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America's Hallowed Ground (2023-2024)

America’s Hallowed Ground (AHG) is a project within Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics that helps lift historic sites of national significance into the national conversation through multidisciplinary arts projects.

AHG’s first partnership is located in Wilmington, North Carolina, where white supremacists staged a violent coup in 1898 to suppress the growing political power of African Americans. The project also has partnerships underway in Cherokee, N.C., the site of the forced removal of the Cherokee people, and Durham, N.C., home to Indigenous people, descendants of the enslaved and freedom fighters.

Team members partnered with AHG to develop content for its website and clarify the language AHG uses to describe its work to better tell the AHG story. The team also helped design a curriculum for students in grades 7-12, that explores how to use multidisciplinary arts and storytelling as a way to investigate historical sites and explore the origins and consequences of racial division in the United States. 

Learn more about this team’s work by reading their team profile.

Team Outputs

Using Arts to Grapple With Stories Embedded in the American Landscape (Team profile; 2024 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Virtual Showcase)

America’s Hallowed Ground (Interactive display; 2024 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase)

America’s Hallowed Ground (Educational curriculum for students in grades 7-12)

America’s Hallowed Ground Website

Timing

Summer 2023 – Spring 2024

See earlier related team, America’s Sacred Spaces (2018-2019).

Image: Wilmington historian Cynthia Brown gestures to an artwork at St. Stephen AME Church, by Huiyin Zhou

Team Leaders

  • Charles Thompson, Arts & Sciences: Cultural Anthropology
  • David Toole, Divinity School
  • Michael Wiley, Kenan Institute for Ethics

Graduate Team Members

  • Crystal Card, Masters of Public Policy
  • Lindsay Huth, Philosophy-PHD
  • Dennis Wang, Master of Management Studies

Undergraduate Team Members

  • Rachel Kamis, Cultural Anthropology (AB)
  • Irma Lopez-Calderon, Psychology (AB)
  • Vishwa Veeraswamy, Public Policy (AB)

Community Team Members

  • Kevin Bitterman, Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA)
  • Kendall Surfus, Independent Literacy Consultant and Curriculum Designer

Community Organizations

  • North Carolina Arts Council
  • Cherokee Historical Association
  • Museum of the Cherokee Indian

Team Contributors

  • Adriane Lentz-Smith, Arts & Sciences: History
  • Courtney Lewis, Arts & Sciences: Other
  • David Malone, Arts & Sciences: Program in Education
  • Anne Whisnant, Social Science Research Institute

Themes