The Washington, DC–based National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced that it is awarding $28.4 million in grants to 239 museums, libraries, universities, and historic sites across the United States; Washington, DC; and Puerto Rico.
Among the recipients of the grants are New York’s Queens Museum, which will put the money toward the restaging of its 1964 World’s Fair exhibition “Panorama of the City of New York” in the context of city planning and its attendant reinforcement of racism and classism; the University of Pennsylvania, which will deploy its funding in the service of the development of an autonomous robot that uses ground-penetrating radar to search for buried artifacts; and Stanford University, which will use the grant to fund the publication of two volumes of the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.
“The grants announced today demonstrate the resilience and breadth of our nation’s humanities institutions and practitioners,” said Adam Wolfson, NEH’s acting chairman, in a statement. “From education programs that will enrich teaching in college and high school classrooms to multi-institutional research initiatives, these excellent projects will advance the teaching, preservation, and understanding of history and culture.”
Among the less widely known organizations receiving grant money are New York’s nonprofit gallery City Lore, which will fund a documentary about the Colfax Massacre of 1873, in which dozens of Black militiamen were slaughtered by Confederate soldiers; Alexandria, Virginia’s American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which will create a volume, translated to English, of Lakota and Dakota literature ranging from the historical to the contemporary; and Washington, DC’s Japanese American Citizens League, which will produce a series of workshops investigating the long-term impact of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.