“A Worthy Place”: Durham, Duke, and the World of the 1920s-1930s

This timeline was developed as a team effort by three graduate students, one undergraduate, and two faculty members in the Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Department. The main goal was to provide viewers with a continuous juxtaposition of events at university, city, and world scales over the 1920s and 1930s. On the lower two levels, the events reflect the interests of the AAHVS department by focusing primarily on the construction and destruction of buildings that made up the changing urban fabric of Durham and defined the place of the new university. At wider, national, and international scales, we emphasized landmarks of the period, including important political events that had wide-reaching consequences worldwide, new technologies that changed the lives of most Americans, and social movements that affected all levels of society in the 1920s and 1930s.

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