What is North Carolina Lives and Legacies?
Started in Fall 2022 as an Information Science + Studies student research lab, North Carolina Lives and Legacies began with the goal of creating a more inclusive interpretation of Bennett Place, a state-run historic site in Durham, NC. The ongoing goal of the project has been to tell new stories about North Carolina’s history based on current historical scholarship and original research, using methods from critical digital humanities, public history, and heritage studies.
Clues & Questions
Clues
Most of our work relies on a combination of archival papers, historic photos, and digitized newspapers. See how we blend this source material on our projects page.
Questions
What was James Bennett’s Life Like as a yeoman farmer in North Carolina’s Piedmont Region?
Bennett Place is a State Historic Site in North Carolina, where yeoman farmer James Bennett once lived. We have considered Bennett Place through different themes, including environmental history and material culture. We are also creating a database by transcribing James Bennett’s account book from the 1840s as a way to better understand his life as a white small farmer and what we can learn from Bennett about Orange County during the mid-19th century.
What hidden narratives exist within the records at Catawba Trail Farm?
Catawba Trail Farm is currently a community garden, but was once part of the Snow Hill Plantation. As a new place of interest for 2025, we plan to explore archival records to better understand the community who lived there.
What is the interrelationship between historical evidence, experience of place and social and environmental justice?
What is distinctive about social and environmental justice in the experiential context of a place, building or landscape? How do these ideas function on the level of individual identity and community-building? In addition to the physical sites themselves, how can digital methods extend our understanding and recover environments that no longer exist? Previous research in this area has focused on Bennett Place and its Unity Monument.
Our team will pursue these questions in Making Meaning at Historic Places, a Bass Connections project 2025-2026.
