of New York’s Cornell University received support for a collaborative effort to translate, annotate, and prepare a commentary on Sidat Sanjara, a work considered by many in Sri Lanka to be the authoritative repository of medieval Sinhalese grammar. In 2002, the University of California Press published Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad by David B. Edwards of Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Edwards had been a fellow at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which in 2002 received another NEH grant to support three fellowships each year for three years.

The School of American Research is a center for advanced study in anthropology, Native American arts, and related humanities disciplines. It sponsors archaeological research, offers seminar programs, and publishes books on human culture and behavior. The Endowment supports residential fellowship programs at major U.S. research centers, here and abroad, as well as international research pursued under the auspices of U.S. organizations. These partnerships expand the access of U.S. scholars to important research collections and scholarly communities. In 2002 the Endowment supported 113 fellows at thirteen research institutions in the United States and thirteen internationally based institutions. The fellows came from thirty-one states and included one U.S. citizen residing in Australia. Fellows working overseas conducted research in twenty-six different countries.

The Endowment directly funds individual scholars for up to a year of full-time study through three programs: Fellowships, Summer Stipends, and Faculty Research Awards for teachers at Historically Black Institutions, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges. In 2002, Professor B. P. Taylor of the University of Vermont received a NEH Fellowship to study the transformation of the American ideal of citizenship and democratic institutions during the Progressive Era.

Natalie S. Robertson, an assistant professor at Hampton University in Virginia, received a Faculty Research Award to support the final phase of a ten-year project. She is reconstructing the history of AfricaTown, a community near Mobile, Alabama, founded by thirty captives from the slave ship Clotilda who were smuggled into the United States in 1860 in violation of the Piracy Act of 1820. Robertson will track the trans-atlantic voyage of the Clotilda and trace the West African origins of the captives. Her completed book will contribute to understanding U.S. political and cultural history as well as the historiography of the African diaspora. The “Elliot tracts” come from an earlier era of our history. They are a series of pamphlets published between 1647 and 1685 that detail encounters between Puritan missionaries and Native Americans. Their most recent reprinting was in 1834. With the assistance of a 2002 NEH Summer Stipend, Professor Christina Bross of Purdue University in Indiana will publish a modern edition of these texts.

In 2002 Professor Robert J. Hard of the University of Texas at San Antonio was awarded an NEH Fellowship to prepare a book describing three-thousand-year-old agricultural terraces he excavated in Chihuahua, Mexico. These sites are fifteen hundred years older than any other known villages in the Southwest. The book will help scholars understand the formation of farming communities across the Southwest and the human transition from foraging to farming worldwide.

During 2002, the Research division received grant products that included 144 newly published books on subjects ranging from The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages to America’s Public Holidays, 1865-1920. To date, NEH-supported research projects have won ten Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.