Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition

The North Carolina Business History Series

University History




Research at the SOHP

Research - by faculty, graduate students, and associates - is the heart of our mission at the Southern Oral History Program. For 35 years, the SOHP has worked to document and understand the extraordinary history of this extraordinary region. The SOHP's oral history research collection, which comprises more than 4,000 interviews and related materials, is permanently archived for scholars in UNC-CH's Southern Historical Collection.

The SOHP's current research priority is the Long Civil Rights Movement initiative. As part of this project, a team of researchers conducted more than eighty interviews in Charlotte and Charleston, SC, this summer to better understand how life in the South has been shaped ny the black and women's liberation movements, the Vietnam War, mass migrations, natural disasters, and conservative politics.


Past SOHP research initiatives include a major Piedmont industrialization series which yielded the award-winning Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. The more recent Women's Leadership initiative made possible the Leading Women video documentary.

Previously, the SOHP focused on Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition, an ambitious, multi-year project documenting the dramatic changes that have so dramatically reshaped North Carolina since World War II. Other ongoing initiatives include The North Carolina Business History Project and The History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill interview series.




The Southern Oral History Program
Center for the Study of the American South
Love House and Hutchins Forum
410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info[at]sohp.org