Wiregrass Archive - Dr. Martin Olliff

The Fine Arts Division and Lyceum Committee is pleased to announce the next event for the 2016-2017 Concert and Arts Season. On Thursday, January 19, 2017, at 7:00 p.m., we will host Dr. Martin Olliff, Wiregrass Archivist, in the Multi-Purpose Room. The presentation is titled “Controlled Bacchanalia: The Pomp and Pageantry of the National Peanut Festival since 1938.” Using the National Peanut Festival Records at the Wiregrass Archives, Dr. Olliff will discuss the sometimes surprising history of the parades, pageants, and showcases of the National Peanut Festival since its origins in the Great Depression. Please come support the Lyceum event and our guest. The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Martin Olliff Bio:

Dr. Marty Olliff has been the Director of the Wiregrass Archives and an associate professor of history at Troy University Dothan Campus since 2002. He received his PhD from Auburn University in 1998, and served as the Assistant University Archivist there from 1996 until 2002.

Olliff is the editor of The Great War in the Heart of Dixie: Alabama during World War 1 published by the University of Alabama Press in 2008, and author of Getting Out of the Mud: Alabama’s Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928 scheduled for publication by the University of Alabama Press in Summer 2017.

He also has served as president of the Society of Alabama Archivists, the Alabama Association of Historians, and the Alabama Historical Association. In addition, he sits on the editorial boards of Provenance: Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists, and The Alabama Review: A Quarterly Journal of Alabama History, and the boards of directors of the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and Dothan Landmarks Foundation, Inc. (Landmark Park).