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NEH & New York

Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in New York received $67 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York Council for the Humanities for projects that explore the human achievement and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.

  • The Brooklyn Navy Yard Center, situated inside the former Marine Commandant’s residence, has received a $350,000 grant to implement a long-term exhibition about the rise, decline, and revitalization of this well-known arsenal and its role in American history dating to the seventeenth century.
  • The New-York Historical Society received a $75,000 planning grant to develop “Lincoln in New York,” which documented and explored the sixteenth president’s fraught relationship with the country’s burgeoning capital of commerce, then a stronghold of pro-slavery sentiment. The museum then developed, with a $400,000 grant, a portable exhibition that traveled to libraries nationwide.
  • Two hundred schoolteachers attended one-week scholar-led workshops devoted to “FDR and the World Crisis: 1933 to 1945” at the former Roosevelt residence in Hyde Park, using this national historic site as a lens through which to view this president’s policies and decisionmaking from the Great Depression through World War II. The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute received two separate grants totaling more than $300,000 in support.
  • The Greene County Historical Society in Catskill received a $320,000 grant to establish a permanent exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, the former home and studio of the founder of the Hudson School of painting, which includes a film, exhibition panels, docent tours, a website, and educational programming.
  • The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History received a $400,000 grant to develop a traveling exhibition for Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man for His Time, A Man for All Times,” which circulated to more than forty libraries nationwide and provided “history in a box” lesson plans to schools.
  • In the early years of the Revolutionary War, Fort Ticonderoga was called the “key to the continent.” With a $160,000 grant, the fort is hosting eighty schoolteachers for one-week workshops devoted to the American Revolution on the Northern Frontier.
  • The Papers of Gouverneur Morris: Diaries Project, supported with a grant of $200,000, is the first modern effort to transcribe, annotate, and publish the personal papers of this Founding Father, contributor to the U.S. Constitution, minister to France, U.S. senator, and close friend of Alexander Hamilton.
  • The forthcoming documentary 1812: The War We Forgot promises to be the first significant television treatment of the first war declared by the United States of America. The film is being produced with the assistance of an $800,000 production grant to the Western New York Public Broadcasting Association.
  • 2009 marked a double anniversary: the bicentennial of Robert Fulton’s steamboat voyage on the Hudson and the quadricentennial of the explorations of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain. A $253,000 grant funded speakers, conferences, and events marking the 400th anniversary of New York State.
  • A $253,000 grant to the New York Council for the Humanities supported Together—Book Talk for Kids and Parents, a program for children ages 9 to 11 and their guardians to read and discuss books with humanities scholars.
  • The Adirondack Museum in Hamilton County received a $20,000 grant from the New York Council for the Humanities to support its exhibition Common Threads: 150 Years of Adirondack Quilts and Comfort, exploring local history through the artistry of quilts.