Your Story is North Carolina's Story
Write It Down
Keeping a journal, one in which you write down details of what is happening, can make sense of these changes, while creating a lasting record for posterity.
Learn more
History is happening now, and our rapid response collection project needs your help to document and preserve it, because Your Story is North Carolina’s Story.
The State Archives of North Carolina and the North Carolina Museum of History are partnering on a project to collect original, first-person personal accounts that document current events including the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent and ongoing protests against racial oppression and police brutality.
The coronavirus outbreak has meant significant changes to the lives of all North Carolinians. While there is still a long way to go in terms of dealing with this worldwide crisis, we would like to hear from you now as we experience and navigate this time together.
Thousands of people have joined together in recent weeks to protest racism and police brutality. We are interested in collecting and preserving items that relate to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the protests that his death and others ignited across North Carolina, and the ongoing movements against police brutality and systemic racism.
Below are examples of what we’re collecting:
- Personal Accounts
- Photographs
- Recordings
- Oral Histories
- Journals and Diaries
We are all affected by these events in varying degrees, and diaries, journals, oral histories, images, recordings, and similar materials will help us tell stories of this unprecedented time in history. Personal accounts provide depth and context for what an event or era was like for the people experiencing it. Our hope is that the record we preserve in 2020 will help future generations understand what it felt like to live through this time. Our goal is to collect the stories of diverse North Carolinians from across the state, and we need your help.
Physical objects cannot be collected while our facilities are closed, and we do not want to take items that are still in use, so people are asked to save items for future collection, but record and submit information about them now.
