The Black Mountain College Semester timeline is organized by the Center for Appalachian Studies as a space of collaboration among researchers, students, and faculty at Appalachian State University. The goal is to merge together digital projects involving students, original video content, and archival resources on Black Mountain College from the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection to develop biographical and contextual information that compliments the exhibitions, publications, workshops, and events of the Black Mountain College Semester.
The timeline is divided into five eras:
The timeline reflects the project's creative goal of encouraging independent exploration of the college legacy. Fundamentally, it provides space for contributors to delve into specific aspects of the Black Mountain College through dialogue, experimentation, and experiential learning; it is not intended as a comprehensive history or analysis, which might be found elsewhere. Rather, its many contributors are engaged in founder John Andrew Rice’s educational vision of learning by doing, including the participation of students and faculty involved in a Black Mountain College Semester Fellows program sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs. As a ‘living’ experimental process, the web content will expand and change between January and August 2018 as individual timeline projects develop.