Are you a UNCW faculty member who wants to integrate archival materials and/or other historical primary sources into your coursework? We can help you with that!  

The Center’s public services archivist, Samantha Crisp, is available to help faculty members connect their students with the historical documents in the Center’s collections, design assignments incorporating primary source research, and source archival collections at other repositories in support of a particular research topic or assignment. This will usually involve one or more class field trips to the library for a hands-on session exploring the Center’s collections. During these instruction sessions, an archivist will introduce students to several foundational primary source literacy concepts, such as understanding and interpreting primary sources, using sources to generate research questions, navigating finding aids and other search tools, and critically interrogating sources to determine biases, silences, and power relationships.

The Center’s collections are vast in scope, and we have materials documenting a wide range of historical topics. Some past instruction sessions and student projects have focused on the following topics, but this list is not exhaustive: 
 

• UNCW history
• Local families and organizations
• The Civil War and Reconstruction
• The Civil Rights Movement in Wilmington
• Regional politics
• Coastal environmental history
• The Lower Cape Fear's visual and performing arts community
• The history of science and medicine
• Women’s history, domesticity, and women’s health
• Erotica, pulp and noir fiction, and dime store novels
• Miniature books
• Pseudoscience, the afterlife, and the occult
• The history of the book

If you’re interested in chatting more about how we can support you and your students in your/their research, reach out to us today!