Adrienne Monteith Petty

Adrienne Monteith Petty is an associate professor at the City College of New York in Harlem. Her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (2013), won the H.L. Mitchell Award of the Southern Historical Association and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society. Petty co-directed the oral history project “Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners,” which produced more than 300 interviews of black farmers and their descendants about their experience in southern agriculture. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill subsequently included “Breaking New Ground” in its Southern Oral History Collection. Petty and the project’s co-director, historian Mark Schultz of Lewis University, are currently writing a book based on the interviews. Among others, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have awarded Petty grants and fellowships.

*Since the NEH was founded, the agency has awarded more than $171 million to nearly three thousand projects on African American history and culture. Petty has been a recipient of NEH funding.  

AFFILIATION: City College of New York