PRINTBetween 2008 and 2012, institutions and individuals in Idaho received $3.6 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Idaho Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples of projects since 2006.
- Exploring American Identity was a multiyear project in Idaho supported by several grants to the Idaho Humanities Council totaling $392,890. The grants facilitated hundreds of speaker’s bureau presentations throughout the state, summer institutes for teachers, traveling exhibitions on American roots music and “Journey Stories,” and special grants related to Idaho’s folk traditions.
- With a $168,944 grant, the University of Idaho, Moscow, brought 100 teachers from around the country to attend one-week summer workshops on the history of the mining industry in the American West.
- Thanks to a $5,000 grant, the Idaho State Historical Society was able to conduct a preservation assessment of its collections. The collections include 50,000 cubic feet of manuscripts and archives, 500,000 photographs, and 3,100 oral histories relating to the state’s political, cultural, and social history from the nineteenth century to the 1990s.
- An audiovisual consultant assessed the oral history and moving image collection on subjects such as homesteading and folk customs housed at the Idaho State Historical Society’s Public Archives and Research Library in Boise. NEH funded the assessment with a $5,880 grant.
- Literature professor Rochelle Johnson of the College of Idaho, Caldwell, received a $6,000 summer stipend to complete a biography of novelist Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813–94).
- With a $5,000 grant, the staff at Mountain Home Public Library received training in how to preserve and maintain their collection of agricultural, mining, and ranching artifacts as well as their maps and county records documenting the history of Idaho and the West.
- A public film and discussion program on the history of jazz came to the library at the University of Idaho, Moscow, with the help of a $1,000 grant.
- The Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise received $5,000 from the Idaho Humanities Council to help support the 2010 season of Shakespearience, an educational touring program reaching about 20,000 students in schools throughout the state.
- With grants from the Idaho Humanities Council, musicologist Gary Eller crisscrossed the state, rediscovering, cataloging, and recording approximately two hundred folk songs pertaining to Idaho. The project has produced a CD along with a 72-page booklet on the history of 17 of those songs.
- Between 2006 and 2010, more than 160 Idaho teachers attended summer institutes run by the Idaho Humanities Council, studying with top scholars such subjects as the history of the Supreme Court, the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, and why Mark Twain still matters.