Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in New Jersey received $16 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Jersey Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- Rutgers University, New Brunswick, has received $450,000 to support a multivolume edition of the Papers of Thomas Edison, drawing on an archive of more than five million pages.
- Twenty-five college instructors will spend four weeks in New Delhi exploring the culture and history of modern India. Developed by the Community College Humanities Association in Newark, this summer institute is supported by a $226,000 grant.
- Scholars from Princeton University and Freie University, Berlin, are collaborating to preserve and disseminate three private libraries of Yemeni documents on Islamic theology and law. With a $209,000 grant, the project will digitize and publish online 236 manuscripts relevant to the Zaydi or rationalist school of Islam.
- The Witherspoon Institute received a $725,000 grant to support Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton, a documentary about our first Secretary of the Treasury, tracing Hamilton’s life from the West Indies to his famous duel with Aaron Burr.
- With a $230,000 grant, Princeton University Art Museum has developed Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of the Bering Strait, a traveling exhibition that includes 150 walrus tusk ivories carved in the first millennium CE.
- Supported by a $200,000 grant, scholars at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, are editing the sixth and final volume of the selected papers of nineteenth-century women’s rights movement leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
- Six hospitals, including AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City and Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, have participated in Literature and Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Heath Care since 2005. The award-winning reading and discussion program, directed by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, aims to improve communication skills, increase empathy for patients, and promote job satisfaction.
- The New Jersey Humanities Council’s Horizons Speakers Bureau offers more than 170 lectures ranging from “Lenape Culture: An Introduction to American Indian Life in New Jersey” to “Responsibility for the Subprime Meltdown.” Last year, over 250 programs were hosted statewide.
- Working with Bard College and the Jewish Renaissance Foundation, the New Jersey Humanities Council has launched a college-level course on “American Freedom” for talented young adults whose socio-economic circumstances have prevented them from pursuing higher education.
- Thirty-seven public libraries and over 1,100 New Jersey residents participated in the screening and discussion series Justice: a Dialogue through Film. The two documentaries shown, Revolution ’67 and A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School, focused on the history of the African-American community in New Jersey.