With the end of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources’ official WWI commemoration in 2019, we have transitioned our internationally-popular “North Carolina in WWI” blog and the department’s WWI page to focus on more general military history topics. With the 75th anniversary of WWII and the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, the goal of the DNCR was to expand th
e representation and stories we share of North Carolina military service individuals, the state’s military installations, and life on the home front in wartime. The new DNCR blog “North Carolina Stories of Service” and a corresponding page will endeavor to share stories of our state’s citizens involved in the U.S. military, whether as service individuals or civilians, and how these experiences have added to the breadth of history of North Carolina. Blog posts will revolve around brief service individuals biographies, anecdotes, events and anniversaries, interesting photographs, maps, posters, films, and other things that help to tell our state’s military history. Stories of anti-war protests, life as civilian wartime factory workers, refugees from conflict areas, school scrap drives, Red Cross and USO clubs’ work—all these and more can be included as posts. The posts will feature images or scans of materials (such as newspaper articles or letters), and spotlight some elements of military history in the state. Stories of Service page will include departmental military commemoration events and exhibits, original photographs, documents, quotes from wartime diaries and letters, and other items, that allows the public to experience war and military service from our fellow North Carolinians’ individual perspectives. We want people to be able to see the ways military service changed from period to period, and to be able to comment and share our content in a user-friendly way. Facebook posts will occur on anniversaries of events, battles, or other military occurrences (such as the 75th anniversary of D-Day).
