The Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, New York will develop Mining in the Adirondacks, a multi-faceted project that will include a 29,000 square foot permanent exhibit, an interactive web site module, curriculum development, and public programming. The exhibition will feature approximately 300 objects from the Adirondack Museum collection, including a tuyere plate, miners’ safety gear, picks and drills, historic photographs, an ore cart, maps, iron pigs, garnet jewelry, household items and audio recordings. A mining tunnel, open pit and mine village landscape will be incorporated to provide an immersive experience for visitors. The Mining in the Adirondacks project seeks to interpret the history of mining in the Adirondack wilderness grounded in current scholarship, best museum practice, visitor studies research, and understanding of varied learning styles. Four humanities scholars will work with museum staff.
The Chicago Architecture Foundation will produce "One Nation, Under Construction," a weekly web and radio broadcast program that engages people in learning the stories behind the building – conceptual and physical – of America’s spaces, places, and structures. Each week, the show will address a humanities theme through exploration of architecture, infrastructure, urban history, planning, and landscape. While drawing on the latest scholarship, each 60-minute broadcast will surprise, engage, and move viewers as it investigates the link between the ways of building and the values of the builders. The innovative power of this project derives from its approach –featuring the everyday voices and stories that illuminate humanities themes discussed by featured scholars and experts – combined with an internet-based strategy linked to a national scholarly network and the Chicago Architecture Foundation's extensive programming.
The Rochester Museum & Science Center (RMSC) requests funding to complete initial plans for Innovation Place (working title), a major new 10,000 sq. ft. exhibition in RMSC’s third floor galleries that promotes understanding of Rochester’s technological history and its culture of invention and innovation. Collections objects, immersive environments, multimedia presentations, and interactives will be used to tell stories of invention and innovation from Rochester’s beginnings as the nation’s first boomtown after the opening of the Erie Canal to its current rank among the top knowledge-based economies in the world. By combining the sciences and the humanities into a single exhibition, this project will critically frame and interpret new questions about Rochester as a laboratory of significant technologies – on the local, national, and global levels – and the changes in regional culture and economics that both inspire, and result from, their invention.
This is a request to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funds to support the production of Panama Canal, a two-hour special presentation of American Experience, for national broadcast on PBS. Focusing primarily on the decade-long American construction effort, it places the American Canal against the backdrop of the calamitous French effort that preceded and haunted it. It traces the roots of the American commitment to a trans-Isthmian canal in Theodore Roosevelt’s expansionist vision of American power, and shows how advances in public health, technology and engineering made it possible for the Americans to succeed where the French had failed. It examines how the leadership of the canal dealt with the challenges of recruiting and managing an immense and diverse work force, and explores the risks borne by workers building one of the planet's most remarkable structures in one of the most hostile environments on earth.