Publication Date

August 10, 2015

Perspectives Section

News, Perspectives Daily

On July 28, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced 212 humanities projects that will receive a total of $36.6 million in grants.  According to NEH Chairman William Adams, these grant projects “represent the very best of humanities scholarship and programming” and “illuminate the great ideas and events of our past, broaden access to our nation’s many cultural resources, and open up for us new ways of understanding the world in which we live.” The announcement also includes the first awards made under the new NEH Public Scholar Program, which supports “nonfiction books that apply serious humanities scholarship to subjects of general interest and appeal.”

Dozens of historians received grants in a number of categories, including many current AHA members(*).

Seminars for College Teachers

James Akerman, Newberry Library, “Mapping, Text, and Travel”

*Betul Basaran, Saint Mary’s Coll., Md., “Transcending Boundaries: The Ottoman Empire, Europe, and the Mediterranean World, 1500–1800”

Olivier Zunz, Univ. of Virginia, “Exploring American Democracy, with Alexis de Tocqueville as Guide”

Seminars for School Teachers

*Peter Gibbon, Boston Univ., “Philosophers of Education: Major Thinkers from the Enlightenment to the Present           “

Matthew Heaton, Virginia Tech, “Race and Mental Health in History and Literature”

*Graham Hodges, Colgate Univ., “Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad”

Harvey Klehr, Emory Univ., “Communism and American Life”

*Gerard Koot, Univ. of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, “The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of a European World Economy”

Public Scholar Program

Thomas Andrews, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, “Animals in the History of the United States”

*Kevin Boyle, Northwestern Univ., “Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1891–1927) and the Culture of Early 20th-Century Anarchism”

*Eric Cline, George Washington Univ., “Digging up Armageddon: The Story of Biblical Megiddo from Canaanites to Christians”

*David Courtwright, Univ. of North Florida, “Multinational Industries: Pleasures, Vices, and Addictions”

*Andrew Curran, Wesleyan Univ., “French Enlightenment Philosopher and Critic Denis Diderot (1713–1784): The Art of Thinking Freely”

Jonathan Hansen, Harvard Univ., “Young Castro: The Making of a Cuban Revolutionary”

*Craig Harline, Brigham Young Univ., “Wild Boar: The Monk Martin Luther and the Start of the Reformation”

Malinda Lowery, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle”

John McManus, Missouri Univ. of Science and Technology, “The US Army in the Pacific/Asia Theater in World War II”

Lien-Hang Nguyen, Univ. of Kentucky, “Tet 1968: The Battles that Changed the Vietnam War and the Global Cold War”

*Linda Przybyszewski, Univ. of Notre Dame, “The Unexpected Origins of Modern Religious Liberty”

*Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Univ. of New Mexico, “Latino Landscapes: A Transnational History of Urban America since 1950”

*Jason Sokol, Univ. of New Hampshire, “Shot Rings Out: How Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death Was Lived”

Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan Univ., “Caught on Camera: A History of Photographic Detection and Evasion”

Landmarks of American History               

George Boudreau, La Salle Univ., “Benjamin Franklin and the American People”

Timothy Crimmins, Georgia State Univ., “The Problem of the Color Line: Atlanta Landmarks and Civil Rights History”

Jennifer Dorsey, Siena Coll., “Religious Revival, Utopian Society, and the Shaker Experience in America”

*Tim Keirn, California State Univ., Long Beach, “The Cold War Home Front in Southern California”

Eric Rauchway, Univ. of California, Davis, “The Transcontinental Railroad: Transforming California and the Nation”

Rachel Reinhard, UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, “Movement, Mobilization, and Militarization: The Bay Area Home Front in World War II”

*Stephen Robertson, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, “Graffiti Houses: The Civil War from the Perspective of Individual Soldiers”

Kevin Sheets, State Univ. of New York, Coll. at Cortland, “Forever Wild: The Adirondacks in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era”

Jose Torre, State Univ. of New York, Coll. at Brockport, “The Rochester Reform Trail: Women’s Rights, Religion, and Abolition on the Genesee River and the Erie Canal”

Scholarly Editions and Translations

*Christopher Brick, George Washington Univ., “Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project”

*Clayborne Carson, Stanford Univ., “Papers of Martin Luther King Jr”

*Daniel Feller, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, “The Papers of Andrew Jackson: A Documentary Edition”

Paul Israel, Rutgers Univ., “The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Volume 9)”

Edward Lengel, Univ. of Virginia, “The Papers of George Washington”

*Constance Schulz, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia, “The Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen of South Carolina: A Digital Documentary Edition: Phase 2”

*J.C.A. Stagg, Univ. of Virginia, “The Papers of James Madison”

Harry Stout, Yale Univ., “Jonathan Edwards Center Online Initiative”

Institutes for College and University Teachers

*Kevin Butterfield, Univ. of Oklahoma, “Westward Expansion and the Constitution in the Early American Republic”

Glenn Gordinier, Williams Coll., “The American Maritime Commons”

Steven Heine, Florida International Univ., “Tokyo: High City and Low City”

Karin Maag, Calvin Coll., “Teaching the Reformation after Five Hundred Years”

*Donna Ray, Graduate Center, CUNY, “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath”

Kurtis Schaeffer, Univ. of Virginia, “Problems of the Study of Religion”

Institutes for School Teachers

Cornelius Bynum, Purdue Univ., “From Plessy to Brown: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Twentieth Century”

Robert Johnston, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago, “Rethinking the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Capitalism, Democracy, and Progressivism”

*Scott Levi, Ohio State Univ., “Central Asia in World History”

*Christian Peterson, Ferris State Univ., “War, Revolution, and Empire: US-Russian/Soviet Relations, 1776-Present”

William Watson , Immaculata Univ., “Duffy’s Cut: Immigration, Industrialization, and Illness in 19th-Century America”

Collaborative Research

*Gordon Chang, Stanford Univ., “Chinese Railroad Workers in North America: A Conference”

Max Krochmal, Texas Christian Univ., “Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Oral Histories of the Multiracial Freedom Struggle in Texas”

Digital Humanities Implementation Grants

Tom Elliott, New York Univ., “Pleiades 3”

David Eltis, Emory Univ., “Enhancing and Sustaining www.slavevoyages.org”

*Philip Ethington, Univ. of Southern California, “Implementating Scalar for Digital Humanities Multimodal Online Publishing: Editorial and Authorial Workflow in Collaboration”

Erika Lee, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “Immigrant Stories”

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Kim Gallon, Purdue Univ., “Space and Place in Africana/Black Studies: An Institute on Spatial Humanities, Theories, Methods and Practice”

*Jennifer Guiliano, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ., Indianapolis, “The Digital Native American and Indigenous Studies Project”

*Sharon Leon, George Mason Univ., “Doing Digital History 2016: An Institute for Mid-Career American Historians”

National Digital Newspaper Program

Brian Geiger, Univ. of California, Riverside, “California Digital Newspaper Project, Phase Four”

Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections

*Lisa O’Sullivan, New York Academy of Medicine, “NYAM Old Stacks Sustainable Preservation Environment Project”

Cooperative Agreements and Special Projects

Annie Polland, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, “Museums and Digital Storytelling”

The complete list of winners of this grant cycle can be found here.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.

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