UNC exhibit revives the voices of NC publications that were ‘blogs’ before the internet

Once they were in people’s hands, part of the fabric of everyday life, full of news and comment, announcements, lists and poems. Now they are under glass and on exhibit at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They are newspapers, some more than a century old.

But they are not dailies or traditional weeklies. They are voices that couldn’t reach the mainstream press. They are newspapers, newsletters and magazines created by teenagers, farmers, mill workers, African Americans, political activists, religious groups and prisoners. A few are handwritten and some were made on typewriters, but most were typeset and aspired to be little newspapers in an era when commercial newspapers abounded. One from 1878, named “Little but Loud,” was the smallest of newspapers — slightly bigger than a matchbook.

The exhibition, “Papers for the People: A Treasury of North Carolina News Sources,” will be on view until May 31, when the papers will return to their places within the library’s vast collection of North Carolina newspapers.

Those who produced the publications were moved by the same impulse as those who today post blogs, create Facebook pages and set up community websites. Linda Jacobson, keeper of the North Carolina Collection Gallery and chief curator of the exhibition, said, “We wanted to remind people that this has always been done, just in print.”

John Blythe, an assistant curator at the Wilson Library, was the inspiration for the exhibition after he told Jacobson that he had acquired another “amateur newspaper” for the library’s collection. Amateur papers were published in the late 19th century, often by teenagers. The exhibition includes “Our Free Blade,” published in 1879 by a teenage Josephus Daniels, who went on to be publisher of The News & Observer.

Blythe said of the papers: “Now you would do it with social media and blogs, but I like the permanence of these. The writing style is much more polished and mature than you would see on a blog, certainly from a teenager, or even an adult.”

The library does not have enough of the amateur papers to support an exhibition, so Jacobson expanded the exhibition’s scope to include other special newspapers.

“The Prison News” was written by North Carolina inmates during the 1920s. “The Inquisition” was a counterculture newspaper published out of a garage by students from East Mecklenburg High School in 1969. (The school board went to court in an unsuccessful effort to suppress it.) “Bragg Briefs” was published by soldiers at Fort Bragg who opposed the Vietnam War. “Network of North Carolina Women” was an early 1980s publication focused on feminism and issues often ignored by traditional papers, such as domestic violence.

The exhibition focuses on the collective desire to be seen, heard and informed through the printed word. And it is a little unsettling to see those efforts displayed in glass cases like artifacts of a lost culture. The internet now allows the smallest voices to be heard around the world, but those voices also must compete with a digital cacophony. Much has been gained by news going online, but something personal and tactile is going away.

Jacobson seemed to sense that, too. She said, “I hope that after all newspapers are gone, it will be like phonographic records. People will rediscover them and bring them back.”

For now, she has.

Barnett: nbarnett@ newsobserver.com, 919-829-4512.