Carrying On When the Grants Go Away
Over the past three decades, RRCHNM has received many awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We’ve used a truly tiny portion of the federal budget to have a huge impact on individuals and communities. Students in public schools use our teaching resources. Visitors to public history sites learn more from our websites. Citizens wondering about the origin of our nation listen to our podcast about the American Revolution. For literally pennies per person we reach, we’ve had a huge impact on public understandings of the past.
Last week we learned that six of our active NEH awards—totaling $789k in unspent funds—were immediately “terminated” by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Below you can read about the projects that were affected. This is obviously a blow, and a serious one, to RRCHNM’s work. But we will carry on.
We can keep doing the important work of democratizing access to history because of people like you, who have donated to RRCHNM’s work in the past. We are grateful to donors who have already given, but those past donations won’t tide us over forever. We need more financial support for our staff and students. Please consider making a donation as we carry on our work.
—Lincoln Mullen, RRCHNM Executive Director
Grants Terminated by the NEH
The Mathematical Humanists
Jessica Otis in collaboration with independent scholar Ashley Sanders were awarded funding to facilitate an institute that would have guided participants through fundamental mathematical concepts that underpin common Digital Humanities (DH) methods. The Mathematical Humanists included a series of in-person, online, and asynchronous professional development workshops on statistics, graphs and networks, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics methods that inform computational humanities methodologies such as network analysis, and text mining and analysis.
Graffiti Houses
RRCHNM in collaboration with six local partners—the Office of Historic Resources, (City of Fairfax, Virginia); the Brandy Station Foundation; the Office of Historic Preservation, (Prince William County); R.B. Toth Associates; the Manassas Museum System; NOVA Parks; and the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation were awarded funds to support the building and publishing of a digital archive focused on soldiers’ graffiti found in Civil War-era structures located in the greater Northern Virginia region. The digital archive would have provided scholars, students, and the public access to the graffiti and a reasonably large collection of ancillary archival material associated with the graffiti.
Connecting Threads
Deepthi Murali and Jason Heppler were awarded funds in support of the ongoing global textile history project Connecting Threads: Digitally Connecting Collections, Expanding Public Engagement. This grant would have allowed the project team to complete building the digital infrastructure and processing of collected data. This collaborative digital history project is dedicated to amplifying the contributions of Indian weavers and Afro-Caribbean consumers to global histories of dress.
La Sfera
Amanda Madden in collaboration with Carrie Beneš of New College of Florida, Laura Ingallinella of the University of Toronto, and independent scholar Laura Morreale, were awarded a second major grant for a continuation of the scholars’ work on the La Sfera Project, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem La sfera (The Globe). The team will finalize the design and infrastructure of the digital edition and complete collecting textual and cartographic data from approximately one hundred extant fifteenth-century manuscripts, which represents about two-thirds of the extant corpus. Both a teaching and research tool, the project aims to provide a clear idea of complex dynamics of readership and transmission of the La sfera text across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and serve as a useful case study for scholars and students on the relations between text and image in the premodern world.
American Religious Ecologies
Lincoln Mullen and John Turner were awarded a second NEH grant in support of our American Religious Ecologies project to continue their work with the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. These documents are a rich source of information about American religious institutions in the early twentieth century. They contain a wealth of information about each congregation, including its membership by age and sex, its expenditures on buildings and missions, its minister’s name and whether he or she had gone to seminary, and its denominational affiliation, and location of the congregations. Using the NEH-supported DataScribe software created at RRCHNM, a team of researchers was working to transcribe the schedules into datasets which can be analyzed and visualized.
The Ohio Black Press
RRCHNM with Dr. Jewon Woo of Lorain Community College (Ohio) was awarded a NEH Chair Award in ensuring the sustainability of her digital project on the 19th-century Black press in Ohio. This project illuminated the distinctively collaborative editorship of these newspapers and through that research will help us better understand the complexity of 19th century African American communal life.
Give Now
RRCHNM’s mission is to democratize history through new media. We do that by providing free and open resources to help public audiences study and interpret history for themselves. Historical understanding and historical thinking is as important as ever in our democracy. Make your donation today, to help us continue this critical work.