Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Wisconsin have received $10 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wisconsin Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- The University of Wisconsin, Madison, received three grants totaling $1.35 million to support the final print volumes and a digital edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English, a seminal examination, fifty years in the making, of geographic variations in American English.
- The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution and the Adoption of the Bill of Rights has been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and in numerous reviews. Twenty of its projected twenty-eight volumes have been published and, with support from a $250,000 grant to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, work continues on two volumes illuminating the history of the debate over ratification as it played out in New York and Rhode Island.
- The artifacts at the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center, Superior, include a fully restored P-38 Lightning aircraft similar to one the museum’s namesake flew in the Pacific theater during World War II. The museum has received two grants totaling $11,000 to plan and improve storage of its extensive wartime collection.
- Ryan Patrick Hanley, who teaches at Marquette University, Milwaukee, received a $40,000 research fellowship to support his work on the moral philosophy of the economist Adam Smith, for a book published by Cambridge University Press.
- The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, received a $315,000 grant to preserve and share online 56,000 deteriorating nitrate negatives of historic photos of an international array of landscapes and streetscapes. The negatives are holdings of the American Geographical Society Library, Milwaukee.
- The Aldo Leopold Shack and Farm, Baraboo, where the pioneering conservationist and author of Sand County Almanac lived with his wife and five children, is being reinterpreted with the help of a $45,000 grant.
- Hundreds of students at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, take U.S. History to 1877 with Professor Michelle Marie Kuhl. Using a $12,600 teaching fellowship, she spent three months researching Wisconsin history to enrich the course by adding more local material.
- The Wisconsin Humanities Council is supporting the traveling Smithsonian exhibition “Key Ingredients,” which stops at several venues around the state and is supplemented by local programming on agriculture, food, and cooking.
- The Making It Home Film Festival, a program of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, presents cinema on the themes of land, history, and cultural heritage, then invites attendees to explore connections between people and place in open conversations.
- For several years, the Wisconsin Humanities Council has devoted a portion of its reading and literacy programming to themes based on key phrases from the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, distributing books and providing humanities scholars to lead discussions with readers statewide.