A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to ensure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century and researched for a book on the history of red hair was among the 226 beneficiaries of new grants from National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.
The grants, totaling $31.5 million and the third to be awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states. and Washington, DC, as well as in Canada, the UK and the Netherlands.
Such projects include a documentary, co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about The Colfax Massacre – named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze clouds in John Constable’s landscapes and to follow the application of his Realism techniques by 19th-century European artists. other. The funding will also go to research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his day and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.
Shelly C. Lowe, the foundation’s president, said in a statement that the projects, including educational programs for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and enhance capabilities. access to knowledge, resources, and experiences in the humanities.”
In New York, 31 projects at state cultural institutions will receive $4.6 million in funding. The grant will support the creation of a new permanent exhibit exploring 400 years of Brooklyn’s history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and Hospital of the Innocents, 600 – aged child care facility in Florence, Italy.
Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers Project, a U.S. government initiative that provides jobs to unemployed writers during the Great Depression, led by Stone. Soup Productions is based in Washington. Another grant that will benefit the history of the Cherokee Nation is co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson University in North Carolina.
The grants will also benefit Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African-American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on the 1980s lawsuit. against the Central Intelligence Agency over their Cold War MK-Ultra program, which involved mind control experiments.
