Between 2008 and 2012, institutions and individuals in Georgia received $12.5 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Georgia Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples of projects since 2006.
- Georgia’s statehouse and its grounds receive more than 700,000 visitors annually. The Georgia Capitol History Project, funded by a grant of about $40,000, uses digital multimedia tours to interpret the Capitol as a site for history and public memory.
- Over the past eighty years, the Linguistic Atlas Project has gathered information on everyday American English. A $349,000 grant will make it possible for 6,400 hours of interviews from the 1960s to the 1990s to be digitized, stored, and made available to researchers and the public on the atlas website and on CD.
- The New Georgia Encyclopedia, created and supported by the Georgia Humanities Council, is an exemplary online resource of information about Georgia places, events, and traditions. The encyclopedia registers 1.3 million page views per month and is used in schools and universities throughout the state.
- Leveraging a $200,000 challenge grant, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, has raised $650,000 in private funds to establish an endowment to support the position of head of museum interpretation. This key team member assists museum staff in developing innovative interpretive tools for visitors.
- A $150,000 grant enabled sixteen college and university teachers to participate in a four-week residential summer seminar examining recent scholarship on the Civil War. The American Civil War at 150: New Approaches was organized by the Georgia Historical Society.
- Lyrasis, a not-for-profit cooperative, received a $450,000 grant for a regional field service preservation program providing education and training, information services, consultations, and disaster planning assistance to libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations in the Southeast.
- The University of Georgia Research Foundation received a $50,000 start-up grant to support a telecollaborative foreign-language instruction project that includes high-definition video, audio, and textual bilingual exchanges between students in the United States and Russia.
- Ossabaw Island, a barrier island twenty minutes from Savannah by boat, was home to an African- American community for more than two centuries. The Ossabaw Island Foundation received a grant of $40,000 to develop a long-term outdoor exhibit on the community’s history from enslavement to emancipation and into the twentieth century.
- The Atlanta-Fulton Public Library Foundation received two grants totaling $10,800 for the preservation of 1,488 items in the Margaret Mitchell Collection that document the life and work of the author of Gone with the Wind.
- At Valdosta State University, the Georgia Humanities Council funds the Veterans Oral History Project, in which teachers and students learn interviewing and transcription skills before recording the stories of Georgia’s WWII veterans.Transcripts are preserved in the Valdosta State University archives and at the Library of Congress.