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Orange County Indexed

Chronology

Key events from Orange County history: 100 highlights to start, then the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, each connected to the index. A storyline gathers many dated events into one history, such as the Regulator crisis.

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5 dated events match your filters.

Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–5.Back to highlights

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5 dated events
1968Civil rights era
  1. Civil rights era · 1945–1975
  2. Daphne Athas teaches creative writing at UNC

    Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill

    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.

    People: Randall Kenan

  3. Recent decades · 1976–2026
  4. The Black Cultural Center holds a reception for alumnus Randall Kenan

    Publication, speech or performance · Chapel Hill

    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.

    Subject: Sonja Haynes Stone Center (Black Cultural Center)

  5. Randall Kenan returns to UNC as a visiting professor

    Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill

    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.

    Subject: UNC Libraries

  6. Randall Kenan teaches creative writing on the UNC faculty

    Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill

    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.

  7. Lee Smith, Randall Kenan and Allan Gurganus gather with other authors at Brick Alley Books

    Publication, speech or performance · Hillsborough

    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.

    People: Lee Smith · Allan Gurganus

Suggest a correction to an entry →

A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →

Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.

Two mice reading back to back against a leaf, with the hand-lettered words Friends of the Orange County Public Library
Illustration by Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell, gifted to the Friends 2026