Skip to main content

Newsroom

NEH & Virginia

Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Virginia received $27.5 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.

  • The Papers of George Washington, a project begun in 1968 and two-thirds completed, will result in a comprehensive edition of the private and public papers of the Father of Our Country. The University of Virginia received two grants totaling $700,000 to support work on print volumes, along with a digital edition, relating to Washington’s role in the Revolutionary War and his terms as president.
  • Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription: an Open Source Tool is a digital humanities project at George Mason University that, with a $49,000 grant, is working to facilitate the use of volunteers as an alternative labor source to transcribe the Papers of the War Department.
  • The Papers of James Madison, underway since 1956, received two grants totaling $415,000 to support work on volumes relating to the retirement, presidential, and secretary of state years of this Founding Father and key architect of the American constitutional system.
  • The Virginia Sesquicentennial received $1 million in two grants for An American Turning Point, a large exhibition and smaller traveling exhibit treating the state—where the confederacy made its capital and where General Robert E. Lee surrendered—as a microcosm of the national experience.
  • The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton will host, at its re-created Blackfriars’ playhouse, an institute for twenty-five college instructors to study the Bard’s original principles of stagecraft and apply them to classroom study. The center was awarded a $177,000 grant.
  • The Virginia Historical Society mounted Lee and Grant, a major exhibition on the biographies of these Civil War generals. The project used a $365,000 grant to develop the show in partnership with the New-York Historical Society, which put on a comparable exhibition.
  • The Giles County Historical Society, housed in a historic landmark building, received a $6,000 grant to assess the preservation needs of its collection of county records, family genealogical records, newspapers, ledgers, and other artifacts dating from the eighteenth century.
  • The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities produces a radio show called Backstory with the American History Guys, hosted by three professors whose combined expertise stretches from the pre-Revolution era to postwar America. The program is broadcast on radio stations across the country and was supported by two recent grants totaling $85,000.
  • Encyclopedia Virginia is an online peer-reviewed resource that is continually publishing new articles about the history of the commonwealth from the literary career of the late Alice Adams to the Battle of the Yellow Tavern. A project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, it was supported by a $280,000 grant.
  • The NEH-funded TransAtlantic Slave Database has transformed the study of slavery in North and South America. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, with the support of a $153,000 grant, convened a six-week seminar for college and university teachers to use the database to study the pre-1800 slave trade.