I am Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a professional historian and Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Duke University. My teaching, research, consulting, and writing focus on public history, digital and geospatial history, and the history of the U.S. National Park Service. In 2006, UNC Press published my book Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History, the first serious study of the development of the National Park Service’s most visited site. Through Primary Source History Services, which I run with David Whisnant, I have been the co-principal historian on three book-length NPS projects: an administrative history of De Soto National Memorial, a Historic Resource Study of Cape Lookout National Seashore, and a visitor handbook for Shenandoah National Park. In 2011, a team of scholarly colleagues and I published Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, a major report co-commissioned by the Organization of American Historians and the National Park Service.
I spent 10 years at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I was the scholarly adviser for “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina,” a digital, geospatial history collection developed collaboratively with the UNC Libraries. I also taught UNC’s Introduction to Public History course(History 671) from 2008-20.