PY-253089-17
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001) Nicholas Allen (Project Director: May 2016 to present) |
Remus, Celie, and Me: Preserving and Presenting the History and Life behind the Literature of Putnam County
A day of local history programming centering on
Putnam County, Georgia, and its literary figures, Joel Chandler Harris and
Alice Walker, with community stories and heritage documenting a shared history.
With the goal of engaging the local community to expand understanding of the
region’s history during the tumultuous end of segregation and the struggle for
Civil Rights, the project would build on institutional relationships between
the University’s Wilson Center for the Humanities and Arts, the Georgia Virtual
History project, the Putnam County Charter School System, and the Georgia
Writers Museum. In an earlier pilot, the applicant has worked to identify
characters and places in Harris’ Uncle
Remus tales and to connect them with documentary information found in the Putnam
County archives, including Works Project Administration interviews of former
slaves. The applicant has also been using Walker’s work in the local schools to
study segregation and civil rights and has conducted 75 oral histories with community
members. The proposed project would use the works of Harris and Walker to widen
the “lenses through which the past can more fully and meaningfully come alive.”
Documents and photographs provided by community members would be digitized and
oral histories recorded. Also planned are public readings of works by Harris
and Walker, talks by local history scholars, and a preview of a play on the
history of the region that is currently in production. Finally, the collected
materials would be exhibited at the Georgia Writers Museum and made available
through the Georgia Virtual History website.
Putnam County is where both Joel Chandler Harris and Alice
Walker were born to learn hard lessons about the world around them, a world
they changed in literature. Our project is part of an embedded commitment to
involve the larger community in telling its own stories, both as context for,
and document of, this crucial American literary landscape. The grant will allow
us to plan, promote, stage and share a day of local history programming in
spring 2017, with an exhibition and website.
The local history day event will include stations for scanning documents
and photographs, recording oral histories, listening to local music and public
readings from selected pieces specifically relating to Putnam County by Joel
Chandler Harris and Alice Walker, as well as talks by local history scholars,
and a preview of one short segment of a local history play being produced in
conjunction with this larger project.
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Project fields:
History, General
Program:
Common Heritage
Division:
Preservation and Access
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Total amounts:
$12,000 (approved) $12,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
1/1/2017 – 6/30/2018
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