Key Ingredients on Display

 The Smithsonian Institutes’s “Key Ingredients: America by Food” exhibit at the Historic Courthouse in Buchanan will be on view until February 14.

The Key Ingredients exhibit is the award-winning partnership of UWG’s Center for Public History, the Georgia Humanities Council and the Smithsonian Institute. Buchanan is the last location of the traveling exhibit before it is shipped to Washington, DC.

Highlighting the success of the partnership, the Center and the GHC will receive its second statewide award for its work on the Smithsonian exhibit this week.

The Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries will award the Center and the Humanities Council for "Special Projects" in recognition of the work on the two-year tour of this exhibit.

The exhibit documents through oral histories, photographs and archival research the history and meaning of food in Georgia and the South. The project is part of the Museum on Main Street program, which brings Smithsonian exhibits to small towns throughout the country.

Podcasts are available on the Smithsonian website at www.museumonmainstreet.org. To add a recipe to the American Cookbook, go to http://www.keyingredients.org. For a virtual peek, go to http://www.georgiafoodtour.org/tour/buchanan.html.

The Center contributed to this project under the direction of state scholar, Dr. Ann McCleary, Director of the Public History Center and UWG professor of history.

Working with history graduate students Kristina Hartmann Ferguson and Katherine Hicks, McCleary traveled throughout the state to conduct oral histories with more than 100 hundred Georgia residents and compiled an extensive catalog of Georgia foodways.

This catalog, “Food, Family and Community: A Collection of Georgia Memories,” is available at the CPH, the Humanities Council and at the Buchanan exhibit.

In October 2009 the Center and the GHC received its first award, “Award for Excellence in Archival Development,” from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board.

For more information on the Center for Public History, go to www.westga.edu/cph or call at 678-839-6141.