Friday, May 22, 2020

The History of the NC Republican Party, via the Levine Museum of the New South

By Michael Bitzer

Last year, Dr. Tom Hanchett, a community historian and, for 16 years, the Staff Historian at Levine Museum of the New South and now is historian-in-residence for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library, asked me to do a presentation on the history of the Republican Party in North Carolina.

With the upcoming Republican National Convention, it was a perfect for their series, "The New South for New Southerners," and it would be a fun presentation for me to put together for an in-person evening of talking about politics in the Old North State.

Little did we realize that COVID-19 would cancel that in-person presentation, so we did the next best thing: went online with a FaceBook Live presentation. 

Here's the presentation, along with a Q&A for a few minutes afterwards. I'm thinking of breaking up the presentation and doing a separate series of YouTube videos on each of the three questions that I pose in the presentation, along with including a bit more depth of items that I couldn't get into the presentation due to time constraints.