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NEH & North Dakota

Between 2004 and 2010, institutions and individuals in North Dakota received $4.9 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the North Dakota Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.

  • Dickinson State University has been awarded $97,100—during the first two years of a six-year matching grant that can go up to $500,000—to endow a chair in Theodore Roosevelt studies. The twenty-sixth president credited his famously energetic character to formative years spent in North Dakota.
  • The Plains Art Museum in Fargo was awarded a preservation assistance grant of $6,000 to properly store a collection of 310 works of art by artists including Salvador Dali and Jasper Johns.
  • The University of North Dakota received $200,000 to complete the five-volume Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the first scholarly print edition of this Victorian poet’s work in over a century. The project will also include Web enhancements.
  • A $111,000 grant helped send fifteen schoolteachers to a five-week seminar on the culture and history of the Great Plains, as seen through classic American literature from Willa Cather to Wallace Stegner, at the North Dakota State University in Fargo.
  • From the Revolutionary era to post-Reconstruction, some sixteen thousand black Americans emigrated to Africa, Liberia in particular, via the African Colonization Society. University of North Dakota professor Eric Burin received $40,000 to digitize the society’s emigration records.
  • A grant of $168,000 enabled twenty-eight schoolteachers to attend a four-week summer institute to examine the historical and cultural contexts of the Lewis and Clark expeditions at Minot State University.
  • The Lewis and Clark bicentennial was celebrated in a Chautauqua series titled From Sea to Shining Sea: American Expansion and Cultural Change, 1790 to 1850, supported by a $32,000 grant to the North Dakota Humanities Council, featuring characterizations of Clark, Sacagawea, and John Jacob Astor.
  • “Why? Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life” is a biweekly radio program of the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life, a collaborative program of the North Dakota Humanities Council and the University of North Dakota College of Arts and Sciences.
  • The North Dakota Humanities Council supported a widely noted conference on the eventful life and distinguished career of TV newsman Eric Sevareid, who for many years served as a commentator on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
  • On Second Thought is a triannual magazine of culture, history, and literary reflection published by the North Dakota Humanities Council to foster connections between the humanities and life on the plains.