Chronology

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1. Civil rights era · 1945–1975

2. 1971–1979
   Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill Christopher Fordham serves as dean of the UNC School of Medicine

   Fordham, who had earned a certificate in medicine at UNC in 1949, was dean of the School of Medicine from 1971 to 1979 and for part of that time also vice chancellor for health affairs. The Area Health Education Centers program began under him.

3. 1972 or 1973
   Appointment, election or service · University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 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.

4. Recent decades · 1976–2026

5. 1980–1988
   Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill Christopher Fordham serves as chancellor at Chapel Hill

   As chancellor Fordham oversaw a major revision of the undergraduate curriculum, while faculty research funding grew from 56 to 105 million dollars and the endowment from 30 to 130 million.

6. 1988
   Naming or commemoration · UNC campus, Chapel Hill UNC names its biotechnology building Fordham Hall

   In 1988 the university named its biotechnology building Christopher C. Fordham Hall.

7. March 5, 2008
   Naming or commemoration · Polk Place, UNC, Chapel Hill Thousands gather on Polk Place to remember Eve Carson

   On the day student body president Eve Carson was killed, thousands gathered on UNC's Polk Place for a moment of silence.

8. February 19, 2010
   Publication, speech or performance · Sonja Haynes Stone Center, UNC campus Ralph Frasier speaks at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center

   Ralph Frasier, one of UNC's first three Black undergraduates, gave a free public talk in the Hitchcock Room of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. He had left the university in 1958 without a degree.

9. May 2011
   Publication, speech or performance · Chapel Hill UNC graduates wear Alexander Julian's true-blue recycled gowns

   UNC's new commencement gowns, designed by Alexander Julian in true Carolina blue with white piping and made from recycled plastic bottles in North and South Carolina mills, were first worn at the May 2011 Commencement.

10. July 1, 2013
    Chapel Hill The Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy begins

    The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation funded a five-year chair at UNC honoring Lambeth's retirement, and three professors were named to it from July 1, 2013.

11. November 14, 2016
    Publication, speech or performance · Chapel Hill UNC puts Oliver Smithies's research notebooks online

    UNC released digitized copies of the research notebooks Smithies had kept since his graduate student days, while he was still working in his lab at 91.

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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 4, 2026.