Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Vermont received $5.3 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vermont Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- About 90,000 pages of historical newspapers such as the Working-Man’s Gazette and the Windham County Reformer from 1836 to 1922 are being digitized by the University of Vermont with a $391,000 grant. This work is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, an NEH–Library of Congress collaboration.
- About 25,000 visitors come annually to the Calvin Coolidge Visitors’ Center, in Plymouth Notch, the rural hamlet where the thirtieth president was born and resided. With support from a $330,000 challenge grant, which it has used to spur private contributions of $990,000, the Center will be enlarging and modernizing its facilities into a full-fledged museum with expanded programming.
- With support from a $24,000 education grant, the University of Vermont has developed a onesemester course on the “enduring questions” surrounding individualism and its excesses. Students read authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Richard Rorty.
- Revolutions have inspired historical novels from A Tale of Two Cities to Doctor Zhivago. This literary phenomenon is being examined by Middlebury College professor John Probasco McWilliams in an upcoming book for which he has received a $50,000 research grant.
- The history of the machine tool was reinterpreted, with the help of a $40,000 grant, in a long-term exhibition at the American Precision Museum in Windsor.
- The nineteenth-century gentleman farmer’s way of life is conveyed at the Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock, which boasts a restored 1890 farm office and a creamery. With assistance from a $40,000 grant, this gateway to rural Vermont culture and the Yankee way of life is expanding its programming to include audio tours and other enhancements.
- With assistance from a $24,000 research fellowship, Middlebury College professor James Calvin Davis has compiled On Religious Liberty, a warmly reviewed selection of the writings of seventeenth-century Puritan colonist Roger Williams. Though Williams contributed significantly to the American doctrine of religious freedom, his works have mostly fallen out of print.
- For thirty-seven years the Vermont Humanities Council has hosted a fall weekend conference on humanities subjects. In 2009, around two hundred people gathered at the Essex Culinary Resort to discuss food, its rituals, place of origin, the international food trade, and issues of poverty and hunger.
- Eight medical centers throughout the state are hosting Literature and Medicine, a reading and discussion program led by humanities scholars that seeks to help medical professionals to better understand patients and their own reactions to suffering through exposure to notable books.
- The northern front of the Civil War is a major theme in Vermont during the war’s 150th anniversary. The Vermont Humanities Council is providing educational materials and web resources to help interpret more than one hundred Civil War sites throughout the state.
- For nearly a decade, “First Wednesdays” have brought lecturers on “Civility in a Fractured Society,” “Beethoven’s Sketchbooks” and other topics to libraries across the state, supported by the Vermont Humanities Council and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.