NEH awards funding for “Making the History of 1989: Sources and Narratives on the Fall of Communism”

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are excited to announce that we have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a website on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

The project–Making the History of 1989–will have three main features: a database of 300 primary sources (text, images, audio, video) on the events of 1989; multimedia interviews with four historians make visible the strategies scholars use when working with primary sources and interpreting the past; six teaching modules and ten teaching case studies provide historical context, tools, and strategies for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources.

When it is completed in early 2009, the project will debut at a meeting at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Wilson Center, the growing list of partners in the project includes the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project (Washington, D.C.), the Wende Museum (Los Angeles), and the Research Network 1989 (Berlin).