• Articles,  Featured Collections

    Fifty Years of Appalachia at the Nunn Center for Oral History

    This article appeared in the Volume 4, Issue 1 Spring/Summer Winter 2023 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. by Kopana Terry The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023. Under the Special Collections Research Center umbrella at the University of Kentucky Libraries (UKL), the Nunn Center is one of America’s largest oral history archives, with over 18,000 interviews from more than 700 unique projects. Here, oral history projects documenting American civil rights, industry, health care, veterans, the India-Pakistan partition, survivors of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, religion, small towns, legendary sports figures, Kentucky governors, and the commoner…

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    Urban Appalachian Story Gathering Project

    This article appeared in the Volume 3, Issue 3 Winter 2022 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. by Pauletta Hansel, Project Director; Urban Appalachian Community Coalition Core Member The Urban Appalachian Story Gathering Project is an activity of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, a small nonprofit which formed in 2014 when the decades old Urban Appalachian Council was disbanded. UACC traces its origin to the 1964 founding of Cincinnati’s Main Street Bible Center, which served Appalachian migrants chiefly in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. The Urban Appalachian Council was established in 1974 and provided services for forty years to urban Appalachians and their descendants…

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    Foxfire Museum’s crowd-sourced COVID oral history project

    This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 3 Winter 2021 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. By Kami Ahrens, Curator and Educational Outreach Coordinator, Foxfire In March 2020, the Foxfire Museum responded to the nation-wide shutdowns by launching a crowd-sourced oral history program, as so many museums and archives did. For over 50 years, Foxfire has been collecting oral histories, including experiences during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. This project aligns with our organization’s mission to preserve, protect, and promote Southern Appalachian history. Initial submissions to the project were largely from a class assignment out of the University of North…

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    Community Archiving Profile: Mountain People, Mountain Lives Oral History Project

    By Elizabeth McRae and Alex Macaulay, Department of History, Western Carolina University This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. For the past five years, history faculty at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC, have collaborated with students at a local high school on the Mountain People, Mountain Lives Oral History Project.  Beginning each January, Drs. Elizabeth McRae and Alex Macaulay conduct a series of workshops, preparing students at Smoky Mountain High School to research, organize, and conduct oral interviews with a wide range of local people.  In May, the participants scatter throughout…

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    Community Archiving Profile: Helen Horn – The Other Half Speaks: Reminiscences of Coal Town Women

    By Burr Beard This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Burr Beard had the pleasure of working with the late Helen Horn on her transcripts and materials from a valiant effort of her work in the 1980’s to collect oral histories of woman of the Southeast Ohio coal towns, entitled The Other Half Speaks: Reminiscences of the Coal Town Women, 1900-1950 in Athens County, Ohio. Helen Horn entrusted Beard to organize the typewritten files of these oral histories and granted permission to have the files archived in both the Southeast Ohio…

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    Community Archiving Profile: Saving Kentucky Craft History

    By Philis Alvic, Kentucky Craft History and Education Association This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. The Kentucky Craft History and Education Association (KCHEA) is an organization founded in 2008 that gathers, conserves, and presents the history and on-going impact of crafts in Kentucky.  This mission is carried out in a number of different ways.  Saving objects and documents and recording interviews that tell the story of Kentucky crafts is one of the goals of the organization.  Bringing awareness of Kentucky crafts to a wide audience is another goal.  So, it…

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