Friends Historical Collection to Collaborate on Local History Project
The College’s Friends Historical Collection will be working with archives at four other local colleges and universities and the Greensboro Historical Museum to digitize and publish online material about the city’s history.
Led by UNCG and funded by a $203,910 grant awarded by the State Library of North Carolina, “Textiles, Teachers and Troops: Greensboro, North Carolina, 1881-1945” will make available more than 175,000 digital images including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, scrapbooks, printed materials and oral histories documenting the social and cultural development of Greensboro.
By documenting the influence of the textile industry, public and postsecondary education, and the massive World War II military presence, the project will help explain Greensboro’s growth from a 2,000-person town into one of the leading manufacturing and education centers in the Southeast.
The Friends Historical Collection will provide item selection and metadata creation, and will assist with the creation of contextual materials. Along with scrapbooks and correspondence collections from Guilford, the College is providing an album with numerous photos of that campus in the late 19th century.
Several Guilford collections document regional education themes in general, particularly in the area of women’s education (Mary Mendenhall Hobbs Papers, Rachel Farlow Taylor papers), the interaction between colleges (Robert and Lyra Dann Papers), and the College’s history and connection to the community (selected series from the Binford papers, Duke Memorial Hall papers).
In addition to Guilford, UNCG and the Greensboro Historical Museum, the partners are Bennett College, Greensboro College and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. This is the first time the five colleges and universities will be collaborating to make primary source materials available online. Guilford previously worked with UNCG on Civil Rights Greensboro, which makes available documents from the modern civil rights era in the city.
“Textiles, Teachers and Troops” is made possible by funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.
A more extensive description of the project is available on the UNCG Digital Collections blog.
