Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in New Mexico received $6.2 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Mexico Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- One hundred thousand pages of historic newspapers from 1840 to 1922, such as La Verdad and the Santa Fe Republican, are being digitized by the University of New Mexico in collaboration with the University of North Texas with the support of a $352,000 grant. This work is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, which NEH is conducting through a partnership with the Library of Congress.
- Supported by a $551,400 grant, the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, is stabilizing and rehousing 10,735 historic artifacts including arms and armaments of Spanish conquistadors, Chinese silks brought from Mexico along the Camino Real, and a railway station clock struck by a bullet during Pancho Villa’s 1916 Columbus raid.
- Isleta Pueblo has used a $330,000 grant to develop a traveling exhibition, “Time Exposures: Picturing a History of Isleta Pueblo in the Nineteenth Century.” Photographs, oral narratives, and historic records document the daily lives of Isleta’s Tiwa people in the 1800s.
- The University of New Mexico has received two grants totaling $74,300 to develop an online database that will help students of ancient architecture access three-dimensional models, virtual reality environments, and geographic information system maps developed by an international team of art historians, archaeologists, and museum professionals.
- Supported by a $5,000 grant, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, is preserving 1,752 photographs either by the artist or documenting her life and work. Many of the O’Keeffe portraits are by Ansel Adams and other noted photographers.
- Margaret Irene Malamud, a professor of ancient history and Islamic studies, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, has received $50,400 to support research for her upcoming book Black Minerva: African Americans and Classical Culture.
- Over the last five years, grants totaling $422,000 have supported the New Mexico Humanities Council’s preparations for the state’s 2012 centennial celebration. The council has completed an online atlas of historical maps, and plans future projects: oral histories, folk music events, radio broadcasts, and museum exhibitions.
- To mark the quadricentennial of European settlement of Santa Fe, the University of New Mexico hosted two K–12 teacher workshops on “contested homelands.” Supported by a $160,800 grant, the workshops focused on sites, stories, and artifacts relevant to the history of Santa Fe and surrounding communities.
- The New Mexico Humanities Council has partnered with the Smithsonian Institution’s Museums on Main Street program to support development of local programs to complement two traveling exhibitions. “Journey Stories” focuses on accounts of “coming to America,” and “New Harmonies” on American musical history.
- Working with six other state councils, the New Mexico Humanities Council developed Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West, a two-year project that addressed social issues surrounding the Colorado watershed in a documentary radio series, a traveling exhibition, and a reading and and discussion series.