Elon University has received a grant of nearly $116,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize two history seminars next summer for community college professors from across the nation. Assistant professor John Beck authored the grant proposal and will co-direct the project with Jim Bissett, the William J. Story, Sr. Professor at Elon University.
The grant funds come from NEH’s Landmarks of American History and Culture Program, which supports seminars and workshops that explore topics through the study of both texts and historic sites. Elon’s project, “Building the New South: The Social and Economic Transformation of the Piedmont after the Civil War,” will in two, week-long seminars explore the changes that swept the piedmont South in the decades after the Civil War that made the region a major industrial center.
Participants will work with some of the top scholars in the field of southern history such as Pulitzer-prize winning historian Steven Hahn and Jacquelyn Hall, director of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill and co-author of the acclaimed Like a Family: The Making of a Cotton Mill World.
The project arose out of Beck’s research interest in the economic development of the South after the Civil War. Beck calls the project a “natural” for Elon.
“Elon’s facilities are perfect for a seminar like this, and the area around the university is rich in the physical remains of what I call the heroic era of the industrialization of the South—the late 1800s and early 1900s,” he said. “Glencoe, on the outskirts of town, for example, is one of the best intact examples of a textile mill and mill village complex in existence.
“A wealth of other resources is nearby, such as the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill, Spencer shops near Salisbury and the Museum of the New South in Charlotte, so we really are ideally situated for this.”
The projects website is http://org.elon.edu/newsouth/