PRINTBetween 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Colorado received $10 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Colorado Humanities for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- Three grants totaling $478,500 enabled 130 teachers to attend workshops at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez on the archaeology, history, and culture of the Pueblo Indians, focusing on tribes in the Mesa Verde region.
- A $100,000 grant enabled the Molly Brown House Museum, Denver, one of the most visited historic house museums in the West, to produce a short documentary film, present interpretive panels, and place interactive multimedia kiosks for the permanent exhibition “Molly Brown: The Biography of a Changing Nation.”
- The University of Denver’s Museum of Anthropology received a $6,000 grant for a preservation training workshop and to rehouse the Franktown and Kenton Caves Organic Archaeological collections, which consist of 670 rare, fragile archaeological objects.
- Colorado libraries received $17,500 to help defray programming and exhibition expenses incurred in bringing three traveling exhibitions to local public and university libraries: “Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War,” “Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience,” and “John Adams Unbound.”
- The Bessemer Historical Society received two grants totaling $510,000 to process, arrange, and describe archival records on the mining and steel industries between 1872 and 1993 from the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the American West’s first iron and steel mill.
- The Colorado Historical Society received a $367,000 grant to expand “Old Stories, New Voices Intercultural Youth Program,” developing the award-winning program for use in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. “Old Stories, New Voices” sends underserved 9- to12-year-olds to educational summer camps at historic sites. Over the three years of the grant, the camp served nearly two hundred at-risk youth.
- How did colonists choose which side to support in the American Revolution? This question is explored by Virginia Anderson, a scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in her forthcoming book The Martyr and the Traitor: Choosing Sides in the American Revolution. Research for this study has been supported by two fellowship awards totaling $55,400.
- Every February, Colorado Humanities sponsors Black History Live, a touring program featuring Hasan Davis, a noted poet, storyteller, and scholar, who does live interpretations of prominent African-Americans such as York, the only black member of the 1803 Lewis and Clark expedition, and Joe Lewis. This free public program reaches more than 2,000 children and adults annually.
- Cheyenne and Arapaho Legacies are remembered in online programming from Colorado Humanities and through its two teacher institutes: The Cheyenne Way: The History and Culture of the So Taaeo’o Naa Tsetsestakese and The Arapaho Through History: Hinono’eiteen, which thirty-six schoolteachers from the Denver Metro area and the Front Range of Colorado attended last year.
- Through Young Chautauqua, a nationally recognized youth program administered by Colorado Humanities, nearly 2,000 students a year in fifteen schools across the state research historical figures and present them as live interpretations to audiences of their peers.