Jacquelyn Dowd Hall of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation\u2019s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies.<\/p>\n
Hall,\u00a0the Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of history in UNC\u2019s College of Arts and Sciences, is a pioneering scholar in Southern women\u2019s history and founding director of the\u00a0Southern Oral History Program<\/a>\u00a0in UNC\u2019sCenter for the Study of the American South. In her 37 years at the helm, the program has recorded approximately 4,300 first-hand accounts of history by the people who lived it.<\/p>\n Hall is among 212 new academy fellows announced today (April 19). They include individuals that the academy calls some of the world\u2019s most accomplished leaders in academia, art, business, the humanities, philanthropy and science. The class will be inducted Oct. 1 at academy headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.<\/p>\n With Hall, UNC has 34 faculty members in the academy, an independent policy research center founded in 1780 to undertake studies of complex and emerging problems. The academy\u2019s diverse membership of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines and professions gives it the capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary research.<\/p>\n In 1999, Hall was called \u201cone of the nation\u2019s pre-eminent scholars of the New South\u201d when awarded a National Humanities Medal, bestowed by President Bill Clinton. The medal honors those whose work has deepened the nation\u2019s understanding of the humanities or helped preserve and expand Americans\u2019 access to the humanities.<\/p>\n UNC hired Hall, an Oklahoma native, in 1973 to direct the South\u2019s first major oral history program and teach women\u2019s history. She had just completed courses for a doctorate in U.S. history at Columbia University. Already, she had concluded that she couldn\u2019t unearth history just by studying written records.<\/p>\n As the program continues today, she says, \u201cOur goal is to add new stories to the historical record and enable teachers, students and interested people throughout the world to learn about the South by listening to voices that might otherwise go unheard.\u201d<\/p>\n About 530 of the interviews by Hall and her students and colleagues are available to all via the web on the University Library\u2019s \u201cDocumenting the American South<\/a>\u201d site, in the collection titled \u201cOral Histories of the American South<\/a>.\u201d Another 2,251 are online as transcripts or transcripts plus sound. The rest, which are scheduled to be digitized, are on tapes and transcripts housed in Carolina\u2019s Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library. There, researchers can access first-person, real-life stories of mill hands, entrepreneurs, politicians, environmentalists, civil rights activists and more.<\/p>\n One of the program\u2019s early and most significant projects was a study of the growth of mill villages where previously, farming communities predominated. \u201cLike A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World\u201d (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), a book by Hall, students and colleagues, resulted. Hall also has had numerous prize-winning journal articles published and wrote the book \u201cRevolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women\u2019s Campaign Against Lynching\u201d (Columbia University Press, 1993).<\/p>\n In recent years, Hall has led a major oral history project documenting social justice efforts from World War II to the present. She also is co-principal investigator for \u201cPublishing the Long Civil Rights Movement<\/a>,\u201d a project designed to inspire scholarly collaboration and develop new ways of creating and sharing scholarship on the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n For more about Hall, visit\u00a0http:\/\/history.unc.edu\/people\/faculty\/jacquelyn-d.-hall<\/a>. For the academy\u2019s news release and list of new fellows, visit\u00a0http:\/\/www.amacad.org\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n