NHPRC Awards
May 2024
Archival Projects
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, AL
$110,798 to support a project to enhance finding aid description and digitize an anticipated total of 40,230 records referring to Alabama’s coal and iron labor history, including the Brierfield Iron Works, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, and the Shelby Iron Company. (RH-104728)
University of Georgia
Athens, GA
$137,080 to support the Finding Their Names project to digitize and enhance description and discovery of documents from approximately 80 collections related to enslavement in Georgia. The enhanced description will include a form of reparative description that will name enslaved individuals in item- and folder-level scope and content notes. (RH-104735)
Citizens Motorcar Company
dba America's Packard Museum
Dayton, OH
$51,030 to support the processing and digitizing of the Automobile Quarterly Collection (1962-2012), to enhance access through a finding aid for 1,143 cubic feet of production records, slides and negatives, and research files, and to digitize and provide online access to a sample of 1,500 photographs, documents, and drawings from this vintage motorcar publication. (RH-104737)
Amistad Research Center
New Orleans, LA
$150,000 to support a project to arrange, describe, and provide long-term preservation, conservation, and access to approximately 140 linear feet of historical records on African American Freemasonry: the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge Free & Accepted Masons for the State of Louisiana (1857-2017). (RH-104756)
San Diego Air and Space Museum
San Diego, CA
$150,000 to support a project to catalog, rehouse, digitize, and create a finding aid for the San Diego Aviation Company’s Rohr/Goodrich Collection. Founded in 1940, Rohr/Goodrich was a major contributor to aviation manufacturing. The museum will increase online discoverability of the 170,000 images. (RH-104767)
Museum of Chinese in America
New York, NY
$149,400 to support a project to digitize approximately 16,000 images from 443 rolls of 35-mm negatives taken in 1975 from the photography collection of Emile Bocian (1912-1990). In his capacity as a photojournalist for the now defunct China Post, Bocian documented New York’s Chinese American community throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (RH-104769)
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH
$109,349 to support a project to complete archival processing of the records of the Cincinnati Branch of the NAACP related to the 1974 Bronson v Cincinnati Board of Education desegregation case (215 linear feet), the city’s most significant case in the fight for school desegregation. The collection includes correspondence, court filings, background research on segregation in education, the conditions of the schools, curriculum, and information about how Cincinnati Public Schools addressed the decree. (RH-104772)
New York City Department of Records and Information Services
New York, NY
$148,093 to support a project to expand public discovery of 268 cubic feet of records created by the New York City Commission on Human Rights (1945-1976). The records include minutes, reports, speeches, correspondence, and planning files created to address systemic injustice. The department will digitize for online access 53 cubic feet of the earliest records. (RH-104776)
B&O Railroad Museum, Inc.
Baltimore, MD
$102,542 to support the second phase of a project to process an additional 25,000 records of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Relief Department. The first phase processed 15,000 records from the B&O Railroad’s efforts to respond to their employees before programs such as workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, private health insurance, and other such social insurance and security programs existed. (RH-104778)
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Omaha, NE
$150,000 to support a collaboration with Great Plains Black History Museum to arrange and describe the museum’s archival collection, 115 cubic feet of material dating from 1870 to 2015 that documents the development of the Black community in Omaha, Nebraska, and more broadly in the Great Plains. (RH-104785)
Old Dartmouth Historical Society
dba New Bedford Whaling Museum
New Bedford, MA
$147,972 to support a project digitizing approximately 348,000 pages from 1,200 whaling logbooks and journals, spanning from 1669 to 1977. The logbooks and journals detail not only how many whales were taken and where, but also detail unique interactions with coastal and islander communities and Indigenous nations and tribal groups, historical weather data, and information about crew members. (RH-104805)
Public Engagement
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources
Raleigh, NC
$141,264 to support the North Carolina American Indian Heritage Commission and the State Archives of North Carolina to partner with state-recognized tribes (Coharie, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian, Haliwa, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneech Band of Sapani Nation, Sappony, and the Waccamaw Siouan) and the North Carolina Native American Youth Organization to collect and publish online at least 144 oral histories of American Indian elders and tribal members, train American Indian youth as oral historians, and to create guidelines for collecting and sharing American Indian oral histories. (DP-104730)
Upstander Project, Inc.
Boston, MA
$112,262 to support a project to expand access to historical records relating to Indigenous peoples from the 16th through the 19th centuries held at the American Antiquarian Society, including books, pamphlets, mission press imprints in various Indian languages, missionary reports, Indian captivity narratives, and fictional works concerning Indigenous peoples. Upstander will create digital learning resources and presentations of contextualized materials, and collaborate with educators through workshops encouraging inclusion of these materials into lesson plans and curricula. Project staff will relaunch the Bounty Teachers’ Hub site, built for Upstander’s 2021 film, Bounty, which tells the story of the 1755 Phips Proclamation declaring the Penobscot people enemies to the province of Massachusetts Bay. (DP-104763)
South Asian American Digital Archive
Philadelphia, PA
$150,000 to support “From Home to History,” a nationwide participatory archiving initiative in which community members will collect, preserve, digitize, transcribe, and share 1,500 archival items online to shed light on the diverse experiences of South Asian Americans. The initiative consists of three components: six archival challenges, calling for contributions built around specific formats or themes; six training workshops on topics such as physical and digital preservation, oral history methods, or metadata creation; and building an online community of practice for community historians. (DP-104804)
The Vanport Mosaic
Portland, OR
$140,850 to support a project, using audio and video histories and other materials, to create an augmented reality walking tour of the lost city of Vanport, Oregon. Built as wartime public housing in Multnomah County, Oregon, between the contemporary Portland city boundary and the Columbia River, Vanport was destroyed in a 1948 flood. Using a collection of over 100 audio/video oral history interviews with former residents and survivors, as well as six intergenerational dialogues with elders and descendants and close to fifty short documentaries, Vanport Mosaic intends to design and build an augmented reality walking tour app drawn from community-based historical records. (DP-104806)
Publishing Historical Records in Collaborative Editions
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Papers of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. (PE-104719)
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Mahwah, NJ
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Jane Addams Papers, an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author. (PE-104726)
Cumberland University
Lebanon, TN
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Papers of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States. (PE-104732)
Indiana University
Indianapolis, IN
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Frederick Douglass Papers, a leading orator, abolitionist, social reformer, writer, and statesman. (PE-104738)
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
$125,000 to support the Freedmen and Southern Society Project to edit and publish Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. (PE-104739)
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation
Springfield, IL
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States. (PE-104741)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Piscataway, NJ
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Thomas A. Edison Papers, noted American inventor and entrepreneur. (PE-104742)
Villanova University
Villanova, PA
$120,000 to support a project to edit and publish Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, an online edition at informationwanted.org that identifies and publishes advertisements taken out by or concerning formerly enslaved people looking for separated family members and friends from the early stages of emancipation through the early 1920s. (PE-104744)
Mississippi State University
Starkville, MS
$124,993 to support the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Digital Documentary Edition, built from the historical records collections of nine governors from late 1859 through 1882, (PE-104752)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$125,000 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. (PE-104761)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Papers of James Madison, fourth president of the United States. (PE-104764)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$125,000 to support a project to edit and publish the Papers of George Washington, first president of the United States. (PE-104765)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
$125,000 to support the Presidential Recordings project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs to edit and publish transcriptions from secret White House tapes. (PE-104777)
University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL
$125,000 to support the Papers of Roger Taney: A Digital Documentary Edition, the personal and professional papers of Attorney General and Treasury Secretary under Andrew Jackson, jurist, and Fifth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (PE-104779)
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE
$124,976 to support the Charles Chesnutt Cleveland Archives, the papers of a pioneering African American writer, lawyer, and voting rights activist, to be published to the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive. (PE-104780)
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA
$124,974 to support the Colored Conventions project to collect, catalog, and transcribe scattered records collections of the 79 Colored Conventions held in the Civil War era, the nation's largest movement for Black civil rights during the 19th century. (PE-104783)
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC
$125,000 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. (PE-104784)