The American Historical Association awarded $2.5 million in funding to small history-related organizations nationwide, part of a grantmaking program to deliver relief to organizations adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the grant recipients, which include site-based organizations, membership associations, and history departments at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, will use funds to support short-term projects that explore new ideas or build on experiments initiated during the pandemic—from online programming or publications to using new technologies or expanding audiences and accessibility.

Fifty organizations received grants ranging from $12,000 to $75,000 each through the AHA’s Grants to Sustain and Advance the Work of Historical Organizations Program.

Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society
Charlottesville, VA
Race & Sports: The Desegregation of Central Virginia Public High School Athletics
Athletics in school desegregation is a story with local, regional, and national significance. Focusing on students in Albemarle County and Charlottesville, Virginia, high school athletics between 1954 and 1974, our project will collect the oral histories, complete 60 interviews, produce transcriptions, and develop a publicly accessible website.
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Amelia Island Museum of History
Fernandina Beach, FL
Vertical Files Digital Scanning Project
This project will scan/digitize 478 biography and over 250 historical district homes files to place on the museum's website. This will allow for greater access to many of the files the public uses for family research as well as historic homes research in our area.
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American Catholic Historical Association
Emmitsburg, MD
Native Boarding Schools, Historical Research, and Catholic Archives
As calls for “truth telling” about Catholic missions and Native boarding schools grow, the American Catholic Historical Association is promoting transparency and access around Catholic archives. The project aims to cultivate relationships between Indigenous communities, archivists, and scholars, clarify what archival research truth-telling requires, and build access to historical materials.
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The American LGBTQ+ Museum
New York, NY
Queering the Path to Theirstory: New Forms for Telling LGBTQ+ Stories
The American LGBTQ+ Museum will partner with experience designers in the arts, theater, and digital technology to pilot virtual, in-person, and hybrid events and exhibitions. Our goal is to meet the audience for LGBTQ+ history content where they are—including those who are isolated by the closet, geography, or accessibility.
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American Social History Productions
New York, NY
Connecting to the Past: Resources for Middle and High School Teachers
American Social History Productions will research and classroom-test materials to add to the site, Social History for Every Classroom, including primary sources, teaching activities, and interpretive essays that will help middle and high school teachers place current events in a broad historical context.
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American Society for Environmental History
Chicago, IL
Environmental History Week 2023
Environmental History Week is an international celebration of environmental history, organized by ASEH and environmental historians of all stripes to foster scholarly collaboration, academic research, teaching and public awareness of environmental history. It emphasizes locally organized, public-facing, and virtual events that promote engagement with the communities to address current environmental challenges.
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Assocation culturelle et historique du Mont-Carmel
Lille sur-St-Jean, ME
Development of Folk Culture Exhibition and Public Educational Programming
Development of a permanent international and bilingual folk culture exhibition and planning for public educational programming that complements and enriches the exhibition. The exhibition shares the story of the international region of the St. John Valley in northern Maine next to New Brunswick and Québec from 1600s to early 20th century.
Website

Baptist History and Heritage Society
Macon, GA
Making Baptist History Public History
The Making Baptist History Public History project brings together professional historians, religious leaders, and religious congregations to think about history. Through a series of webinars, this project expands the reach of the Baptist History and Heritage Society to highlight how Baptists have shaped broader American history and culture.
Website

Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Columbia, MD
Creating Student Affiliates and Speakers’ Networks to Diversify and Expand Women’s Histories and Reach
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians will offer two initiatives—a pilot student affiliate program and a speakers network that will historicize present questions of social justice and center diverse histories—to address one of the central challenges that the discipline of history faces: declining enrollment, particularly as it is shaped by the discipline’s poor performance recruiting and retaining women and students of color and by students questioning the value of historical work.
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Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City
Kansas City, MO
Sharing the Diverse Histories of Kansas City
Our diverse team of scholars will build an interactive virtual tour of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City in Clio, along with walking tours and citywide trails that digitally embed primary sources and oral histories.
Website

Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
Portsmouth, NH
People and Places: Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire Marker Project Expansion and Revitalization
The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire will hire research associates who will, with staff and consultants, organize the institution's research archive, publish a research guide to African American history in NH, transcribe oral history recordings, and create video tours of NH Black history sites.
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Buena Vista Historical Society
Storm Lake, IA
Bringing History to the Digital Age
We will reorganize and digitize our collection of historic records, including documents, photographs, and materials relating to county schools, churches, organizations, clubs, local government, businesses, individuals, and buildings by improving accessibility to museum members, researchers, local historians, students, and members of the general public interested in family history.
Website

Cayuga Museum of History and Art
Auburn, NY
It Speaks for Itself: Re-Envisioning the Story of Sound Film
It Speaks for Itself: Re-envisioning the Story of Sound Film will examine the Case Research Lab collection and establish a new guided tour through research and interpretation. This project will create a one-year curator position to accomplish this important work, telling the story of creating sound film through new perspectives.
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Charnley-Persky House
Chicago, IL
The City Beyond the White City: Race, Two Chicago Homes, and their Neighborhoods
This project is a physical and online exhibit, with online programming, that explores the history of race and the built environment in Chicago through the 1893 Worlds' Columbian Exposition and two 1892 home sites, Charnley-Persky House and Mecca Flats. Putting these three sites into conversation via the exhibit is a way to interrogate difficult and even erased Chicago histories.
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Collections & Stories of American Muslims (America's Islamic Heritage Museum)
Washington, DC
America's Islamic Heritage Museum Social Media Programming
The project will help to build the museums' social media capacity and outreach by using different virtual media platforms to provide arts and humanities programs along with offering a new museum app that will provide educational tools, virtual tours, and programs for teachers and students.
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Coordinating Council for Women in History
Charlotte, NC
Online Outreach and Knowledge Sharing Initiatives
CCWH will enhance its online presence, support outreach and other initiatives, and engage in knowledge sharing with the goal professional and intellectual development for members and others.
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Dennys River Historical Society
Dennysville, ME
Mapping the Dennys River over 9,000 Years
Mapping the Dennys River over 9,000 Years is a web-based project that uses historically informed maps and documents to tell the stories of the communities along a 20-mile corridor in Washington County, Maine, linking the freshwater wetlands of Lake Meddybemps with the saltwater of Dennys Bay, the Gulf of Maine, and the Atlantic Ocean.
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Elizabeth City State University History Program
Elizabeth City, NC
Making History at ECSU: Fostering Innovation in Humanities Research, Teaching, and Recruiting
This project seeks to grow history student enrollments at Elizabeth City State University, strengthen support for and knowledge about the history and the humanities at the university and in the community, and develop relationships about and spaces for developing Humanities research and knowledge that are meaningful to university and community constituents and stakeholders.
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Gaston County Museum of Art & History
Dallas, NC
African American History of Gaston County
The primary goal of this project is to increase the research on African American history in Gaston County and incorporate that research into the interpretation at the Gaston County Museum. This project will help identify post-Civil War community development as well as expound upon historic figures that were instrumental in the growth of the prominent African American communities throughout the county. The research will also be incorporated into research and survey reports on four key African American historical sites within the county that potentially could be designated as local landmarks by the Historic Preservation Commission.
Website

Hiram Historical Society
Hiram, ME
See it, Hear it, Speak it
The project is in two parts: the first to edit oral history videos to make them accessible; the second is to create a video tour, with narrative overlays, of historic physical features in the town of Hiram, Maine, as a prelude to making a map of the town.
Website

Historical Society of Cheshire County
Keene, NH
State-of-the-Art Technologies to Share Our Local History
The Historical Society of Cheshire County will acquire state-of-the-art technologies to share our local history stories. This will involve new high-quality projection and sound systems at our facilities and the ability to broadcast our programs over the internet for those who can’t attend in person.
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History Center in Tompkins County
Ithaca, NY
Preserving Community Oral Histories
The History Center in Tompkins County is advancing the preservation of our community oral history collection. The work to update transcripts, technology formats, and finding aids will drastically improve their accessibility and use. The project underlines our commitment as stewards of our local history for the community.
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History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff
Lake Forest, IL
Deeply Rooted and Rising High: African American History in Lake Forest
The History Center of Lake Forest and Lake Bluff, in partnership with the Ragdale Foundation and local African American community, will develop a lecture series and expand the permanent archival collection of African American stories, bringing to light the rich, diverse experiences of the community, beginning in the late 1800s.
Website

International Big History Association
Allendale, MI
Humanity on a Finite Planet: A Big History Perspective
The International Big History Association will hold a 72-hour, global, virtual conference consisting of continuous and concurrent sessions. Participants and audience members will be able to join at any time 24 hours per day for the duration of the conference.
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Island County Historical Society Museum
Coupeville, WA
Indigenous Populations of Island County Washington
A three-part professionally produced digital video series, useful in an academic environment, and readily accessible to a diverse audience.
Website

Lane County History Museum
Eugene, OR
Lane County Historical Society Artifacts Rescue
The project will support the completion of a crucial museum-wide inventory of artifact collections delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes wages for collections technician hours to work alongside current inventorying being performed, and outfit a space with shelving for unpacking previously unmanaged storage spaces that require temporary space.
Website

Madison County Historical Society
Edwardsville, IL
Madison County at the Migratory Crossroads: An Interactive Digital Mapping Exhibit
The Madison County Historical Society will create an interactive digital storytelling exhibit that draws together oral histories, archival documents, and digitized materials contributed by local residents to tell the rich story of migration in and through Madison County, Illinois. This multimodal exhibit will be projected in our renovated museum, and will also be available as an interactive online exhibit. The centerpiece of both the online and physical exhibits will be an interactive digital map, created in cooperation with Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Department of History and Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship Center for the Digital Humanities.
Website

Moravian Historical Society
Nazareth, PA
Moravian Historical Society Digital Collections
The Moravian Historical Society will develop a new digital resource making its important historical resources accessible and sparking new opportunities for research. These archival documents, important to early American history, will be available through online exhibitions and a searchable catalog enabling audiences to engage with our collections in new ways.
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The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund for Blues, Music, and Justice
Water Valley, MS
A Community-Engaged, Participatory Historic Preservation Project for African American Blues Communities
The project seeks to prevent the further erasure of historic sites important to the African American community in Mississippi through the erection and preservation of historic markers and creation of a digital web Atlas.
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New York State Association of European Historians
Buffalo, NY
NYSAEH Fall 2022 Conference in Partnership with the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center
The annual NYSAEH conference hosts traditional research presentations, pedagogy-focused panels, undergraduate paper panels, and a keynote speaker. For 2022 conference, NYSAEH is forging a partnership with Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center as co-hosts. The theme of this year's conference is “Slavery, Race, and Empire in Europe and the World.”
Website | Twitter

Over-the-Rhine Museum
Cincinnati, OH
Voices of Over-the-Rhine Oral History Project
The Voices of Over-the-Rhine Oral History Project will support the preservation, interpretation, and presentation of the unique history of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. AHA-NEH SHARP funds will provide funding to establish a new part-time oral history coordinator and update our toolkit for collecting and preserving oral histories.
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The Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture
Baltimore, MD
Inaugural Exhibitions for the Peale’s Workforce Development Program
The Peale’s Accomplished Arts Apprentices (AAA) program aims to increase equity and inclusion in the arts, museums, and preservation trades by providing vocational training for young people from Baltimore’s disinvested communities. The AAA apprentices will learn exhibition production from start to finish by installing inaugural exhibition(s) in the Moses Williams Center, the teaching gallery at the Peale where the AAA program is based.
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Putnam History Museum
Cold Spring, NY
Beyond the Museum Walls
The Putnam History Museum’s Beyond the Museum Walls project will create an expansive slate of self-guided, outdoor, and hybrid public history programs for use by museum visitors and audience members. The programs will include history crawls, "Take & Go" activity bags, history hikes, history hunts, and more.
Website

The Reckoning
Louisville, KY
Kentucky African American Civil War Widows Project
The Kentucky African American Civil War Widows Project will index and calendar the contents of over 500 pension files related to African American Civil War widows from Kentucky. These will be placed in an online database that will be freely available to the public, whether for academic or genealogical research.
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Refusing to Forget
Austin, TX
Recovery, Revision, & Remembrance: Public Outreach during a Moment of Censorship, Violence, and Pandemic
The project will create a traveling version of the award-winning exhibit, “Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920,” developed in conjunction with the Bullock Texas State History Museum (2016). The exhibit will bring awareness to this often-forgotten violence and its civil rights legacies that continue to influence social relationships today.
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Roebling Museum
Roebling, NJ
Documenting Black and Immigrant Steel Workers from a NJ Company Town
Roebling Museum will digitize and preserve newly donated employment records that highlight the lives of Black and immigrant steelworkers from the 1910s to 1950. The data from these records will be used in an upcoming exhibit, will help update our interpretation, and will be made available to the public and scholarly researchers.
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Sing Sing Prison Museum
Ossining, NY
Sing Sing Prison Museum Interpretive Planning
The Sing Sing Prison Museum will create an interpretive exhibition and program plan, both digital and analog, with special attention to the causes, conduct, and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States from 1970–2020. This period represents a distinct departure from previous history as the state and federal prison population ballooned from 325,000 in 1970 to almost 1.5 million by 2020.
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Society for History Education
Long Beach, CA
Promoting Equity and Diversity in History Education Publishing
The editorial team of The History Teacher, which is published by the Society for History Education, has developed initiatives to promote equity and diversity in history education. The grant will help facilitate broader discussions between K–12 and university history educators in an effort to make history pedagogy more inclusive.
Website

Society for the History of Children and Youth
Philadelphia, PA
Insights from History: Trauma, Epidemics, and Children's Well-Being
SHCY will organize a hybrid three-day conference examining the history of trauma, epidemics, and children’s well-being. The face-to-face portion of the conference will bring together approximately 20–30 invited experts. The online version of the conference will be open to interested individuals. All participants must preregister.
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Society for the History of Technology
Kirksville, MO
Heartbeat Conferences to Widen Dialogue and Diversity in the History of Technology
SHOT will develop a series of free online “heartbeat conferences” to enliven and widen intellectual and professional dialogue across the history of technology community and beyond. “Heartbeat” themes will extend our long-standing internationalization outreach, diversity programs, and graduate-student support, while building on our 2020–21 virtual meeting experience.
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South Asian American Digital Archive
Philadelphia, PA
Our Stories
SAADA will support faculty at colleges and universities across the country in incorporating South Asian American experiences into their existing American history courses. By doing so, SAADA will take an important step in ensuring that South Asian Americans are in included in the American story: past, present, and future.
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South End Historical Society
Boston, MA
South End, Boston, Oral History Project
This is an ongoing project to capture the oral history of Boston’s South End during a period of rapid social and cultural change, often characterized as “gentrification,” from the l960s through 1980s. The study will include the voices of those displaced as well as “newcomers.”
Website

Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies
Wingate, NC
For the People: Portable Latin American Histories
SECOLAS will develop audio documentaries about the 1947 Mendez vs. Westminster School District of Orange County case, the Bolivian 1952 revolution, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. We will also increase our Spanish-language offerings for new audiences in Latin America.
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Tennessee State University History Program
Nashville, TN
PHENOM: Public History ENgagement, Opportunities, and Methods
The goal of PHENOM is to prepare our history majors for postcollege careers while bolstering equity and representation in Nashville’s cultural institutions. The program centers on an internship program that gives students the opportunity to network and gain professional experience at partner cultural institutions in Nashville.
Website

Urban History Association
Ann Arbor, MI
An Expansion of Support for Online Engagement Enhancement and Membership Diversification
The UHA will develop a multi-pronged effort to rebuild services disrupted by the pandemic and adopt new initiatives to strengthen and diversify the UHA’s revenue streams.
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Vermont Granite Museum of Barre
Barre, VT
Vermont Granite Museum Digital Library
The Vermont Granite Museum of Barre is creating an online digital library that will contain a portion of the museum’s vast and ever-growing digital collection. The digital library will promote the preservation, accessibility, and availability of the historic archives, exhibits, and research held and conducted by the museum.
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Walker County African American Historical and Alumni Association
Chickamauga, GA
Confronting COVID-19 Challenges
Developing Walker County's first African American Museum and sustain the organization’s historical television show.
Website

W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy
Great Barrington, MA
Historian-in-Residence
The historian-in-residence will expand audiences and partnerships for Clinton Church Restoration’s vibrant heritage site, which interprets the life and legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois and celebrates African American history in rural New England, creating space to engage questions of infrastructure and sustainability beyond our current moment.
Website

Western Association of Women Historians
Long Beach, CA
WAWH Scholars & New Leaders Program 2022–23: Intersectionality, Collaboration, and Professionalism
Our Scholars and New Leaders Program will provide a year-long series of activities to participants. We will incentivize and compensate younger scholars' time and energy beyond their campuses. This project will “lean in” to the remote/virtual environment and reward professional development to cultivate and affirm scholarly leadership in tough times.
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Window Seat Media
Olympia, WA
The Third Thirty: Honoring and Amplifying the Voices of our Elders
The Third Thirty is a community oral history project that features elders in Washington’s South Sound who were artists, innovators, and change-makers during the 1960s and 70s. The project's photo voice exhibit, walking tours, and workshops shares wisdom from local leaders to help inform the challenges we face today.
Website