An Interactive Digital Collection on Early Movie Culture in the American South

FAIN: FX-50021-08

Robert C. Allen
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

Going to the Show will be an online, interactive, digital collection that will illuminate cultural and social life in the early 20th-century urban South by documenting the role of movies and moviegoing in communities across North Carolina over the first three decades of the century. It will be hosted and maintained as a component of Documenting the American South, an award-winning digital library initiative of the University of North Carolina Libraries. It will foreground the determinative role of race in the experience of movies and of everyday urban life more generally in the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing South of the early 20th century. It will include 650 digitized and geo-referenced Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, photographs, and the first relational database of movie exhibition for a U.S. state. It will also form the basis of a monograph on space and race in U.S. film history.