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Project Details

This project examines a soldier newspaper published and circulated by Americans onboard the WWI transport ship the USS George Washington. The double-sided sheet, entitled The Hatchet, included news from home and abroad, baseball scores, ship announcements, poetry, and satirical columns and classifieds. This exhibit pays attention to the paper's racist content, examining how the publication's alignment with Jim Crow doctrines affected the soldiers of color onboard the ship.

Subjects or Themes

African American, World War I, Jim Crow, Segregation,

Project Language(s)

English

Time Period

Geographic Location

Project Categories

Content Type

Oral History, Artifacts, Sound, Images, Text, Archives

Target Audience(s)

Creators

Leslie Rowen, PhD Student in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
leslierowen.com

Year(s)

2019

Host Institution / Affiliation / Project Location

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Software Employed

Labor and Support

This digital exhibit was created as part of a semester-long project in Dr. Heidi Kim's "Theories of the Archive" graduate course at UNC-Chapel Hill, in Spring 2019. Labor, including research, writing, revision, and web design, lasted from January-May of 2019.

Project Cost

Partnerships, funding sources, or grant-funding acknowledgement

Special thanks goes to the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This collection houses the papers of Ernest B. McKissick, an African American soldiers in the 349th Field Artillery, 92nd Division. It also houses the papers of Robert March Hanes, officer with the 30th Division, whose letters preserved Jim Crow racism and issues of The Hatchet for generations to come. All other images are available in the public domain thanks to the National Archives. Thank you to Dr. Heidi Kim for her feedback and support.