NHPRC Awards -- May 2023
INSTITUTES FOR HISTORICAL EDITING
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$465,000 to support a three-year project to develop, enhance, and administer its new, freely-accessible professional development platform for historical and scholarly editing practitioners, eLaboratories (eLabs). (DE-103621)
ARCHIVES LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$300,000 to support a three-year project to host the 2024-2026 Archives Leadership Institute, a program for mid-career archivists and memory workers to develop leadership skills at an in-person summer program followed by virtual gatherings and training sessions throughout the year. (DL-103622)
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
For projects that encourage public engagement with historical records.
University of Illinois, Chicago
Chicago, IL
$125,038 to support “Teaching Care: Building a history curricular library of Chicago’s Black nurses,” an initiative of the Midwest Nursing History Research Center in collaboration with the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. The team will create a curricular library of lesson plans, built from primary archival sources and previously collected oral histories, to engage students in middle school, high school, undergraduate nursing and graduate nursing education. (DL-103545)
Stillman College
Tuscaloosa, AL
$145,556 to support a collaborative project of the college’s School of Education and Department of English, Journalism, and Media Communications, with the Alabama Alliance of Arts Education, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Alabama Institute for Education in the Arts for “Students reFraming: Narratives of African American Female Landownership in Alabama’s Black Belt.” Students, educators, and community-based individuals will use public records as foundation for research into the history, culture, and family of African American female landowners in the Alabama Black Belt. Students will then create character sketches and digital shorts based on the research data and share them with the community at large. (DP-103588)
Lewis & Clark College
Portland, OR
$149,828 to support the Vietnamese Portland Archive, including providing access to additional records, provide training to Vietnamese-American community organizations, offer teacher and librarian training, and develop curricular tools drawing from these collections to be used in the school district’s Vietnamese Dual Language Immersion program. (DP-103589)
University of Northern Iowa
Cedar Falls, IA
$50,000 to support a project to develop, test, and promote a new embeddable Exhibit Tool to become part of a suite of capabilities built into Fortepan.us, a digital archival platform, that displays thousands of digital-only collections chronologically, geographically, and thematically. The Connecticut Digital Library and five partner sites – the Great Plains Action Society, the Anamosa State Penitentiary Museum, the Cedar Falls Public Library, the Clinton Public Library, and the Kendall Young Library – will embed and test the Exhibit Tool. (DP-103605)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, VA
$150,000 to support the Chicago Covenants Project, which draws on volunteers to locate, digitize, and make available every racially restrictive covenant in the analog land records of Cook County, Illinois, in order to explore how covenants were key tools of racial segregation and how they continue to affect society. (DP-103606)
ARCHIVAL PROJECTS
For projects that ensure online public discovery and use of historical records collections.
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
New York, NY
$150,000 to support a project to conserve, process, digitize and make available online 67 linear feet from the Jewish Labor and Political Archives: the International Ladies' Garment Workers’ Union Collection, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Collection, and the Jewish Labor Committee Collection. (RH-103536)
Northeast Historic Film
Bucksport, ME
$102,801 to digitize, catalog, and provide access to 2,969 news stories and programs (about one million feet of audiovisual material) produced by WCVB-TV Boston from the years 1973 and 1974. (RH-103541)
University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Chattanooga, TN
$144,049 to support a project to process and describe 125 linear feet of archival material amassed by Tommie F. Brown (1934- ), an accomplished civic leader, educator, researcher, and state legislator whose career is defined by historic firsts, including serving from 1992-2012 as the first Black woman to represent the 28th District in the Tennessee House of Representatives. (RH-103542)
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI
$103,063 to support a project at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to process approximately 237 cubic feet from four collections: the film critic and programmer Amos Vogel, the founding editors of Jump Cut, the feminist editor Elfrieda Abbe, and the Wisconsin Film Festival. (RH-103544)
Tacoma Public Library
Tacoma, WA
$126,823 to support a project to re-house, digitize, and make publicly available the photograph archive of the Tacoma News Tribune (established 1883), the state’s second-largest newspaper. The Library will also update the primary source sets and lesson plans for K-12 students to include digital surrogates from the Tacoma News Tribune photo morgue and create a public exhibit. (RH-103549)
Amistad Research Center
New Orleans, LA
$72,441 to support a project to provide access to 21 archival collections totaling 109 linear feet documenting Historically Black Colleges and Universities, public school integration, African American arts administration, cross cultural efforts between the U.S. and Africa, the history of the NAACP, housing discrimination, and intergroup and race relations. (RH-103557)
New York University
New York, NY
$142,766 to support the digitization of the Daily Worker and Daily World Negatives Collection (36 linear feet) that will produce nearly 185,000 newly accessible photographs drawn from the newspapers of the Communist Party, USA. The photo collections provide images of labor, immigration, race, class, and political culture, including historic and watershed events of the era and depict leading national figures of the 20th century. (RH-103562)
Cranbrook Educational Community
Bloomfield Hills, MI
$131,026 to support a project to digitize documents of Cranbrook’s Horizons-Upward Bound Program, one of the oldest and largest college access programs, serving low-income and first-generation high school students from Detroit area public schools by providing opportunities for academic and cultural enrichment in the pursuit of higher education, at no cost to the students. The project will include 35 minutes of motion picture film of HUB’s history. (RH-103566)
Atlanta Historical Society, Inc.
Atlanta, GA
$137,554 to support a project to rehouse, arrange, and create publicly accessible finding aids for archival collections that document populations and land use in and around Atlanta. The collections - the Atlanta Department of City Planning, Atlanta Urban Design Commission, and Atlanta Real Estate Board appraisals - are important to understanding the impacts of segregation and redlining on Black Atlantans. (RH-103567)
Arizona Corporation Commission
Phoenix, AZ
$132,355 to support a project to digitize and provide public access to docket information for evidentiary hearings on cases involving the regulation and oversight of regulated utilities, pipeline and railroad safety, and securities salespersons and investment management advisors. The Docket Control Office will digitize at least 899 rolls, approximately 5.6 million images, of the most frequently requested files. (RH-103571)
Nebraska State Historical Society
Omaha, NE
$148,492 to support History Nebraska’s project to convert its existing collection descriptions by migrating approximately 1,400 government record and manuscript finding aids from non-EAD documents into ArchivesSpace; oversee the migration of the remaining 1,500 finding aids in the collection; and link the finding aids to born-digital and digitized assets to Preservica, which currently contains over 470,900 digital assets. (RH-103576)
La MaMa Experimental Theater Club
New York, NY
$118,320 to support a project to recover data lost in 2022: approximately 600 object records, 200 production records, and 150 work records from the first half of the 1990s. These records represent material such as posters, VHS, programs, flyers, press, photographs, and more. This project will re-digitize those records, as well as digitize 400 new object records, 100 new production records, and 100 new work records. (RH-103577)
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UH
$130,834 to support a project to review, update, or create at least 400 collection finding aids related to women, create at least one LibGuide informing patrons of the existence of these archival collections and teaching them how to access the materials, and create at least one exhibition allowing university and community patrons to learn about women’s contributions to Utah and regional culture and history. (RH-103579)
Westchester County Historical Society
Elmsford, NY
$75,875 to support a project to digitize the McDonald Papers (1,100 annotated) handwritten transcriptions of 407 interviews with participants and eyewitnesses to the Revolutionary War recorded between 1844 and 1850. (RH-103590)
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA
$149,938 to support a project to digitize the Local History Collection (formerly held by the Philadelphia History Museum as part of the Atwater Kent Collection) which contains an estimated 20,000 individual paper-based items from the late 17th through early 21st centuries, totaling 150 linear feet. The project will catalog 10,000 item-level entries to be searchable online via PhiladelphiaHistory.org, digitize 15,000 historical records; and create a new comprehensive descriptive online finding aid. (RH-103591)
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV
$150,000 to support a project to process 40 feminist collections from the 1950s to the early part of the 21st century totaling 325 linear feet plus 45 GB of electronic records and digitize a minimum of 100 representative documents drawn from collections of playwrights, novelists, and historians; the Artemis Sisters Collective Collection; the Women’s Information Center; the university’s Council for Women’s Concerns and the Women and Gender Studies; and the papers of Linda Cooper, a leader for environmental justice who helped create the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge; and others. (RH-103587)
New America Foundation
Washington, DC
$149,571 to support a project in collaboration with the Alexandria Library in Virginia to shed light on an under-told story of a precursor event to the Civil Rights Movement: The Alexandria Library Sit-In of 1939. The project aims to digitize select portions of collections at the Alexandria Library’s Local History and Special Collections branch. New America will also integrate these digitized materials into an online storytelling exhibit and hold two workshops for educators and scholars. (RH-103598)
WQED Multimedia
Pittsburgh, PA
$150,000 to support a project to preserve, digitize, and make accessible approximately 870 hours of video from the television programs “Black Horizons,” “Horizons,” “OnQ,” as well as documentaries and other Black history programs. Once digitized and cataloged, this content will be contributed to the the American Archive of Public Broadcasting; preserved at the Library of Congress; and made freely available online through AAPB’s online database. (RH-103607)
Densho
Seattle, WA
$85,375 to support a project to Densho process, digitize, and make available the Loni Ding Oral History and Film Research Collection. Ding (1931-2010), a pioneering Chinese American documentary filmmaker, television producer, educator, and activist, dedicated her career to increasing awareness of the Asian American experience and promoting the use of filmmaking to address social justice and equity. The collection consists of 12 linear feet of photographs, documents, and ephemera and 41 linear feet of analog A/V materials related to her films. (RH-103608)
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
San Francisco, CA
$122,725 to support “Lavender Godzilla,” a project to process and create online finding aids for seven collections (50.75 linear feet) related to LGBTQ Asian American/Pacific Islander people. Additionally, GLBTHS will digitize material from these collections and three additional, previously processed collections, and provide online access to 1,000 items from these ten collections. (RH-103610)
National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
Minneapolis, MN
$124,311 to support a project to digitize 20,000 pages of records (1852-1945) related to at least nine Quaker-operated boarding schools from six states held in the collections at Swarthmore College and Haverford College. This group of records are from Quaker-operated boarding schools and Quaker organizations include enrollment papers, financial information, correspondence, administrative records, and photographs. (RH-103611)
PUBLISHING HISTORICAL RECORDS
For projects to publish documentary editions of historical records.
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN
$160,000 to support the Papers of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. Project staff will advance editorial work on Volumes 13 (1835) and 14 (1836), and expand the New Jackson Document Discoveries and Native Voices sections of the Papers of Andrew Jackson website. (PE-103538)
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Mahwah, NJ
$160,000 to support the Jane Addams Papers Project, American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author. Project staff will advance editorial work on documents from 1927-1928; complete editorial work on and submit Volume 5 for publication; and begin selection for Volumes 6 -7. (PE-103540)
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC
$110,000 to support a selective digital edition of the Papers of William Short. After serving as Jefferson’s secretary, William Short (1759-1849) became a career diplomat and successful financier and philanthropist. Project staff will complete the identification and collection of the remaining Short correspondence and papers held in smaller repositories; complete cataloging of documents for 1778-1810; advance editorial and translation work on documents spanning years 1778-1795. (PE-103552)
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
$160,000 to support the Freedmen and Southern Society Project on the history of emancipation. Project staff will bring Volume 7 (Law and Justice) to near completion and advance editorial work for Volume 8 (Family and Kinship). (PE-103555)
Villanova University
Villanova, PA
$120,000 to support Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery project which aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. During the grant year, the project will publish an additional 500 new advertisements; complete all remaining work for its website redesign; and expand its education resources including teacher workshops and presentations at social studies conferences; and assist in the submission of a narrative non-fiction book proposal. (PE-103559)
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation
Springfield, IL
$150,000 to support the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States. Project staff advance will advance editorial work for an additional 500 documents selected for publication in the Campaign Digital Edition; and capture images of new documents in repositories and private collections as they become available. (PE-103565)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Piscataway, NJ
$160,000 to support the Thomas A. Edison Papers, noted American inventor and entrepreneur. Project staff will complete the manuscript for Volume 10; ; select and transcribe 150 of 300 documents for Volume 11. In addition, staff will edit the years 1925–1927 of the Edison General File; complete processing and uploading images from 44 microfilm reels of Part 5; and add approximately 610 item-set PDFs from Outside Repository Collections and Edison-Miller. (PE-103568)
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
$160,000 to support the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers, a national leader in civil rights. Project staff will complete all remaining editorial work for Volume 8 and submit the completed manuscript to University of California Press. Working with the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing, project staff will migrate its online edition, including all existing King Papers content, to a newly installed and customized Drupal 9 Platform module. (PE-103570)
Cumberland University
Lebanon, TN
$150,027 to support the Papers of Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States. Project staff will publish all 646 documents in Digital Edition Series 4 (U.S. Senator); advance editorial work on Digital Edition Series 7 (Vice President), Series 13 (Move to Free Soil Party), and Series 14 (Retirement); complete and submit to press the final manuscript for Selected Papers of Martin Van Buren, Volume 1 (1782-1820); and complete document selection for Volume 2 (1821-1836). (PE-103574)
The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA $150,050
To support the Presidential Recordings project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Project staff will create verified transcriptions for 360 conversations (38 hours) from the Lyndon B. Johnson tape recordings, spanning the period April – June 1965; and complete all copyediting and final edits for publication and deliver the manuscript to the publisher. (PE-103575)
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, MS
$160,000 to support the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Digital Documentary Edition. Project staff will complete editorial work on and publish 603 documents from Humphreys Correspondence & Papers and 612 documents from the Alcorn Correspondence & Papers; create and verify transcription for 1,200 documents in the Ames Correspondence Papers. (PE-103580)
Indiana University
Indianapolis, IN
$132,412 to edit the Frederick Douglass Papers, a leading orator, abolitionist, social reformer, writer, and statesman. Project staff will complete the manuscript for Journalism and Other Writings Series, Volume 2 and complete the final production steps for publication of Correspondence Series, Volume 4 (1881-1888); and advance editorial work for Correspondence Series, Volume 5; add an additional 750 unpublished letters from 1853-1865 and 100 from 1866-1880 to the digital edition; and upload to the corrected text, annotation, and textual notes for Autobiographical Writings Series, Vol. 2 and Journalism and Other Writings, Vol. 1. (PE-103585)
University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL
$155,088 to support the Papers of Roger Taney: A Digital Documentary Edition. Project editors are developing a free, publicly accessible, annotated, 9-volume digital edition of the personal and professional papers of jurist and Fifth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During the proposed grant year, project staff will accession an additional 1,500 documents; transcribe an additional 2,000 manuscript pages; and advance editorial work on 200 of 300 documents selected for Volume 1: The Bank War. (PE-103586)
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE
$159,792 to support the Charles Chesnutt Archives. During the proposed grant year, project staff will advance its editorial work on 250 items of correspondence to and from Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), a pioneering African American writer, lawyer, and voting rights activist, to be published to the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive. Project staff also will update the comprehensive catalog and conduct promotional outreach activities to build awareness of Chesnutt and the legacy of his writing in Cleveland. (PE-103596)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$160,000 to support the Papers of James Madison, fourth president of the United States. Project staff will publish volumes 13 and 14 of the Secretary of State Series,bring volume 15 to near completion, and advance editorial work on volume 16; complete the editing of volume 5 of the Retirement Series and commence work on volume 6; advance editorial work on the new edition of the 1840 text of The Papers of James Madison; and complete final checks and publish Madison’s “Notes on Salkeld.” (PE-103600)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$160,000 to support the Papers of George Washington, first president of the United States. Project staff will publish volumes 32, 33, and 34 of the Revolutionary War Series; advance editorial work on the next three volumes; add volume 29 and part of 30 to the digital edition; and add at least 40 new George Washington letters to the digital edition. (PE-103601)
University of Delaware
Newark, DE
$215,085 to support the John Dickinson Writings Project, which is editing and publishing The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, the “Penman of the American Revolution.” Project editors will advance editorial work on Volume 4; commence development work on the project’s digital edition; and develop and implement a content metadata schema.
(PE-103602)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$160,000 to support The Chinese American WWII Veterans Online Resource, an online resource and archive that will bring together information drawn from U.S. military service records, including enlistment, separation, and discharge records, as well as information from private records on the more than 22,000 Chinese and Chinese Americans who served in World War II. During the proposed grant period, project staff will advance metadata creation and cross-referencing for an additional 6,000 service records; create content folders, clear publications rights, import, and process metadata for 12,000 veteran service records and newly-acquired source materials; and verify 3,650 tombstones of Chinese and Chinese Hawaiians as potential WWII veterans. (PE-103603)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$160,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Papers of Julian Bond. A pioneering voice in American politics for some five decades, Julian Bond (1940-2015) was a civil rights advocate, legislator, and teacher. During the proposed grant period, the project will hire and train students on digital imaging and editorial work; scan, upload, and ready metadata for material from 200 folders; and verify and launch 120 transcriptions from Series 1. (PE-103604)