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NEH & Maryland

Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Maryland received $15 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Maryland Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.

  • At the University of Maryland, College Park, scholars with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project are working on volumes 6 and 7 of the nine-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation: 1861–1867, which is based on letters and other accounts in the National Archives. NEH has provided two grants totaling $351,000.
  • The National Council for the Traditional Arts, Silver Spring, received $250,000 to digitize 4,670 hours of original analog sound recordings of folk and traditional music from the 1960s to the present. Copies will go to the Library of Congress.
  • Parchment to Pixel, a project at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, was awarded $315,000 to preserve and digitize medieval manuscripts representing diverse Christian cultures. Nearly 39,000 pages of text and 3,500 images will become accessible via the museum’s website.
  • Twenty-five college faculty will participate in Slaves, Soldiers, Rebels: Currents of Black Resistance in the Tropical Atlantic, 1760–1888, a five-week summer institute developed by the Africana Studies Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Hopkins received $382,500 for this project and a 2009 institute on the same topic.
  • A challenge grant of $585,000 will help the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Washington College, Chestertown, endow writing fellowships and acquisition of an eighteenth-century residence in Chestertown that will house visiting fellows writing about the American founding.
  • Delis, Chinese food on Christmas, and regional delicacies such as matzo ball gumbo, latkes with maple syrup, and salmon gefilte fish will be explored in “Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture, and American Jewish Identity,” an exhibition supported by two grants totaling $240,000 that will open at Baltimore’s Jewish Museum of Maryland.
  • With the help of a $75,000 grant, sixty social studies teachers from the Baltimore City Public School System participated in Baltimore: Portal to the American Identity, a workshop to help educators use local resources to develop standards-based American history lesson plans.
  • Living history presentations, workshops, and other programming helped Marylanders explore race relations and the civil rights movement in a two-year Maryland Humanities Council project called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Remembrance and Reconciliation, which won the Helen and Martin Schwartz Prize for excellence in humanities programming.
  • More than 500 middle and high school students addressed the theme of Innovation in History: Impact and Change at the 2010 Maryland History Day competition at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Catonsville. The Maryland Humanities Council has coordinated observance of Maryland History Day since 1999.
  • One Maryland One Book, a Maryland Humanities Council program, encourages communities statewide to read and participate in local discussions about one thought-provoking book each year. Maryland’s giant “book club” most recently has read A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, Song Yet Sung by James McBride, and Outcasts United by Warren St. John.