The Down East community of Harkers Island, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is an island community built on foodways and traditions necessitated by the landscape. Harkers Island is a community inextricably linked to the water, and its people–fisherman and boat builders–deeply woven into the fabric of place.
Charlotte’s Central Avenue reveals the city’s shifting demographics, from working-class textile mill employees in the early twentieth century, to new immigrants in the 1990s. These new Southerners revived strip malls and subdivisions to shape a new Charlotte. Our Central Avenue Corridor Oral History Project documents some of those voices. According to UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Opportunistic Task Force, many factors lured new immigrants to Charlotte, including the booming banking industry in the 1990s.