We the People Challenge Grants in United States History, Institutions, and Culture

The following examples are illustrative only and suggest the kind of activities and goals appropriate to the We the People special challenge grants.

An independent research library that has major bibliographic holdings in American history from the colonial period, the Revolutionary War, and the early Republic will use funds from the special initiative to endow an Early American Studies Program, which it will conduct jointly with a nearby research university. This program will bring together a consortium of the library, regional museums, and the history, literature, and material studies departments at the university. The grant will support an endowment for graduate fellowships, postdoctoral research awards, an enhanced acquisitions budget for the library, scholarly publications, training workshops for pre-college teachers, and public presentations including annual lecture and exhibition series.

A university will endow its Center for Constitutional Studies, which explores American constitutional principles through research, teaching, and public discussion. The center is jointly sponsored by the university's departments of history and political science and its law school. An endowment funded through the special initiative will provide support for postdoctoral research fellowships in the fields of constitutional law and political thought, graduate fellowships, public lectures, and academic conferences. The endowment will also support an undergraduate student forum as well as faculty stipends for the creation and maintenance of courses in American constitutional history that will fulfill requirements in the university's undergraduate core curriculum. The special initiative challenge grant will also be used to support renovation of office space for visiting research fellows.

An association of colleges and universities, which has conducted faculty development programs in the past, will use funds from the special initiative to establish a new endowment for an annual summer institute for faculty members. Participants in this institute will spend two weeks during the summer in Washington, D.C., reading primary texts and investigating topics in U.S. constitutional history under the leadership of nationally recognized scholars. Earnings from the endowment will provide salaries for the institute leaders, honoraria for guest speakers, stipends to cover costs of travel and subsistence for the participants, and an administrative budget for the institute.

A public television station will use funds from a We the People special challenge grant to endow continuing programming on local and general United States history. The station's production team will collaborate with scholars, archivists, and curators to design and write programs suitable for the general public as well as for school use. A portion of the grant funds will be expended directly to upgrade the station's digital production capabilities. The remaining funds will be used to establish an endowment that supports research costs, salary for a program coordinator, stipends for humanities consultants, and an annual summer workshop for teachers to study the topics covered in the television series and to prepare sample lesson plans that will be posted on the World Wide Web.