PRINTBetween 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Indiana received $12.2 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Indiana Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.
- Over two summers, Indiana University, Bloomington, received $404,000 to conduct a four-week institute for fifty schoolteachers on the art and writing of John James Audubon.
- Ball State University’s Center for Middletown Studies is using a $160,000 grant to create What Middletown Read, an online database on library usage and reading patterns in Muncie from 1891 to 1902. Muncie was the actual town on which Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd based their sociological classic, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, first published in 1929.
- Thanks in large part to a $250,000 grant to scholars at Indiana University, two volumes of Assiniboine oral history narratives have been compiled. They will be published with an accompanying dictionary.
- Indiana University, Indianapolis, received a $225,000 grant to develop tools for visualizing complex data, which it tested using information from the well-known North American Religion Atlas.
- The Elkhart County Historical Society received $6,000 to improve storage facilities for its archives, which include a collection of rare photographs of the Nuremberg trials taken by a county resident.
- The Ball Brothers Glass Works operated in Muncie from 1887 to 1962, and its artifacts and records are housed at the Minnestrista Cultural Foundation, which received $6,000 to help preserve its collection.
- A $5,000 grant for environmental monitoring equipment ensures the longevity of the artifacts in the study General Lew Wallace built for himself in Crawfordsville after he wrote Ben Hur and served as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
- Preservation specialists at Indiana University are digitizing twenty-nine fragile audio collections that document Native American, African-American, and Anglo-American oral traditions, as part of Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage, a project that has developed guidelines for preserving audio materials and received two NEH grants totaling $698,000.
- Food for Thought is a two-year initiative sponsored by the Indiana Humanities Council in partnership with more than a dozen private organizations that features a conference, a blog, digital curriculum guides, a traveling exhibition, and workshops on how food reflects Indiana culture and history.
- IndyTalks is a collaboration of about thirty groups in central Indiana, supported by the Indiana Humanities Council, that is sponsoring community-based discussions on what it will take for Indiana to survive and prosper in the 21st century.