – Former SOHP Field Scholar Ina Dixon’s “Historic” Quest
A former field scholar for the Southern Oral History Program is helping a Virginia community examine and designate its buildings and way of life as historic. Ina Dixon owns Storied Capital, a historic consulting company, one of three companies hired to survey the area’s properties. Her work will help create an inventory of properties in the former Dan River Mills Village in Schoolfield, a mill town outside of Danville, Va., contributing to the historic district nomination application to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Read more about Dixon’s work to help the community become a state and federally recognized historic district.