Between 2008 and 2012, institutions and individuals in Ohio received $16.4 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ohio Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples of projects since 2006.
- Albert Sabin, who developed the oral vaccine against polio, came to widespread fame after immunizing 180,000 schoolchildren in Cincinnati. Recently, scholars at the University of Cincinnati received $314,000 to digitize fifty thousand pages of Sabin’s correspondence and accompanying materials.
- The expanding and newly redesigned Akron Art Museum is using a $296,000 stabilization grant to rehouse and preserve the museum’s valuable collection of twentieth-century art.
- Two hundred community college teachers examined hidden complexities of society, politics, and literature during the Gilded Age in week-long conferences at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, supported by a $443,000 grant.
- The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which opened in Cincinnati in 2004 and has received more than 900,000 visitors, has been awarded $267,000 in challenge grants (which require matching funds) to support its distance learning programs, exhibitions, and educational workshops.
- The Ohio Historical Society has received $687,000 to digitize and make public two hundred thousand pages of newspapers such as the Akron Daily Democrat dating from 1880 to 1922. This work is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program which NEH conducts in partnership with the Library of Congress.
- Fifty community college teachers studied in a program entitled Mounds, Earthworks, and the Pre-History of the Ohio Valley, examining the prehistoric culture of Native Americans in the area with the help of a $114,000 grant. The Ancient Ohio Trail is also being explored by tourists with the assistance of downloadable information provided by a $40,000 grant to the University of Cincinnati.
- In June of 1964, young civil rights activists came to the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (now Miami University), to train for work in the The Mississippi Summer Project, which brought together about a thousand out-of-state volunteers and thousands of Mississippi residents to register African-American voters. By the time the ten-week project was over, four civil rights workers had died and many were injured. From 2009 to 2010, Miami University received $40,000 to plan an exhibition and public education programs about the Ohio effort and its national implications.
- In 2008, an institute run by Ohio University and supported by the Ohio Humanities Council guided teachers as they studied nineteenth-century African-American history, beginning with an examination of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
- “Between Fences,” a traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian Institute revealing how clainlink, white-picket, and many other types of boundary markers have defined American property since the nineteenth century, visited eight historical societies and museums with the support of the Ohio Humanities Council.
- The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is being noted by an entire corps of Civil War presenters supported by the Ohio Humanities Council, which is working with the Ohio Historical Society to highlight the politically divided state’s contributions to the war and emancipation.