Third Person is foremost about documentary research – doing it passionately, and using the results creatively. Our projects tend to result in a lot of documents and objects: old photographs and recordings, forgotten texts (newspapers and letters), postcards, and uncategorizable ephemera. This website gives us a place to store some of that material and share it with the public, i.e. you. We want ThirdPersonProject.org to serve in part as a kind of online gallery where you can browse through the things we’ve found. It probably goes without saying that we welcome submissions!

The Daily Record Remnants Vol. 4

By John Sullivan/January 10, 2021

A new edition of our Daily Record Remnants Issue, featuring newly discovered fragments of the pioneering African American newspaper. We’ve lovingly compiled these pieces into a facsimile edition of The Daily Record. More u...

Desperate Resistance

By John Sullivan/November 22, 2020

Next in our series of unknown civil-rights pioneers, this one goes wayyy back to New Orleans, 1833. It’s Rosa Parks but on a train and with pistols. These protesters are “free persons of color,” meaning they were legally f...

"Let's Work Together"

By Joel Finsel/July 30, 2020

Our co-conspirator John Jeremiah Sullivan has an essay out in the Triangle’s “Indyweek.” It was published to raise awareness about a new compilation of music covers, proceeds from which go to benefit Cat’s Cradle, the le...

Sylvester Russell "Would Not Move"

By Joel Finsel/July 10, 2020

Evening Telegram (Providence, RI), for the 24th of Feb, 1903 In the coming months, 3rd Person will post on forgotten figures in the anti-racist struggle. As we watch this historic movement grow, these Lives offer encoura...

Lost Watch, Rock Spring, 1806

By John Sullivan/August 7, 2019

One of several reasons why the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, was settled at precisely its current location on the Cape Fear River, in the early 1730s, had to do with a few excellent freshwater springs that issued f...

Daily Record Remnants Issue Vol. 1

By John Sullivan/August 2, 2019

For the past four years, Joel Finsel and I, in conjunction with the Third Person Project, have been meeting weekly with groups of Wilmington 8th-graders to learn as much as we can about the Wilmington Daily Record, the A...

Lost Love Song at the Lumina Festival of the Arts, July 22, 2019

By John Sullivan/July 15, 2019

We want to thank everyone who made Lost Love Song at the Lumina Arts Festival such a success. UNCW’s Kenan Auditorium was filled with a wonderful audience, the stage was filled with brilliant performances, and we had a bal...