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Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
- 1770s
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Provincial Congress at Hillsborough orders its journal printed by James Davis
The congress meeting at Hillsborough directed that its proceedings be delivered to James Davis, the province's printer and a delegate for the town of New Bern, who was desired to print them and send a copy to each member. It also named a committee to state and settle his account for services done as printer to the province.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1810s
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George Moses Horton begins selling poems to UNC students
By about age twenty, George Moses Horton, enslaved on a Chatham County farm, was carrying fruit to the UNC campus on Sundays, and students began paying him to compose love poems and acrostics. His first printed poem appeared in April 1829, the year The Hope of Liberty was published.
- 1820s
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The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication
Dennis Heartt began publishing the weekly Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820, at three dollars a year. The paper ran until 1879, and its surviving issues are a main record of nineteenth-century Hillsborough and Orange County.
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The Hillsborough Recorder calls slavery a misfortune and urges colonization
Editor Dennis Heartt wrote that slavery harmed the state but argued against freeing people to remain in North Carolina. He proposed sending free Black people to Africa at public expense and asked the legislature to act.
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Caroline Lee Hentz befriends and tutors the poet George Moses Horton in Chapel Hill
While her husband Nicholas Hentz taught languages at the university, Caroline Lee Hentz befriended the enslaved poet George Moses Horton, tutored him in grammar and helped edit his work. She sent some of his poems to the Lancaster Gazette in her Massachusetts hometown, which printed them in 1829.
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George Moses Horton publishes The Hope of Liberty
George Moses Horton’s The Hope of Liberty was published in Raleigh, with supporters hoping sales could finance his freedom.
- 1830s
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Anne Royall publishes a hostile account of Chapel Hill
The traveling writer Anne Royall visited Chapel Hill in 1829 and in her Southern Tour, published in 1830, charged that the president's wife, Helen Caldwell, ruled the university. Battle answers with the faculty's account of the student she defended, who had been dismissed for disorder at a Sunday service.
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The Recorder shop prints Letters on Popular Education
The Hillsborough Recorder office printed Letters on Popular Education Addressed to the People of North Carolina in 1832.
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Peter Dromgoole disappears from Chapel Hill
Peter Pelham Dromgoole came to Chapel Hill in January 1833, failed the university's entrance examination and studied under a tutor. That spring, after bitter letters with his father, he vanished from his lodgings, leaving most of his belongings and a debt to a Chapel Hill merchant.
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Isaac C. Partridge publishes The Harbinger
Isaac C. Partridge's weekly The Harbinger, one of the county's first literary periodicals, began at Chapel Hill on August 27, 1833, after a prospectus that January, and ran for about a year. It covered the sciences and arts and leaned on professors Elisha Mitchell and William Hooper for its contents.
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George Moses Horton's The Hope of Liberty is reprinted in Philadelphia and Boston
The 1829 collection by the enslaved Chapel Hill poet came out in a second edition in Philadelphia in 1837 and a third in Boston in 1838.
- 1840s
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Hillsborough Literary Association forms with Dennis Heartt as secretary
A Literary Association was formed at Hillsborough in early 1842 with Frederick Nash as president; James S. Smith, Cadwallader Jones and Robert Burwell as vice presidents; Dennis Heartt as secretary; and Walter A. Norwood as treasurer. Heartt, a charter member, had helped organize it.
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Dennis Heartt prints The Poetical Works of George M. Horton
Dennis Heartt printed The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, the Colored Bard of North-Carolina at Hillsborough in 1845, with Horton's autobiography prefixed to the poems. It was the second book by Horton, who was still enslaved when it appeared.
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Students circulate the Literary Trumpet, a handwritten paper
William M. Howerton edited the Literary Trumpet, a pen-and-ink paper for private circulation, with a lady as nominal co-editor. Battle calls it the first of the university's informal student sheets.
- 1850s
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The 1850 census finds Dennis Heartt's printers and apprentices living at Heartsease
The 1850 census listed editor Dennis Heartt's household at Heartsease with his two daughters, his son Edwin with his wife and small daughter, two young printers, and four boys aged eleven to eighteen entered as students who were probably apprentices at the Hillsborough Recorder.
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Students revive the University Magazine
At a student meeting Jeremiah J. Slade moved to re-establish the magazine, and the first number appeared in February 1852 with editors from both literary societies and William D. Cooke of Raleigh as publisher. It ran until June 1861, the societies agreeing in 1859 to cover its deficits.
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The Hillsborough Recorder calls for a plank road from Hillsborough to Milton
An editorial regretted that no one had asked the last legislature to charter a company to build a plank road from Hillsborough to Milton by way of Roxboro or Yanceyville. It hoped a stock company would form under the general act of 1850-51 while a charter was sought.
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Elizabeth Keckly purchases freedom for herself and her son
Elizabeth Keckly purchased freedom for herself and her son in St. Louis, after earlier enslavement in Hillsborough.
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Charles P. Mallett keeps the University Bookstore on Franklin Street
Mallett's University Bookstore was one of four businesses the book first maps in 1858, along with Andrew Mickle's dry goods, John R. Hutchins's clothing store and C. Gottenburg's mattress shop. All may have opened before 1853.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1860s
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer publishes The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina
Encouraged by her friend, former governor David L. Swain, Spencer published her first book, an account of the war's last months in North Carolina that describes Wheeler's Confederate cavalry passing through Chapel Hill and the town's occupation by Union cavalry in April 1865.
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Dennis Heartt gives up the Hillsborough Recorder after nearly fifty years
In the Recorder of January 11, 1869, Dennis Heartt announced that his connection with the paper would end with that number, thirteen months short of fifty years after its first issue. An 1899 history of the paper says he sold it to Capt. C. N. B. Evans of the Milton Chronicle.
- 1870s
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John D. Cameron becomes editor and publisher of the Recorder
John Donald Cameron took over the Recorder from the Evans family, who kept only their Milton Chronicle. His masthead in January 1879 read 'J. D. Cameron, Editor and Proprietor', New Series Vol. 7, Old Series Vol. 58.
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Fuller's Sea-Gift, the first novel set partly in Chapel Hill, is published
Fuller turned his student years into Sea-Gift, which follows John Smith through the university and the Civil War and draws on the Dromgoole duel legend of Piney Prospect. Students later called it the Freshman's Bible.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer learns on her fiftieth birthday that the university will reopen
A telegram from Raleigh on March 20, 1875, reported that the legislature had passed a bill letting the closed University of North Carolina reorganize with some state support. Spencer, whose letters to state leaders had pressed for the reopening, and a few friends entered South Building and tolled the college bell to celebrate.
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John D. Cameron moves the Recorder from Hillsborough to Durham, ending fifty-nine years of publication in the county seat
Cameron carried the paper fifteen miles east to the tobacco town, where it continued as the Durham Recorder, published every Wednesday. The last issue under the Hillsborough title in the digitized run is March 5, 1879; the first Durham issue there is July 2, 1879.
- 1880s
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Stephen B. Weeks publishes a register of the Philanthropic Society
Stephen Beauregard Weeks, class of 1886, published a 72-page catalogue of Philanthropic Society members since 1795, with a short history of the society and notes on members' careers.
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The revived Hillsboro Recorder moves Dennis Heartt's old press into its office
The new Hillsboro Recorder reported that it had just moved the press and some wood type Dennis Heartt brought from Connecticut for the first Recorder of 1820 out of a Hillsborough cellar, where they had sat since 1867, and into its own office.
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Students found the Order of Gimghoul after hearing the Dromgoole story
Five undergraduates founded a secret society after hearing university president Kemp Battle tell the Dromgoole story. They first called it the Order of Dromgoole and later shortened the name to Gimghoul.
- 1890s
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Thomas Hume leads the university Shakespeare Club's study of All's Well That Ends Well
In the 1890-91 session Dr. Thomas Hume chaired a Shakespeare Club meeting on All's Well That Ends Well, gave a paper on the play's mixed styles and closed with notes on new books. Other members gave papers on the plot's source in Boccaccio and on its characters.
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William James Battle publishes a register of the Dialectic Society
The Dialectic Society catalogue, edited by William James Battle, was published in 1890. Its 168 pages hold a history of the society, members' recollections and sketches of members since 1795.
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The Tar Heel publishes its first issue
The first issue of The Tar Heel, volume 1, number 1, appeared on Thursday, February 23, 1893, as a weekly published under the auspices of the University Athletic Association, with Charles Baskerville as editor in chief. The student paper took the name The Daily Tar Heel in 1929.
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Frank Nash returns to Hillsborough to live and write
After breakdowns in health ended most of his Tarboro law practice, Frank Nash moved back to Hillsborough, where he had grown up at the Nash-Kollock school. He stayed about twenty years and began writing historical romances and local history.
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The University Magazine issues its Golden Jubilee number
In 1894 the University Magazine marked fifty years since its first issue with a Golden Jubilee number, prepared largely by faculty editor Collier Cobb and filled with articles on the university's history.
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President Winston ends support and the University Magazine stops
In 1895 President George T. Winston decided the university was not getting enough for its subscription, and the University Magazine stopped publishing until it was revived a few years later.
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The University Magazine is revived
The student literary magazine, suspended under President Winston, resumed in 1897 with S. S. Lamb as editor in chief, supported by the university and the two literary societies.
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Sallie Walker Stockard becomes UNC's first woman graduate
Sallie Walker Stockard, a Guilford College graduate, entered UNC's senior class in the fall of 1897, the first year the university admitted women. She became the first woman to graduate from UNC when the class of 1898 received its degrees on June 1, 1898, and she earned a master's degree there in 1900.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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Frank Nash publishes Hillsboro, Colonial and Revolutionary
Nash collected his articles on the town from the Charlotte Observer and the North Carolina Booklet into a book, printed in Raleigh by Edwards & Broughton. It was reprinted in 1953.
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Phillips Russell graduates from the university and helps found the Golden Fleece
Russell edited the student paper the Tar Heel and was one of the founders of the honorary society Golden Fleece before graduating in 1904.
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Edward Kidder Graham organizes the Odd Number Club for student writers
Members met monthly to hear poems, sketches and prose by one another, kept ties with like clubs at Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Texas and Vanderbilt, and worked to build up campus journalism.
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James Finch Royster joins the university's English department
James Finch Royster came to the university's English department in the fall of 1907 and taught there for seven years.
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The University Dramatic Club stages a student show
On May 1, 1907, the University Dramatic Club acted a student-written show with a mock sermon and a burlesque faculty meeting. L. W. Parker was the club president.
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Frank Nash serves as mayor of Hillsborough
During Nash's four years as mayor the town laid its first concrete sidewalks, and plans for a public library began to take shape.
- 1910s
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Edwin Greenlaw joins the UNC faculty
Greenlaw, a Renaissance scholar, came to the University of North Carolina in the fall of 1913 at the age of 39.
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Edwin Greenlaw heads UNC's English department
Appointed chairman of the English department in June 1914, Greenlaw built it from eight faculty members to 37 by 1925, when he left for Johns Hopkins.
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Edwin Greenlaw becomes managing editor of Studies in Philology
Greenlaw took over the university's journal Studies in Philology in 1915 and reorganized it as a quarterly.
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The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press
Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers, organized in 1918, and the University of North Carolina Press, founded in 1922, made Chapel Hill a place where plays and books were made as well as read.
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The Carolina Playmakers are organized
Frederick H. Koch organized the Carolina Playmakers at UNC.
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Carolina Playmakers present their first bill
The first bill included Thomas Wolfe’s The Return of Buck Gavin, with Wolfe in the title role.
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A thunderstorm halts Esther Wake at Cameron Park during the homecoming
University Summer School students staged Adolph Vermont's play Esther Wake, on the early history of Hillsborough and Orange County, at Cameron Park for more than 5,000 people. A heavy thunderstorm stopped it in the second act.
- 1920s
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Archibald Henderson heads UNC's mathematics department
Henderson succeeded his uncle, William Cain, as head of the mathematics department in 1920 and led it until he retired in 1948. He built up its graduate program and departmental library.
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James Finch Royster returns as Kenan Professor of English Philology
After seven years in Texas, Royster accepted the Kenan Professorship of English Philology, which he held until his death. Covington says President Chase recruited him back from Austin.
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The University of North Carolina Press is founded
On June 12, 1922, university librarian Louis Round Wilson, nine other faculty members and three trustees founded the University of North Carolina Press, the first university press in the South. Its first book, William C. Coker's study of water molds, appeared in 1923, and William T. Couch became director in 1932.
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Louis Graves founds the Orange Printshop in Chapel Hill
Graves set up the Orange Printshop in 1923 alongside his Chapel Hill Weekly and leased it to W. M. Pugh in 1940. It printed books and magazines and set a record for delivering the state Session Laws.
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The Chapel Hill Weekly publishes its first issue
Louis Graves published the first issue of his newspaper, the Chapel Hill Weekly, on March 2, 1923. He owned and edited it until 1954.
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Hatcher Hughes wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Hatcher Hughes, a UNC graduate and former instructor in English there, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Hell-Bent fer Heaven, a play about a mountain preacher. He was then teaching at Columbia University in New York.
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A. C. Howell serves as the university's first secretary of the faculty
Almonte Charles Howell, an English professor at the University of North Carolina, was the first secretary of the faculty, holding the post for twenty years.
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Playmakers Theatre opens
The Carolina Playmakers dedicated their theatre in the remodeled Smith Hall, the 1850s building later used as a library and law school, on Monday, November 23, 1925, with talks by Frederick Koch and President Harry W. Chase and three new folk plays.
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Chase keeps the University Press from publishing Collier Cobb's book on evolution
Geologist Collier Cobb had a manuscript on evolution in hand at the University of North Carolina Press. Chase wrote him that the book was good but that putting it out under the university's imprint would read to enemies as a challenge while the antievolution fight was still on. It was never published by the press.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray joins the UNC library staff
Elizabeth Janet Gray, later Elizabeth Gray Vining, came to Chapel Hill in 1926 as an assistant cataloger at the University library, after library school at Drexel. Friends in town knew her as Betty Gray.
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Hope Summerell Chamberlain's Old Days in Chapel Hill is published
Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, illustrated with her own drawings, was published in 1926. The University of North Carolina Press was still advertising it in the Chapel Hill Weekly in 1927 and 1930.
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T. Felix Hickerson publishes Highway Curves and Earthworks
UNC civil engineering professor Thomas Felix Hickerson, who laid out the curving roads of Rocky Ridge Farm, first published his road design text in 1926. Later issued as Route Location and Design, it was used in engineering programs at some 83 colleges.
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William T. Couch joins the University of North Carolina Press as assistant director
Couch, who had moved to the Chapel Hill area in 1917, began at the press in 1926 as assistant director under Louis Round Wilson and took over as director in 1932.
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The Student Council removes the Carolina Magazine editors over the story 'Slaves'
Just as classes began, the council voted to remove the editor and assistant editor for printing a story with a hint of interracial sex. On appeal, a faculty committee Chase appointed called publication bad taste and poor judgment but not misconduct, and set the council's action aside. Durham textile executive Kemp Lewis protested; Chase defended the committee.
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Paul Green wins the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham’s Bosom
Paul Green received the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for In Abraham’s Bosom.
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Howard Mumford Jones opens the Bull's Head Bookshop in Murphey Hall
English professor Howard Mumford Jones announced the Bull's Head Book Store, a non-profit shop for modern novels and short stories in his office at 214 Murphey Hall. It later moved to the YMCA building, the ground floor of the university library and, in 1968, the Daniels Building.
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UNC library worker Elizabeth Janet Gray sells her first book
Gray, a member of the University library staff, signed a contract with Doubleday, Page & Co. for Meredith's Ann, a story for girls set in the New Hampshire mountains. She went on to write several more books while living in Chapel Hill.
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Press governors object to Paul Green's introduction to Congaree Sketches
Called before Chase and the press's board, assistant editor William T. Couch heard Royster and the others condemn Green's introduction, which said neither race could leave the ditch until whites gave Blacks a hand. Couch pointed out that some 150 advance copies were already out, and the book went out as printed. Six months later, at Chase's order, unsold copies went to a commercial publisher, which reprinted it without Green's introduction.
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The Carolina Magazine prints an issue of work by Black writers, including Langston Hughes's 'Mulatto'
The student magazine's 'Negro Number' carried only work by African American writers. Hughes's 'Mulatto' drew none of the reaction that the story 'Slaves' had caused the fall before, though both dealt with the same subject.
- 1930s
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Howard Mumford Jones leaves Chapel Hill for the University of Michigan
Howard Mumford Jones, a member of the university's English faculty since coming from the University of Texas in 1925, left for the University of Michigan in 1930 and handed his syndicated book-review column, The Literary Lantern, to Paul Green and his wife.
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Phillips Russell returns to Chapel Hill to teach creative writing
After years as a newspaperman in New York and London, Russell came back in 1931 and taught writing at the university for twenty-five years, first in the English department and then in the School of Journalism. The Atlantic Monthly called his class, often held outdoors under the trees, one of the four best in the country.
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Contempo and the Intimate Bookshop begin in Chapel Hill
Milton Abernethy, Anthony Buttitta and three other young men distributed the first issue of Contempo, a four-page review of ideas and personalities, in Chapel Hill on April 27, 1931. They also ran the Intimate Bookshop from a dormitory room; by June it had moved above the Cavalier Cafeteria, and Contempo was later headquartered there.
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Langston Hughes reads in Gerrard Hall after Contempo prints "Christ in Alabama"
Milton Abernethy of Contempo invited Langston Hughes to Chapel Hill and printed his Scottsboro poem "Christ in Alabama" in the issue dated December 1, timed to appear days before the visit. Hughes spoke and read to students and townspeople in Gerrard Hall on the night of November 19, 1931.
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Milton Abernethy moves the Intimate Bookshop across Henderson Street
Abernethy, who began selling books from his dormitory and had moved over the Carolina Cafeteria in 1931, took the shop into the west end of Hoot Patterson's old store.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray publishes Jane Hope, a novel set in Chapel Hill
Viking Press issued Jane Hope, a novel for young readers set in Chapel Hill, whose heroine comes from Philadelphia to live with her grandparents. The Chapel Hill Weekly noted that the author had absorbed the village's history, with a chapter on the Buchanan commencement.
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Shelby Foote arrives in Chapel Hill to enroll at UNC
Shelby Foote came to Chapel Hill in fall 1935 to register at UNC despite having been turned down, following his Greenville friends Walker and LeRoy Percy. He stayed two years and contributed nine stories to Carolina Magazine.
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Paul Green finishes a small writing retreat on his land east of Chapel Hill
Playwright Paul Green finishes a small building for study and writing on the tract he had bought about two years earlier beyond the Strowd farm, between the Durham and Raleigh roads. He meant to build a family house near it later.
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Paul and Elizabeth Green sell their village home and lay out a new house east of town
Paul and Elizabeth Green sell their home in the Glen to Mr. and Mrs. J. Manson Valentine and, with advice from a landscape architect, site a family house, gardens and outbuildings on their tract east of the village, hoping to move in by September.
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Hope Summerell Chamberlain talks about Old Days in Chapel Hill at the Bull's Head Bookshop
The Bull's Head Bookshop on the ground floor of the University Library announced a Tuesday afternoon talk by Chamberlain about her book, with autographed copies on sale for $1.35.
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Betty Smith edits a collection of plays with Frederick Koch and Robert Finch
Smith coedited Plays for Schools and Little Theatres with Koch and Finch in 1937 and wrote a catalog of one-act plays.
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The Lost Colony premieres
Paul Green's pageant-drama The Lost Colony opened on Roanoke Island on Sunday evening, July 4, 1937, and the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that it scored a hit. The production had Chapel Hill roots: Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers were involved, and at least one actor came to Chapel Hill in June to rehearse.
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Daphne Athas's family moves to Chapel Hill
Athas came to Chapel Hill as a teenager in 1938 with her Greek family, who during the Depression traded a large Massachusetts home for a small house on Merritt Mill Road. She spent most of the rest of her life in Orange County.
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UNC Press publishes These Are Our Lives
The University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill published These Are Our Lives in 1939, life histories gathered by Federal Writers' Project workers in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, with a preface by W. T. Couch.
- 1940s
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Daphne Athas graduates from UNC
Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray wins the Newbery Medal
Gray received the 1943 John Newbery Medal for Adam of the Road, a story of 13th-century England, a decade after she left Chapel Hill. She was then living in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in Chapel Hill, is published
Smith wrote the novel in a one-room house on North Street in Chapel Hill, rising about half past five and working against the chimney wall to keep warm. Harper published it on 17 August 1943 and it sold more than 150,000 copies within two weeks.
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Coates publishes his first history of the Institute of Government, paid for by DeWitt Wallace
In place of a speaking tour, Coates wrote a 76-page account of how the Institute grew out of his law classroom, issued under the Popular Government name in the National University Extension Association's studies series. Wallace paid for 30,000 copies for national distribution, and on the advice of Louis R. Wilson and W. T. Couch, Coates took out the profanity before it went to press.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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William T. Couch leaves the University of North Carolina Press
Couch resigned in August 1945, after thirteen years as director, to lead the University of Chicago Press.
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Orville Campbell starts the Colonial Press in Carrboro
Established in 1947, the Colonial Press did commercial printing for the university and state agencies and had 20 workers by 1953. Its owner also wrote the football song All the Way Choo-Choo.
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Writer Peter Taylor buys the old Laws house on East King Street
Short story writer Peter Taylor, then teaching English at the Woman's College in Greensboro, bought the Ed Laws house on East King Street. The paper reported the purchase when he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in April 1950.
- 1950s
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The Southern Part of Heaven is published
William Meade Prince wrote and illustrated The Southern Part of Heaven, a book about growing up in Chapel Hill. Its title became a common nickname for the town.
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John Ehle teaches in UNC's radio, television and motion pictures department
Ehle, an Asheville native who came to Chapel Hill after infantry service in World War II and graduated from UNC in 1949, taught in the university's Communications Center, later the Department of Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures, from 1951 to 1963. He published his first books while teaching there.
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Manly Wade Wellman settles in Chapel Hill
The writer Manly Wade Wellman, who had moved to Pinebluff, North Carolina, after the Second World War, relocated to Chapel Hill, where he lived for the rest of his life.
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Howard Mumford Jones gives the address at the dedication of the university library addition
Howard Mumford Jones, a former member of the university's English faculty then at Harvard, gave the principal address, on the library in higher education, at the dedication of the $1.6 million addition to the university library, held in Memorial Hall.
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Louis Graves sells the Chapel Hill Weekly
After 31 years as its editor and owner, Louis Graves sold the Chapel Hill Weekly in 1954 to the Chapel Hill Publishing Company. He stayed on as contributing editor through 1960.
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Fumiko Seki lives in Chapel Hill and records the town's color line
Fumiko Seki came to Chapel Hill when her husband received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study at UNC. As a mother, wife and student she watched how residents kept the color line and met Black students, and she later described the town in her memoir Chaperu hiru monogatari.
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O. B. Hardison Jr. teaches in the English department
Hardison, a Renaissance specialist with UNC bachelor's and master's degrees, joined the English department in 1957 and edited Studies in Philology. He left in 1969 to direct the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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Howell's The Kenan Professorships is named one of the best Southern books of
The Kenan Professorships, written by UNC English professor A. C. Howell and published by the University Press with illustrations by William Meade Prince and Adrian Lamb, was chosen for design among 25 best Southern books of 1956.
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The Intimate Bookshop moves into the old Berman Department Store on East Franklin Street
After Sam Berman's death, Paul and Isabel Smith moved their bookshop into the store his department store had used, the 119 East Franklin building it kept for forty years.
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William S. Powell becomes curator of the North Carolina Collection
Powell, who had joined the university library's North Carolina Collection in 1951, was named its curator after Mary Lindsay Thornton retired.
- 1960s
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Edward and Elizabeth Waugh publish The South Builds
Architect Edward Waugh and his wife Elizabeth published The South Builds with the University of North Carolina Press in 1960, a survey of new Southern architecture that favored modern buildings suited to the region's climate.
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Manly Wade Wellman teaches creative writing at the university
Wellman taught creative writing classes in the Evening College of the University of North Carolina and was known for helping new writers.
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Allen A. and Pauline O. Lloyd publish a history of the town of Hillsborough
Pharmacist Allen A. Lloyd published a 200-page, illustrated History of the Town of Hillsborough, with his wife Pauline O. Lloyd named as co-author, after working on it since 1945. He paid about $2,500 to print it and sold copies at James Pharmacy, which he ran.
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Paul and Isabel Smith sell the Intimate Bookshop to Wallace Kuralt
The Smiths sold the East Franklin bookshop to Kuralt but kept running a rare-book department inside the store until the end of 1968.
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Harper and Row publishes John Ehle's The Free Men, an account of the Chapel Hill protests
Ehle's nonfiction book traced the 1963–1964 civil rights campaign in Chapel Hill through three of its leaders, John Dunne, Pat Cusick and Quinton Baker, from the first pickets at a cafe to mass arrests and long prison sentences.
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Time magazine names Hardison one of the country's outstanding college teachers
Time magazine featured Hardison, then teaching English at Chapel Hill, as one of the country's outstanding college instructors.
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Carolyn Kizer is a visiting writer-in-residence at UNC
Poet Carolyn Kizer was one of four writers-in-residence UNC brought to campus for the 1967–68 year, meeting informally with classes and student writers and giving a public address. During the residency she directed the student publication project of a new English course on little magazines.
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Louis D. Rubin Jr. teaches English at UNC-Chapel Hill
Rubin came to UNC from Hollins College in 1967 and taught English for twenty-two years, retiring from teaching in 1989 as University Distinguished Professor.
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Daphne Athas teaches creative writing at UNC
Athas taught creative writing at UNC from 1968 until she retired from teaching in 2009. In the 1970s she took over the stylistics course Glossolalia, known for its annual student performances, and her students included Randall Kenan, Michael Parker and Sarah Dessen.
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Albert Coates publishes What the University of North Carolina Meant to Me
Coates's collection of autobiographical pieces followed him from a Smithfield boyhood through his student years and law teaching to the building of the Institute, with long sections on his work with the FBI and with the University's Extension Division.
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Blyden Jackson joins UNC's English department and becomes its first tenured Black professor
Blyden Jackson joined the UNC-Chapel Hill English department in 1969 and became the university's first tenured Black faculty member. He established the study of African American literature at Carolina and later served as assistant dean of the Graduate School, working to recruit Black faculty and students.
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The class of 1966 unveils a bronze Thomas Wolfe memorial beside Person Hall
An 850-pound bronze relief of an angel, designed by art professor Richard Kinnaird from an idea of Armistead Maupin, was unveiled at the northeast corner of Person Hall. It moved to New East in 1972 and later to a courtyard between Murphey and Greenlaw halls.
- 1970s
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Carolyn Kizer joins the UNC English faculty to head poetry writing
Kizer joined UNC's English department on February 1, 1970, as a visiting lecturer, to develop a poetry curriculum and head the poetry side of the creative writing program under Max Steele. She remained UNC's poet-in-residence until 1974.
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Daphne Athas publishes Entering Ephesus, a novel set in Carrboro and Chapel Hill
Her coming-of-age novel, set in Carrboro and Chapel Hill during World War II among intellectuals, poor southerners and Greek immigrants, was named one of the ten best novels of the year by Time magazine.
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Phillips Russell publishes These Old Stone Walls
Russell's last book, a collection of stories and historical anecdotes about Chapel Hill, appeared in 1972, two years before he died.
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Powell moves from the North Carolina Collection to the history faculty
Powell left the North Carolina Collection to teach North Carolina history on the UNC faculty, where he stayed until 1986 and taught more than 6,000 students.
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Carolyn Kizer and Po Fei Huang read Chinese poems in Greenlaw Hall
Kizer, then UNC's poet-in-residence, and Po Fei Huang, director of East Asian language and literature at Yale, read and chanted Chinese poems and translations in 101 Greenlaw as part of a week of programs on East Asia.
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Annie Dillard wins the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, drawn from her private writings about the surroundings of her home in Roanoke, Virginia. This was years before she lived in Hillsborough.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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The Carrboro Bicentennial Commission publishes Mack Watts's Carrboro Yesterday and Today
For the 1976 Bicentennial the town's commission issued Mack Watts's local history, Carrboro Yesterday and Today. The 1983 inventory drew on it for the Weaver House and other early sites and names Watts among the memoir writers who sharpened local interest in the town's past.
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Lee Smith teaches creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill
Novelist Lee Smith taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill as a lecturer from 1978 to 1981, before joining NC State.
- 1980s
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Playwright Paul Green is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Paul Green (1894-1981), the dramatist who wrote the outdoor drama The Lost Colony, was buried in the cemetery.
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Louis Rubin and Shannon Ravenel start the press that became Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Rubin, then a UNC English professor, and editor Shannon Ravenel formed Bright Leaf Press, Inc., working from a garage at Rubin's home with money for a first printing of 1,500 copies. As Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill it went on to publish Clyde Edgerton, Dori Sanders and Jill McCorkle.
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Shanklin's Press prints Irene Oliver Pender's History of Orange County Schools
Shanklin's Press of Hillsborough, the Black-owned print shop run by the family of Thomas Shanklin, published Irene Oliver Pender's A History of Orange County Schools: 1752-1983. The shop began in the family home in the 1960s and later moved to Cornelius Street.
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Annie Dillard reads at UNC during a two-week campus visit
Dillard spent two weeks in Chapel Hill in March 1983 as a preliminary event of the student-run Fine Arts Festival, giving a poetry reading on March 16 and leading afternoon seminars. The festival's organizer later said she was shocked by the size of the audiences for Dillard and Robert Bly.
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UNC gives John Ehle its Distinguished Alumnus Award
The university's 1984 citation honored Ehle as a writer and for his work, beginning as special assistant to Governor Terry Sanford in 1963 and 1964, on the School of the Arts, the School of Science and Mathematics and the Governor's School.
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Carolyn Kizer wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Kizer won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Yin: New Poems, more than a decade after she left her UNC post.
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Charles Kuralt gives the UNC spring commencement address
Kuralt, who had edited the Daily Tar Heel as a student, returned to Chapel Hill to deliver the University's spring commencement address in 1985. He told the graduates that the influence of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moves outward to the farthest corners of the state.
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Elizabeth Spencer teaches in UNC's creative writing program
Spencer and her husband John Rusher moved from Montreal to Chapel Hill in 1986, and she joined UNC's Creative Writing Program as a visiting writer that fall, teaching until 1992. She lived in Chapel Hill for the rest of her life.
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The Emily Dickinson Centennial Conference holds sessions at Bolin Brook Farm
Sessions of the Emily Dickinson Centennial Conference met at Bolin Brook Farm, the Andrews home near Calvander, in April 1986. The Andrewses often opened the property to meetings and house tours.
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Doug Marlette wins the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning
Doug Marlette won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for work he did at The Charlotte Observer and The Atlanta Constitution. By then he was working for the Constitution in Atlanta.
- 1990s
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Louis Rubin hands Algonquin Books to Shannon Ravenel and Robert Rubin
A year after Workman Publishing of New York bought Algonquin, Rubin turned control over to his son Robert and to Shannon Ravenel, who moved the St. Louis office to Chapel Hill.
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Shelby Foote receives the Charles Frankel Prize
The National Endowment for the Humanities gave Shelby Foote the Charles Frankel Prize, the award now called the National Humanities Medal, as novelist, historian and principal commentator of the PBS documentary The Civil War.
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UNC awards Shelby Foote an honorary Doctor of Letters
UNC-Chapel Hill conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters on Shelby Foote, a UNC student from 1935 to 1937, for his fiction and his three-volume narrative history of the Civil War.
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The Black Cultural Center holds a reception for alumnus Randall Kenan
UNC's Black Cultural Center held a reception for Kenan, a 1985 graduate, on the publication of his story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead; the Bull's Head Bookshop held an autograph party for the book the same day.
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Shelby Foote becomes UNC's first Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence
Shelby Foote spent the fall 1993 semester at UNC as the university's first Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence.
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Perry Deane Young speaks at Chapel Hill High School after gay-authored books are pulled from a reading list
After four gay- and lesbian-authored books were pulled from an English teacher’s multicultural reading list at Chapel Hill High School, Young and author Susan Johnson spoke at an evening program there and joined a panel. The Orange Lesbian and Gay Association and Many Voices, One Community sponsored it.
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Randall Kenan returns to UNC as a visiting professor
Kenan, who decided on a writing career in UNC English classes, came back to Chapel Hill in 1995 as a visiting professor, and read that February in the Second Sunday series at Wilson Library.
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Annie Dillard is UNC's Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence
Dillard spent a week at UNC in the English department's Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence program, meeting creative writing students and giving a free public reading in Memorial Hall on February 1. The Daily Tar Heel reported a full house.
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Allan Gurganus is a visiting scholar at UNC's Institute for the Arts and Humanities
Gurganus spent 1996 as a visiting fellow of UNC's Institute for the Arts and Humanities and presented at the institute's symposium Echoes of Home, Imitations of Return in Hill Hall that October.
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Perry Deane Young writes a column for the Chapel Hill Herald
Young, a Vietnam War correspondent and author, wrote a column for the Chapel Hill Herald from 1996 to 2003.
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Allan Gurganus and Marly Youmans sign books to fund a Habitat for Humanity house
Hillsborough novelist Allan Gurganus and Carrboro author Marly Youmans signed books at the Intimate Bookshop in Eastgate, with 15 percent of the evening's sales going to a new Habitat for Humanity house sponsored by seven fraternities and sororities and four parishes.
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Wallace Kuralt closes the Intimate Bookshop's East Franklin Street store
Forced to cut back, Kuralt gave up all but one of his Intimate Bookshops, and the one he kept was not the long-time store at 119 East Franklin. The empty building was to be remodeled for a Sephora cosmetics shop.
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Annie Dillard joins the Rubin writers panel at the North Carolina Literary Festival
At the North Carolina Literary Festival at UNC, Dillard sat on a panel of writers who had studied under Louis Rubin, with Lee Smith, Katie Letcher Lyle, Margaret Gibson, Sylvia Wilkinson and Elizabeth Seydel Morgan, in Hamilton Hall.
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Elizabeth Spencer reads in Memorial Hall at the North Carolina Literary Festival
Spencer gave a program in Memorial Hall on the Saturday of the North Carolina Literary Festival at UNC, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South.
- 2000s
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Doug Marlette teaches at UNC as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of journalism
Hillsborough cartoonist Doug Marlette served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, teaching courses on the editorial cartoon and on humor writing.
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Doug Marlette's novel The Bridge, set in a fictional Hillsborough, stirs the town's writers
Marlette's first novel, The Bridge, is set in the fictional town of Eno, modeled on Hillsborough, where he lived and worked. Some of Hillsborough's writers took offense at characters based on them, and the manager of the Bull's Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill cancelled a reading.
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Shannon Ravenel leaves Algonquin's editorial directorship for her own imprint
Ravenel stepped down as editorial director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill to choose books for Shannon Ravenel Books, an imprint within Algonquin, by then a division of Workman Publishing.
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Elizabeth Spencer gives the Thomas Wolfe Prize lecture at UNC
Spencer received UNC's third Thomas Wolfe Prize, given by the English department to writers with distinguished bodies of work, and gave the free public Thomas Wolfe Lecture in the Hanes Art Center auditorium.
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Randall Kenan teaches creative writing on the UNC faculty
Kenan joined UNC's English and Comparative Literature faculty full time in 2003 and taught fiction, nonfiction and food writing until his death in August 2020 at his home in Hillsborough.
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Allan Gurganus speaks at the Festival for a Better Future rally on McCorkle Place
Gurganus was a featured speaker, with law dean Gene Nichol and state Senator Ellie Kinnaird, at the Festival for a Better Future, a pre-election rally sponsored by several campus organizations on McCorkle Place.
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Lee Smith, Randall Kenan and Allan Gurganus gather with other authors at Brick Alley Books
Kenan, Lee Smith and Allan Gurganus shared stories at a gathering of authors at Brick Alley Books in Hillsborough. The Daily Tar Heel used the evening to report on the town as a home for writers, quoting Smith, Gurganus, Kenan, poet laureate Mike Troy and photographer Elizabeth Matheson.
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Flyleaf Books opens
Flyleaf Books, an independent bookstore in the Midtown Market shopping center on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Chapel Hill, opened in November 2009 with a soft opening set for November 16. Jamie Fiocco, Sarah Carr and Land Arnold ran the store, and its grand opening followed on January 9, 2010.
- 2010s
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Annie Dillard receives the National Humanities Medal
President Barack Obama presented Dillard with the 2014 National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony for her reflections on human life and nature. The Associated Press identified her then as Annie Dillard of Key West, Florida.
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Chapel Hill creates a poet laureate post and names CJ Suitt the first
The Chapel Hill Town Council voted to launch a poet laureate program, initiated by council members Rachel Schaevitz and Allen Buansi, and appointed CJ Suitt as the first. He took up the role in January 2020, and the town stretched the two-year term to three because of the pandemic.
- 2020s
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Tressie McMillan Cottom joins the faculty of UNC’s School of Information and Library Science
Sociologist and author Tressie McMillan Cottom joined the UNC School of Information and Library Science as an associate professor and became a senior faculty researcher in the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life.
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Daphne Athas dies in Chapel Hill
Athas died in Chapel Hill on July 28, 2020. She had long lived in Carrboro in a small cabin she built with friends and into her late 80s was a familiar sight biking across town.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom wins a MacArthur Fellowship
The MacArthur Foundation named McMillan Cottom a 2020 fellow for her work as a sociologist, writer and public scholar on race, gender, education and digital technology, including her books Lower Ed and Thick. She was an associate professor at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science.
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Daniel Wallace gives UNC's Winter Commencement address
Novelist and English professor Daniel Wallace was the speaker at UNC's Winter Commencement in the Dean E. Smith Center.
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Lee Smith launches her novel Silver Alert at the Main Library in Hillsborough
The Orange County Public Library held a reading and signing at its Main Library on West Margaret Lane to launch Lee Smith's novel Silver Alert.
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A $10 million gift creates the O.B. Hardison Scholarship at UNC
Stephen Israel, a 1966 graduate whose life was changed by Hardison's courses, gave $10 million for undergraduate humanities scholarships named for his former professor.
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Kathleen DuVal wins the Bancroft Prize
UNC historian Kathleen DuVal won the Bancroft Prize for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. She was the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor in UNC's history department.
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Kathleen DuVal wins the Pulitzer Prize for History
UNC historian Kathleen DuVal won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, a history of Native American nations over a thousand years. She taught early American and American Indian history at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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