What are the impacts and responses to COVID-19 in the South?
Our #COVIDintheSouth series provides perspectives from scholars and community partners on responses to the global pandemic here in the South. In many ways, the global pandemic highlights how connected the South is to the world.
We invite you to engage each week with these reflections on COVID in our region, in terms of social, cultural, medical, artistic, and other areas of concern. In this moment of crisis and change, how are we responding to the current challenges, remembering the past, and preparing for the future?
How Oral History Projects Are Being Stymied by COVID-19
Rachel Seidman, Director of our Southern Oral History Program talked to Smithsonian Magazine about how Covid-19 is impeding oral historians’ work. Photo by Jeny Luna Hernández, Courtesy of Rhode Island Latino Arts Read the article here.
Resilience
Whether fighting disease, climate change, or other challenges, where do we turn for visionary leadership? Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor Dr. Sherry Magill and other scholars point to communities, cultural memories, lessons in resilience, and the role of academia in building the future. Watch the video here.
Listen to Those Who Have Suffered
Today I donated groceries at Carrboro’s town hall. In the parking lot, a masked volunteer took the food out of my trunk, thanked me, and I drove off. All around the country, others are doing the same, because so many more of our neighbors suddenly face hunger. As I drove away, I thought about an oral history interview I did… Read Rachel Seidman’s essay here.
Black Farmers and Fishermen Weather New Storms
COVID-19 compounds the challenges faced by African American farmers and fishermen. Last year as part of an oral history project, Brunswick County, North Carolina farmers and fishermen shared their experiences with extreme weather, land loss, and centuries of systemic discrimination. How are those narrators dealing with the current COVID-19 crisis and what can we learn from their resiliency in the past? Click here for a brief update and to hear the podcast.
Cultural Erasure
Crises like COVID-19 and climate change can fundamentally reshape how we see our communities and our society. How will artists, scholars, storytellers and activists help us remember these events and grapple with the lessons they hold for our shared future?” In the months before COVID-19 emerged on the radar, the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke hosted interdisciplinary conversations on emerging issues in southern communities including climate change and its toll on cultural preservation. In this video excerpt from one of eleven Southern Summit panels, Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor Dr. Sherry Magill poses a provocative question about the importance of cultural memory in building the future in a diverse and changing regions. Learn more and watch the video excerpt here.
#COVIDintheSOUTH: Imagining What My Ancestors Would Do
Imagining What My Ancestors Would Do
What would a Lumbee man, called both an outlaw and a hero in nineteenth century Robeson County, do in our current COVID-19 crisis? His descendant, UNC Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, Malinda Maynor Lowery, discussed the value of myths and collective memory with Frank Stasio on WUNC Radio’s The State of Things.
#COVIDintheSOUTH – Voices in Crisis
Voices in Crisis
News media have always held the role of informing the public of health workers’ essential work during pandemics. In this excerpt from the Southern Oral History Program, learn how hospitals in the South found an ally in the media.
Before Henry T. Clark served as the first Administrator of Health Affairs at the University of North Carolina, he worked at Vanderbilt Hospital creating the first polio ward in Tennessee.
One of ten in the United States at the time of its establishment in 1953, the ward housed its first 50 patients with no fatalities.
Local newspapers covered the opening and praised the brave staff. This media boosted morale in the hospital by letting the workers see “what they were doing was important not only inside the building, but outside.”
Find Clark’s entire account here.
Since 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has worked to capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring history to life.
Photo courtesy of The Library of Congress.
#COVIDintheSOUTH – Voices in Crisis
Voices in Crisis
As we see with the COVID-19 pandemic, families often stay together in times of crisis. In this excerpt from the Southern Oral History program we hear from a family in the rural South how they endured the a deadly flu epidemic in 1918.
Stella Foust Carden quarantined at her family’s farm in Schoolfield, VA, during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918.
The textile mill and area’s largest employer set up a temporary hospital in a welfare building to combat the pandemic.
She was 11 years old during her family’s quarantine. The local doctor visited daily and fed them a “little old thin soup, a little chicken soup.”
Listen to Carden’s entire oral history here.
Since 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has worked to capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring history to life.
Photo courtesy of William Ferris, Professor Emeritus.
#COVIDintheSouth: Social Distancing in the Age of Assimilation
Social Distancing in the Age of Assimilation
In our first post of this series, UNC alumna Mikaela Morgane Adams, highlights Indigenous history to reveal connections between the South and the world. Dr. Adams, Assistant Professor of Native American History at the University of Mississippi and author of Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South, provides examples from beyond the South to place Indigenous people at the center of global history, specifically the 1918 flu pandemic. Her work shows how the future lies in truth telling, shared understanding, empathy, and mutual respect. Adams’ essay helps us to see that while UNC’s home region is distinct in some ways, it is also inextricably connected to the world. Read her essay here.
Also join Dr. Adams for her livestream lecture on April 22 – “Influenza in Indian Country: The Health Costs of Economic, Cultural, and Racial Marginalization during the 1918-1920 Pandemic.”