PRINTBetween 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in New Hampshire received almost $5 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Hampshire Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- Supported by a $250,000 grant, scholars at Dartmouth College are preparing a digital edition and website of the works of the Mohegan intertribal leader Samson Occom. A student of Dartmouth’s founder, Occom was one of the most important Native American intellectuals of the eighteenth century.
- The New Hampshire State Library has received two grants totaling $10,850 to assess the conservation needs of its historical maps, atlases, and imprints. The imprints collection comprises 850 books produced between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Daniel Fowle’s 1756 Good News from a Far Country, the first book ever printed in New Hampshire.
- With a $199,740 education programs grant, Keene State College is developing five online teaching modules on the life and times of Helen Keller. The project, a collaborative effort of the college, Straight Ahead Pictures, and the Hampshire Education Collaborative, will create secondary and higher education materials and be disseminated in conjunction with a new public television documentary, Becoming Helen Keller.
- The University of New Hampshire’s Center for New England Culture and the Portsmouth Historical Society are using a $40,000 grant to develop an exhibition detailing the rich history of Portsmouth, expand the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, and create a new Footsteps of Washington trail. The walking tours will connect historic sites and homes throughout the city.
- Franklin Pierce Manse in Concord, the only surviving home that the fourteenth president owned and lived in, has been awarded a $4,700 grant to enhance its environmental monitoring system. Now a museum, it houses eighty-five artifacts that belonged to Pierce or his immediate family, and two hundred other objects dating from the 1840s.
- Saint Anselm College in Manchester has received a $25,000 grant to plan and implement an undergraduate course on liberty and justice in the contemporary world. Students will read de Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Milton, among others, and participate in a community-based research project exploring real-world ramifications of their coursework.
- An interdisciplinary team at Dartmouth has created an open source electronic game for archival data systems called Metadata Games. The software, developed with the assistance of a $49,015 digital humanities start-up grant, uses “crowdsourcing” to generate reliable descriptive tags for digitized archival materials.
- Over the last five years, Humanities to Go, the New Hampshire Humanities Council’s speakers bureau, has received $394,700 in grants. The program offers 180 different lectures and living history presentations, with topics ranging from “The Shaker Legacy” to “African American Submariners.”
- Fences and Neighbors, a statewide initiative of the New Hampshire Humanities Council, is designed to increase understanding of the history of immigration in the state and provide opportunities for the public to examine current immigration issues. Programs benefitting from a $225,000 grant include lectures, oral histories, and civic reflection forums.