Documenting the American South has just released an innovative online mapping project on the history of movie theaters in North Carolina. It is called “Going to the Show,” and you can see it here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts. Knitting together Sanborn fire-insurance maps from 1896 to 1922 and overlaying them on Google maps for contemporary context, the project pinpoints all North Carolina movie theaters of the period in 47 towns and cities and, via an ingenious clickable movie-ticket icon, leads the user seamlessly to archival documents and newspaper clippings related to the history of each theater.
As the “Going to the Show” project team delved into the maps and related archival material during development of the site, they recognized that they were about to reveal new, detailed information about patterns of segregation in the Jim Crow South. The racial policy of each theater is documented; many theaters were African American only. From the site: “The project highlights the ways that race conditioned the experience of movies and urban spaces more generally for all North Carolinians — white, African American, and American Indian. Its collection inventories every known N.C. African American movie theater in operation between 1908 and 1963.”
The site is easy to navigate; links and image enlargements work quickly for this user. Congratulations to scholarly advisor Bobby Allen, UNC professor of American studies, history, and communication studies, and principal investigator Natasha Smith of Documenting the American South.