Mystic Seaport received an implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund a suite of online, onsite, offsite, and onboard public programs and exhibits that will provide new national insight into universal and important humanities themes, through an interdisciplinary exploration of historic and contemporary American whaling. The Museum and its partners will explore through this project how, when, and why dominant American perceptions of whales and whaling took their dramatic turns. The project will raise public awareness in New England and nationwide about the role the whaling industry played in the development of our nation’s multi-ethnic make-up, our domestic economy, our global impact and encounters, and our long-standing fascination with whales. And it will promote thought about the nation’s whaling heritage, and how it continues to shape our communities and culture.
THE POWER TO HEAL (working title) is a 90-minute documentary on the dramatic yet largely untold story of how American hospitals were desegregated in the mid-1960s. With the active help of the civil rights movement and using Medicare as the lever, the U.S. government successfully desegregated thousands of hospitals in just a few months. Through eyewitness narratives, historians, scholars, photos, films and other period materials, we follow inspectors into the field, black and white doctors and nurses providing care and filing discrimination complaints, and senior federal officials charged with carrying out LBJ’s explicit policies. The film honors the 50th anniversaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 legislation creating Medicare, and draws on significant humanities perspectives in American, civil rights, and health care history with particular focus on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and the work still being done to achieve equality in health care.
In the summer of 1938, newlyweds Geneviève and Bernard de Colmont and their friend, Antoine de Seynes, set off from France on an adventure to kayak and document the great American West. They launched from Green River, Wyoming, and emerged 900 miles later in Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, with their travels vividly documented in 16mm color film. The French Trio’s journey offers a unique, previously unseen, window into a historic and cultural turning point for America—a first-hand pioneer experience in the pre-war West, and the beginning of a new era of recreational river runners. In collaboration with humanities scholars, and University of Utah archivists, the project team members seek support for an America’s Media Makers Development Grant to fund preparation for a one-hour documentary film, to search out additional archival materials, to conduct further historical research, and collaborate with scholars to refine the humanities content.
In collaboration with the libraries of Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Mount Holyoke College, the American Library Association proposes a traveling exhibit and public programs for 40 libraries examining the history and legacy of the Dust Bowl. The project spotlights Ken Burns' film "The Dust Bowl," and brings to public view two little known Dust Bowl archives: online oral history interviews of Dust Bowl survivors at OSU, and letters and essays of Caroline Henderson, a Mount Holyoke alumna who farmed in Oklahoma throughout the Dust Bowl. Libraries will display the exhibit for 6 weeks and present at least 3 public humanities programs from a list provided. The project humanities themes include the interaction between humans and nature; the different ways human beings respond to adversity; and how people living in the Dust Bowl tried to understand their social, economic, and ecological environment.
In May 2012, the Penn Museum will present the traveling exhibition, Lords of Time, the Maya and 2012 – an innovative exploration of the ancient and modern Maya and their conceptions of time. The exhibition will include over 75 archaeological artifacts and groups, stone sculpture, historical materials, modern reproductions, digital media components, and interactive displays to actively engage visitors in the discovery of an ancient culture, as well as its legacy to the modern world. Themes of the exhibition will span the fields of astronomy, history, archaeology, anthropology, and comparative culture studies. The exhibition is a formal collaboration between the Penn Museum, the Honduran government’s Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Peabody). After its debut at the Penn Museum, the core of the exhibition will travel to other US venues through 2014.
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.
The Kitchen Sisters will support the production of Hidden Kitchens World, a new multimedia series that explores life and culture through food across the globe. Inspired by the original NEH-funded NPR Hidden Kitchens series, this new on-air and online collaboration will feature stories exploring what people eat and grow, how food marks our sameness and differences, and how food culture adapts in the face of globalization, socioeconomic conditions and environmental changes. Each story will include perspectives from scholars, as well as video, music, photographs, curriculum and links to a curated library of resources relating to the themes raised within the stories. Funding from the NEH will help produce a multi-faced project featuring 8 stories on NPR, 1 hour-long radio specials distributed nationwide, 8 podcasts, research and development of a smart phone app, and a collaborative, humanities-rich website with audio, video, recipes, images and writings from around the world.
This award will support the production of a two-hour documentary about one of the great milestones in the history of flight: the 1935 crossing of the Pacific Ocean by a Pan American Airways flying boat called the China Clipper. The Pacific crossing was a technological achievement that captured the world’s imagination in much the way the space program did a generation later. It also began the era of transoceanic flight – an era that would lead to profound changes in American foreign policy, commerce and the very way Americans saw the world. Produced by one of the makers of "Forgotten Genius," NOVA's NEH-funded, Emmy Award-winning biography of black chemist Percy Julian, "Across the Pacific" will combine dramatic re-enactments, interviews with scholars, and films and photographs drawn from the rich archival record about the early days of commercial aviation.
This grant will support the production phase of a 90-minute film about the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted. He is known as the father of American landscape architecture; what is unknown to the viewing public is the fact that he had so many different careers, trying to reform 19th-century America in surprising ways. He succeeded mightily, changed the nation, and his concerns foretold the future. But he also struggled with failure, loss, and with despair for much of his life. The project also includes a website, five short films about Olmsted parks for web distribution, and more.
This feature documentary will join film to humanities scholarship in investigating the historical production of nuclear waste, the present character of communities living with that waste, and the combined efforts of sociologists, anthropologists, writers, and scientists to imagine how to guard this material into the 10,000-year future. Drawing on important work in environmental (land) history, ethics, and politics, as well as work on the cultural anthropology of the nuclear world, the film “Containment” examines how the Cold War transformed the American landscape, how nuclear waste compels us today—in lands across the United States and beyond—to examine our most basic views about the control and ethics of land use, and how 24,000-year half-life of plutonium pushed scientists and humanists into the Congressionally-demanded business of imagining a ten-thousand year human future in order to mark and isolate nuclear waste.