Historian David Cecelski reflects on the interviews from the oral history project, “Preserving the African American Experience in Pamlico County, North Carolina,” which he calls “an invaluable historical record of life on the North Carolina coast throughout the 20th century.”
Our Coast: At the Whales, Whaling Symposium in Beaufort
Historian and author David Cecelski writes about the talk he gave earlier this month on bottlenose dolphin fishery at Hatteras Island during the annual Whale and Whaling Symposium in Beaufort.
Historian reflects on 1898 to 1900 white supremacy movement
Historian and author David Cecelski writes about giving a lecture at Duke Law School on the history of the white supremacy movement of 1898 to 1900 and how it shaped our political system, our society, and our legal system here in North Carolina.
Our Coast: Federal Writers’ Project’s Muriel Wolff in Terra Ceia
Muriel L. Wolff while working for the Federal Writers’ Project spent several weeks during May 1938 interviewing people in Beaufort County’s Terra Ceia, where Dutch immigrants, African Americans, and others tried to make a new home in hard times, historian David Cecelski writes.
Our Coast: On the shores of Harkers Island, 1944
Historian David Cecelski looks beyond the tranquil scene in this image featuring Capt. Stacy Davis, his fish house and nets on Harkers Island, and at the great upheaval here in the years between the 1933 hurricane and just after World War II.
Our Coast: On the ‘Old Mullet Road’ 1942
Historian David Cecelski looks in this photo-essay in his “Working Lives” series, at several photographs that feature workers on a railroad that old timers called the “Old Mullet Road.”
Our Coast: The Shirt Factory in Morehead City, 1942
Historian David Cecelski in this installment of his photo-essay series, “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947,” goes inside the Morehead City Garment Co. in the early days of World War II.
Our Coast: In my great-uncle’s sweet potato fields, 1942
This installment of historian David Cecelski’s photo-essay series, “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947,” is more personal than usual for the author. They were taken at his great-uncle George Ball and his brother Raymond Ball’s potato farm in Harlowe.
Our Coast: On the James Adams Floating Theatre in 1940
Historian David Cecelski in this installment of his photo-essay series, “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947,” goes behind-the-scenes at the James Adams Floating Theatre in 1940, when the vessel was docked on the Pamlico River in Washington.
Our Coast: Sawmill workers of the Roanoke River, 1938-1939
The next installment in historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947″ series takes the reader to a sawmill, a handle mill, and a veneer plant on the banks of the Roanoke River in 1938 and 1939.
Our Coast: In the peanut fields of Edenton, 1937-1942
“Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947″ series begins with a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton in the years just before the Second World War.
Historian explores the working lives of eastern NC 1937-1947
Historian David Cecelski introduces a series of photo-essays focusing on the working lives of people in eastern North Carolina just before, during, and after the Second World War.
Our Coast: Remembering Betty Town
Historian David Cecelski has “devoted a fair bit” of historical research to the people of Betty Town, how their land was taken, and how the community’s people were driven out of their homes to make room for the new town of Aurora, but there is much he doesn’t know.
Our Coast: ‘Cast on shore, at a place called Ocracock’
On a recent trip to New Hampshire, historian David Cecelski pored over historic accounts and survivors’ sworn affidavits pertaining to shipwrecks, storm damage, insurance claims and the North Carolina coast.
‘Working Lives’: Canning sea turtles, Marshallberg, NC, 1938
When the cannery that opened in Marshallberg, a little village in Down East Carteret County, in 1937 ran out of oysters, tomatoes or other crops to can, they turned to canning sea turtles, writes historian David Cecelski.
When fishermen harvested seaweed: Beaufort’s agar industry
The curiosity that sparked when historian David Cecelski came across photos taken in 1944 of fishermen harvesting seaweed near Beaufort inspired a “bit of a deep dive” into topics he never imagined studying: the history of agar, ecology of seaweed, the wartime crisis that led to seaweed harvesting and the construction of the Beaufort agar factory.
