Interpreting the Interstates seeks to understand the impact of Interstate Highways on the culture and history of Rural America. Its core is a unique collection of 36,655 large-format negatives taken before, during, and after construction of the Interstates in Vermont, the Nation’s most rural state. During year 1, we will make 10,000 of these rarely-seen images public through an established digital image archive, the Landscape Change Program. In year 2, we will use images as catalysts for public discourse at town gatherings. In year 3, we will disseminate our findings widely and stimulate public discussion using 1) a flexible modular exhibit reaching much of the State’s populace at non-traditional venues: 20 county fairs, 18 libraries, & 17 rest areas, 2) permanent interpretive signs at rest stops along Vermont’s Interstate Highways to reach millions of tourists who yearly visit Vermont on the Interstate, and 3) a book and interactive web presence for national dissemination.
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.
This award-winning website includes a comprehensive collection of standards-based, space science education materials. Site visitors can explore a variety of resources such as A Hubble Gallery, Online Explorations, Tonight’s Sky, and Star Witness News science content readings. The “For Educators” side of site includes support materials such as science background information and overview pages that provide strategies for using Amazing Space activities in educational settings.
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Space Telescope Science InstituteBonnie Eisenhamer
This traveling exhibit, dedicated to the Hubble Space Telescope’s imagery, provides an opportunity for visitors to contemplate the symbiotic relationship of art and scientific exploration. The exhibit was created through a unique collaboration between the Walters Art Museum, the Johns Hopkins University, and scientists and other experts at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Standards-based support materials are available for host institutions.
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Space Telescope Science InstituteBonnie Eisenhamer
The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to conduct a formative evaluation for Places of Invention, an exhibition funded by the National Science Foundation. The study explored visitors’ use and interpretation of the prototypes (including barriers to use and interpretation), understanding of the relationships among people-place-invention and 21st century skills, and interpretation of what the Places of Invention exhibition is about. How did we approach this study
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Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and InnovationRandi KornEmily CraigAmanda KrantzNational Museum of American HistorySmithsonian Institution
The Harvard Art Museum will organize, present, and circulate a groundbreaking interpretive exhibition that will transform traditional assumptions about the role of artists in the production of new forms of knowledge during the Renaissance’s Scientific Revolution. The museum will create a major traveling exhibition, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, and related publications and public programming. The exhibition, which opens jointly at Harvard’s Sackler Museum and Wellesley College’s Davis Art Museum, addresses the participation of such celebrated northern European artists as Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, and Hans Holbein in the scientific inquiries of the sixteenth century, especially as manifested in their printed works. Such an investigation reveals the previously unexamined close working relationships between the artistic and scientific communities, and the exchanges of influence between them.
Guastavino Vaulting: Palaces for the People will be a multi-formatted project to examine the history and creative contributions of Rafael Guastavino and his family, a Spanish immigrant family of the late 19th century whose adaptations of a traditional Mediterranean construction technique transformed the urban landscape of the United States. The formats will be a web site and a major gallery exhibition that will travel to the Boston Public Library, the National Building Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York.
The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum (TSHM) in partnership with the Texas Historic Commission (THC) is implementing the installation of the French ship La Belle (one of the most important shipwrecks ever discovered in North America) into the Museum for long term exhibition and interpretation. The goal of this project is to place the ship's hull into the Museum in an accessible manner that: ensures stewardship; places its preserved cargo in context; and expands our existing scope of interpretation beyond Texas. The project will continue to enhance and expand our collaboration, bringing together a particularly well qualified team of academic historians, archeologists and exhibit development practitioners who will explore not only the significance of the ship and its impact on American history, but will also formulate how these concepts, objects and story will be interpreted to the broadest possible audience.
The American Precision Museum is housed in the 1846 Robbins & Lawrence Armory, a National Historic Landmark, where in the mid to late 19th century, a group of inventors and machinists perfected the tools and techniques of precision manufacturing. Our project will create a new, long-term exhibition and related programs that explore the themes of innovation and work, and the influence of precision manufacturing on the course of American history. Highly skilled workers produced new machinery that helped drive rapid industrialization, the emergence of the United States as a world power, and the development of the consumer culture. The project will take place over three years from May 2011 to April 2014 and the new exhibition, titled Shaping America: Machines and Machinists at Work, will open in May 2014.