PRINTBetween 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in South Carolina received $5.4 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Humanities Council of South Carolina for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- A unique collection of a thousand documents cataloguing the lives of two generations of South Carolina women, Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her daughter Harriet Pinckney Horry, between 1739 and 1830 is being digitized, annotated, and archived at the University of South Carolina with the help of two grants totaling $324,000.
- The content-rich websites of historical societies and libraries may present numerous challenges to the visually disabled. With a $25,000 digital startup grant, the University of South Carolina is experimenting with Braillesc.org to develop tools to help visually impaired users access humanities collections online.
- When two million African Americans migrated from the South to the North in the early twentieth century, they profoundly altered American society. With the help of a $75,000 grant, fifty middleschool and high-school teachers from South Carolina studied this historical event through the art of Jacob Lawrence and other primary sources at two-day conferences hosted by the Sumter County Cultural Commission.
- One hundred thousand pages of historic newspapers such as the Columbia Phoenix and the Charleston Daily News from 1860 to 1922 are being digitized by the University of South Carolina with the support of a $350,000 grant. This work is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, which NEH is conducting with the Library of Congress.
- The American Revolution pitted patriot against loyalist, but in South Carolina there were older tensions as well, setting under-represented backwoodsmen against politically connected merchants. The resulting “civil war” between Partisans and Redcoats was studied by 180 schoolteachers at Converse College with assistance of two grants totaling $278,000.
- Sixty thousand people came to the Union Course near New York City in 1823 to watch Eclipse and Harry in the greatest horse race of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Johnson of the University of South Carolina, with the help of a $40,000 research grant, researched the showdown as the basis for a book on southern-northern rivalry in the early years of the republic.
- The South Carolina Encyclopedia, a joint effort of the Humanities Council of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies, and the University of South Carolina Press, tells the state’s history.
- Six medical centers have hosted Literature and Medicine, a reading and discussion program of the Humanities Council of South Carolina, which is led by humanities scholars and uses notable books to help medical professionals better understand their patients and their own reactions to suffering.
- Political debate in the 1970s over the Equal Rights Amendment culminated in the International Women’s Year conferences, which helped shape positions on women’s roles in American society. A book about the period and the conferences is being written by Marjorie Spruill, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, with the help of a $50,400 fellowship.