Agenda - 03-14-2023 Work Session; 6 - Historic Preservation Commission – Appointments Discussion

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6 Page 2 of 3 Anne Whisnant NPS and the Organization of American Historians. In 2021, 1 completed a major National Register of Historic Places amended documentation project for Portsmouth Village, NC, a former Outer Banks community now at the north end of Cape Lookout National Seashore. The project expanded the NR boundary and developed an area of significance for African American history in the district. My most recent project, co-written with my husband and partner David E. Whisnant, is a study on African American history for the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, NC. Entitled Black Lives and Whitened Stories: From the Lowcountry to the Mountains, this study won the 2022 Excellence in Consulting Award from the National Council on Public History. Prior to coming to Duke, I spent a decade in administration and on the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill and a year on the faculty at East Carolina University. At both places, I taught North Carolina history and public history. At UNC, I developed and taught(for a decade)the Introduction to Public History course, which often included student projects. The most important of those was an Orange County-focused project: Names in Brick and Stone: Histories from UNC s Built Landscape (2015-17), which featured histories related to the building names on the UNC campus (see https://unchistory.web.unc.edu/). My full CV is available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1 Eb4ii7sWdvyQuhW3LzuQ3c- gbhk1j93x2t_IgOPpvtl/edit?usp=sharing Reasons for wanting to serve on this board: From 2015-17, 1 and my UNC students created an expansive history project focused on the UNC campus. This work drew me into the history of the county where I have resided permanently since 1994. During the pandemic, my husband and I took daily walks along Morgan Creek behind our home. As a side project during this time, we began looking into the very specific history of the property that became the Laurel Springs neighborhood where we live. We overlaid historical aerial photographs on current maps, traced barbed wire around the neighborhood, and researched the Durham and Lloyd families who previously owned this land. I realized that so much interesting history lies within close reach. I would like to serve on this board to contribute some of my expertise to the ongoing larger project of discovering, preserving, and highlighting our County s history for the interest and benefit of our citizens. I would like to engage others in the excitement of discovery that I have experienced and help to highlight resources that make these histories more visible and relevant. With my work described above, I am especially interested in surfacing histories that have had less attention, including those of women, and Black and indigenous populations, and the larger social-economic-cultural-political systems that have operated in what is now Orange County. I think of history and its tangible remains as critical social resources that help us understand our lives and make decisions in our own time. I would also see serving on this board as a way to learn more about the practice of historic preservation, which I ve taught and read about and done a little of(see discussion above of National Register project at Portsmouth Village). But I have never had formal training in historic preservation and would welcome the opportunity to learn more about how it works at the county level. Contribution to the diversity of viewpoints on this board: My original graduate work at UNC was in women s history, and I am always looking for ways to highlight women s lives and how gender worked in the past. Even though I am white, I also have expertise in researching and writing about Black history and am equipped with at least some