October 9, 2015, meeting and related matters

TO: Members of the Historical Society of North Carolina
FROM: Dr. Mike Sistrom, Dept of History, Greensboro College, 815 W. Market St. Greensboro, NC 27401; (336) 272-7102 x306, sistromm@greensboro.edu
SUBJECT: October 9, 2015, meeting and related matters
DATE: September 17, 2015

The society will meet Friday, October 9, 2015 at the Greenville Museum of Art. All of the activities will be held in the “Commons Gallery,” which is the smaller gallery at the Greenville Museum of Art.  There is ample parking at the museum, and overflow is next door at the Center for Art Education.  Members should enter the double doors by the parking lot.

Karin Zipf and Ralph Scott are our meeting hosts. Please RVSP to Ralph directly if you’ll be attending the dinner (scottr@ecu.edu, 252-328-0265) and send a check for $20 made out to The Scullery by Friday, October 2nd. Note you can make your check out to the caterer directly, The Scullery. Please don’t make the check out to Ralph or the HSNC.  Mail the check to: Ralph Scott, 309 South Library St. / Greenville, NC 27858. You only need to reply to me if you can NOT attend the meeting. If you CAN attend, please follow up with Ralph directly by the 2nd, not me.

Note to Michael Perdue: as per our new policy, as Secretary, you no longer have to pay for your meeting dinner or your annual dues.

Lodging Information:

In addition to various lodging options in Greenville you can find online, the Ramada Inn, aka the Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham Greenville/University Med , is offering a $89.00 rate for HSNC members. Call 252-355-8300 and ask for the HSNC block.  You can’t get this special rate reserving the room online. You need to call.

Program:

2:30-3:00        Council meeting                                                                     Commons Gallery
3:00-3:45        Reception                                                                                Commons Gallery
3:45-5:00        Afternoon session                                                                   Commons Gallery

As of when I sent out the packet, I’d not heard from the program committee with details on the afternoon session.  If I get that before the 9th, I’ll send out a follow up email. If there is no afternoon program planned, then we’ll have a brief talk from the GMA director and have a chance to tour the museum galleries.

5:00-6:15        Business meeting                                                                   Commons Gallery
6:30-7:00        Dinner                                                                                     West Wing Gallery
7:00-8:00        Karin Zipf’s presidential address, “How to Make Bad Girls Good:  Discipline and Resistance Inside a Girls’ Reformatory.”                                                     West Wing Gallery

Membership: If you cannot attend an HSNC meeting, please be sure to inform me via email or phone before or after the meeting. (Some of you have already done so.) It is important to keep accurate records of attendance. According to the by-laws the secretary may shift to inactive status any member with three or more unexcused absences. I will contact any members in that circumstance after the October meeting.  If you are no longer able or interested in being an active member of the society, shifting to inactive status can free up openings for new members.

Remember, after the October meeting, I will be stepping down as HSNC Secretary. Michael Perdue will be taking over from there. So any correspondence after October 9th should go to Michael P, not me.

The nominating committee presents Dr. Aaron Shapiro for consideration as a new member at the October business meeting.  If Dr. Shapiro is elected, would raise our total active membership to 101. Technically, that’s one over our 100 member limit, but we have three members who shifted from inactive to active, so they don’t “count” against the total. See the July packet for the updated membership table.

Dr. Aaron Shapiro is associate professor and director of public history at UNC-Charlotte.  Dr. Shapiro received his MA and PhD in History from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania. He is particularly interested in questions regarding the intersection of people and place, changing perspectives of the cultural and natural landscape, and connections between memory, heritage, and public historical interpretation. His research explores questions about the history of land use and environmental change, modern environmental politics, the relationship between work and leisure, and broader cultural transformations in twentieth century urban and rural America.

A Chicago native, Dr. Shapiro started and directed the public history program at Auburn University and previously served as national historian for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, DC, where he was involved with a wide variety of public history projects including historical films, websites, oral histories, interpretive planning, exhibit development, historic preservation, and heritage tourism initiatives. In addition, Shapiro worked on collections management and federal records issues and regularly provided historical policy papers for staff. As agency historian, he developed relationships with interagency and non-profit partners to further the goals of the agency history program. Before joining the Forest Service, Shapiro was Assistant Director of the Scholl Center for Family and Community History at Chicago ‘s Newberry Library. At the Newberry he served as academic director for two Department of Education Teaching American History grants, working cooperatively with the Chicago Public Schools and Chicago-area cultural and non-profit institutions.

He is the author of a book, The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, as well as book chapters, journal articles, and book reviews. Dr. Shapiro served as principal investigator, USDA Forest Service Region 8 (Southern Region) Oral History Project, August 2012-August 2013. ($30,000 grant).

Nominated by John David Smith, co-nominated by Shep McKinley, Carol Higham, Mark Wilson, Brian Jones, and Jeffrey Crow

Election of New Officers:

The nominating committee presents the following slate of officers for your consideration and approval at the business meeting.

For President– Catherine Bishir, NC Office of Archives and History
For Vice-President—(still open. The nominating committee is working on this and will have a nominee by October 9th. If you’re willing and able to serve, feel free to contact Maury York directly. myork@louisburg.edu)
For Secretary-Michael Perdue-NC Senate
For Treasurer (continuing)–Mike Hill of NC Office of Archives and History
For open Council seat—(still open. The nominating committee is working on this and will have a nominee by October 9th. If you’re willing and able to serve, feel free to contact Maury York directly. myork@louisburg.edu)

Membership Dues:

2015-16 dues of $15 are due.  According to Mike Hill, only three members are overdue with dues beyond this year’s 2105-16 dues. Mike has followed up with those members. I am not including a list of members who owe dues. Assuming I am reading Mike Hill’s annual dues report correctly, the following members have already paid their 2015-16 dues:  Broadwater, W. Campbell, Christensen, Cox, Dudley, Elliott, Gavins, Gershenhorn, L. Johnson, Kelly, Lanier, Lutzweiler, McGrath, C. Moore, J. Moore, Oakley, Pleasants, Sistrom, Starnes, Taylor,  Tomberlin, Vann, and D. Whisnant.

If you owe any dues, please send your check to Mike Hill (Research Branch, NC Office of Arch. & Hist., 4610 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-4610) or bring it with you to the Montreat meeting. The more dues Mike can collect before the meeting, however, the easier that makes his job. Please take up any questions regarding your dues directly with Mike Hill, not Mike Sistrom. You can reach Mike Hill before October 9th at michael.hill@ncdcr.gov.

Reminder to Michael Perdue: as per our new policy, as Secretary, you no longer have to pay for your annual dues.

Annual Awards

The Lefler committee  Johnson, Chair, Wade Dudley, and Michael Perdue, have selected Micah Khater’s senior honors thesis from NC State “There will be Political Dirty Work: Gendered Expressions of Black Resistance in United States v. John Cashion (1936)” (nominated by Dr. Kate Charron) as the winner of the 2014-15 Lefler Award for outstanding undergraduate research paper on NC history.  Ms. Khater can’t attend the October meeting. One of the committee members will announce her award during the business meeting.

Connor Award committee Sarah Thuesen, Chair, John David Smith, and Judkin Browning are very close to selecting a winner, but were still deliberating as of “press time.” They will announce the Connor award winner, for best 2014-15 NCHR article, at the October meeting.

HSNC Web Site

Anne Whisnant Sheila Bumgarner, and Mike Hill continued to work on developing a HSNC web site after the April meeting. The HSNC also hired Terry Mehlman, with Gray House Software, to create and then maintain our web site. Here is a link to the site as it looks so far. [http://grayhousesoftware.com/Development/HSNC/]

There are some details that Terry, Anne et al feel the full membership needs to discuss and decide upon before launch. Unfortunately, neither Terry, Anne, nor Sheila can attend the October meeting to lead our discussion and deliberations on this.  Hopefully Karin Zipf and/or Michael Perdue, the incoming Secretary who will be working with this web site and Ms. Mehlman from here on, can lead that process at the meeting so that we can get the site launched later this fall and not have to wait until after the April 2016 meeting. If any of them come up with a set of issues or parts of the web site for members to focus on before the October 9th meeting, I’ll send those along in a later email.

In the meantime, please peruse the web site before the October meeting. If you have suggestions, please send those directly to Ms. Mehlman, not to Anne, Sheila, or me.  tdmehlman@gmail.com. No not use the reply or contact forms on the draft web site.