Charlotte, North Carolina is home to about 2,500 Bosnian refugees, creating one of the nation’s largest communities of Bosnians in the US diaspora.   This digital project ultimately aims to highlight the community through the documents, narratives, and memories of survivors themselves, as well as the historical timeline of the Balkan Wars and a story map to show the devastation that each community and city in the former Yugoslavia suffered through, and how detrimental the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims truly was.  Research on the Bosnian diaspora in America has been limited, predominantly focusing on the younger generations.  

Notably absent from this discourse are the voices and experiences of the women who survived the conflict, now aged 40 through 80, constituting essential pillars of their communities as mothers, wives, and aunts.  They are integral caretakers, forming the bedrock of their families and rebuilding their communities; they serve as the foundation for their family’s source of ethnic identity, transmitters of cultural identities, and leaders within their local communities.  The primary goal of this project will be to cover the historical events that led up to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia Herzegovina (the former Yugoslavia) and its subsequent aftermath through story maps and a historical timeline already available now.