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Georgia Historical Society Awarded Nearly $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Train College Faculty

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SAVANNAH – August 21, 2009.  The Georgia Historical Society is pleased to announce it has been awarded two grants totaling $291,327 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to enhance the teaching of African-American history and culture and the American Civil War by university and community college teachers.   These seminars and workshops will be held in the summer of 2010 and utilize site visits, scholarly lectures, and the Georgia Historical Society's rich archival holdings. Sixty-five college faculty selected from a nationwide application process will study African-American and Civil War history with some of the leading experts in the field. These two grants represent the largest amount of NEH funds awarded to an institution in Georgia in this grant cycle.

These two grants will feature visiting lecturers from some of the most prominent scholars in the country and include a Pulitzer Prize winner, three winners of the Bancroft Prize, two Lincoln Prize winners, and one Lincoln Prize Honorable Mention.  Such luminaries as Annette Gordon-Reed of New York Law School and David Blight of Yale University will be in Savannah to lead these workshops.

The first workshop, The American Civil War at 150: New Approaches, is an NEH Summer Seminar and Institute for University and College Teachers, and will be held in Savannah from June 6 through July 2, 2010.  This four-week residential seminar will engage sixteen college faculty in exploring new scholarship and approaches to the Civil War through lectures and readings, individual research projects in the GHS archives, and visits to historic sites in the Georgia lowcountry.  This seminar will challenge preconceived notions about the causes and consequences of the war that ultimately created our modern nation and ensured the survival of the United States of America, our republican form of government, and proved to the world the ability of the “People” to govern themselves.  This seminar will enhance the teaching of the war on the college and university level during the national Sesquicentennial observance.  College and university faculty from across the country are invited to apply.

The second grant is for a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for Community College Faculty and will focus on African-American History and Culture in the Georgia Lowcountry: Savannah and the Coastal Islands, 1750 – 1950.  These residential workshops will be held July 11 - 17 and July 18 - 24, 2010.  They are designed to address the broad themes of race and slavery in American history and focus on site-specific experiences of Savannah area communities from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.  Fifty community college teachers from across the humanities will examine the centrality of “place” in the African-American experience in the Lowcountry and the larger Atlantic world through readings, lectures, site visits, community presentations, guided tours and research in primary source documents from the Georgia Historical Society’s collection.  Savannah’s Historic Landmark District will be utilized to illustrate the urban social, economic, cultural, and religious life of African-Americans over two centuries.  Participants will visit Ossabaw Island and Sapelo Island’s African American community of Hog Hammock to focus on the lives and distinct cultures that developed in the antebellum era and that still thrive in the Georgia lowcountry.  The workshops are intended to assist community college faculty in teaching and facilitating classroom discussions on African-American life and culture throughout American history, the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the global impact of African-American religion, art, food, and music.  

The Georgia Historical Society is grateful to NEH for the receipt of these two grant awards which help GHS to fulfill its mission to preserve and interpret Georgia and American history.  The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.  For more information about NEH, go to http://www.neh.gov .

To learn more about the Georgia Historical Society, these two NEH grants and for upcoming events, visit www.georgiahistory.com .