Skip to main content

Newsroom

NEH & Mississippi

Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in Mississippi received $6.1 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mississippi Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.

  • NEH has awarded $112,000 to the Ulysses S. Grant Association, Starkville, to complete a supplementary volume to the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. This supplement will include correspondence discovered since publication of thirty-one chronological volumes. A digitized version will be prepared as well.
  • To call attention to fifty significant places in blues music history, NEH awarded $305,000 for the Mississippi Blues Commission’s Blues Trail. The project includes a website with recorded interviews and music.
  • Millsaps College, Jackson, received more than $150,000 for two one-week teacher workshops titled Eudora Welty’s Secret Sharer: The Outside World and the Writer’s Imagination. The workshops focused on the Eudora Welty House, a National Historic Landmark, where the extensive collection of manuscripts, photographs, and correspondence reveals much about Welty’s creative process.
  • Beauvoir, the home of Jefferson Davis, in Biloxi, received a preservation and access grant from NEH totaling $30,000 to salvage papers, paintings, and artifacts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Among the papers are Davis’s manuscripts for his books The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government and A Short History of the Confederacy.
  • Tougaloo College received a $30,000 grant to preserve the personal papers, oral histories, and memorabilia in the L. Zenobia Coleman Library and Art Collection, which documents the lives and work of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders.
  • The Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum, Biloxi, received $30,000 to address extensive wind and water damage from Hurricane Katrina. The collection includes historic boats, marine fittings, and blacksmithing tools.
  • As Hurricane Katrina destroyed a Harrison County art studio on the Gulf Coast in 2005, the rising tides exposed a long-forgotten French colonial cemetery that was abandoned in the early eighteenth century. The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, was awarded a $30,000 grant to excavate.
  • The Mississippi Humanities Council hosted New Harmonies, an interactive exhibit on the rich diversity of American music. The Smithsonian Institution exhibit traveled to six communities in 2007, with a second tour now scheduled for an additional six cities.
  • The Mississippi Humanities Council is preparing programs throughout the state for the arrival of Food for Thought, a conversation series about the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of food. In addition to a film series and book discussions, the project celebrates cultural aspects of food preparation in the Deep South.
  • The Mississippi Humanities Council funds the Mississippi Oral History Program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg which has conducted over 3500 interviews with state residents “from moonshiners to legislators to civil rights participants to blues singers.”