PRINTBetween 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Kentucky received $6.1 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kentucky Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- Appalshop, a not-for-profit arts and education center in Whitesburg, has been chronicling the history, folklore, and artistic traditions of Appalachia since 1969. Grants totaling $238,000 will enable Appalshop to catalog, rehouse, and preserve its collection, which includes 1.8 million feet of 16 mm black-and-white film, 4,000 hours of video, and 2,500 hours of audio.
- A $109,800 grant to Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, for a Landmarks of American History program, enabled fifty community college faculty to participate in a week of field and classroom study of the cultural history of Mammoth Cave.
- A group of five grants totaling $5,000 made it possible for the exhibition “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation” to travel to the University of Louisville and the Louisville Free Public Library, as well as to libraries in Elizabethtown, Danville, and Lexington.
- A $10,000 grant to the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights helped support its work with scholars on Kentucky Remembers! a Carter G. Woodson Human Rights Heritage Project. The grant allowed more than one hundred young people to attend camps where they documented the struggle for civil rights in Kentucky.
- A grant of $29,900 to Kentucky State University, Frankfort, gave faculty an opportunity to do a comparative study of classic Western texts and African and African-American literature to improve their teaching and update undergraduate humanities curricula.
- Louisville’s Frazier International History Museum, home to a presentation rifle that belonged to George Washington, memorabilia from Jesse James’s gang, and George Custer’s Navy Colt revolvers, received $4,800 to assess its collection of edged weapons and firearms from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
- John Dickinson, the “Penman of the Revolution,” was calling for colonial unity against Britain as early as the 1760s. Although he contributed more writings to the American founding than any other figure, his work is not well known today. A $200,000 grant to the University of Kentucky, Lexington, is supporting development of a three-volume scholarly edition of Dickinson’s political writings, an openaccess digital edition, and a course reader.
- Between 2008 and 2010, 726 Kentucky Chatauqua performances were seen by more than 35,000 school children in their classrooms and by 55,000 families and adults in local communities around the state. These one-person dramatic presentations supported by the Kentucky Humanities Council focus on characters from American history.
- Kentucky Humanities magazine delivers articles about the state’s history and culture to 50,000 Kentuckians a year.
- To celebrate Lincoln’s bicentennial, the Kentucky Humanities Council and the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre presented Our Lincoln: Kentucky’s Gift to the Nation at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, February 2, 2009.