August 2021

Art, Power, and Profit at Duke University

Two longtime Duke faculty members are behind an anticipated $2 million in art sales that raise questions about the ethical use of public-domain images, power imbalances within academia, and a university’s thorny role as a gatekeeper of information and access.

The Afghanistan Papers

Craig Whitlock got his start scouring North Carolina for stories. Today, his seminal work on Afghanistan is a must-read for a nation trying to understand what went wrong in its twenty year war some seven thousand miles away.

The Archivist for the Lost Cause

Roulhac Hamilton, right, and University Librarian Louis Round Wilson in front of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. The photo is from a 1930s-era Ford Motor Co. magazine that touts Hamilton “scouring the South for source materials for a national Southern history collection” in his Ford Tudor Sedan. “More than a million pieces of manuscript have been brought to the University of North Carolina in the car,” it says, “and 66,486 miles have been traversed.” // Photo courtesy of University Libraries, UNC-CH

J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton built UNC-Chapel Hill’s renowned Southern Historical Collection. He was also an apologist for the Ku Klux Klan and taught that Black people were inferior to whites. As the university debates removing the professor’s name from Hamilton Hall, his complicated legacy lives on in the archive.

North Carolina Aims for a Deal

Photo by Gerry Broome, AP

An extraordinary state budget surplus puts a historic deal within reach. But that would require the Governor and legislative Republicans to put an acrimonious history behind them.

The Governor of Rural North Carolina

Photo by Joseph Bradley

The gregarious, popular agriculture commissioner, Steve Troxler, won re-election in a landslide. But as the communities he champions shift around him, is he changing with them?