The Alaska State Archives of the Division of Libraries, Archives, and Museums has been awarded $220,146 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through the Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition grant program to support a two-year archival project, Foundations of Statehood: Alaska’s Constitutional Development and the Process of Self-Determination and Full Representation. The Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition grant program supports activities to preserve and improve access to primary source materials in honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s principles of equality, liberty, and government by consent. The Alaska State Archives was one of 33 grant recipients out of 103 applicants to receive the NEH grant award.
The Alaska State Archives project will include archival processing, enhanced catalog description, digitization of audiovisual materials, and transcription. The project will result in improving access for researchers, educators, students, and the public to explore the historical records of one of the defining periods in Alaska’s history, supporting new scholarship, classroom learning, and a deeper public understanding of Alaska’s path to self-government.
In addition, the project will produce a comprehensive online guide to statehood-related records held throughout the Alaska State Archives, bringing together resources from multiple record groups into a single point of discovery. Four standards-aligned lesson plans for grades 9–12 will also be developed using newly accessible primary sources.
In addition to Alaska, NEH granted funding to preserve and digitize archival records of the Dakota Territory documenting the region’s governance and relationship with the U.S. federal government prior to North and South Dakota’s admission to the Union in 1889. A grant to the Mariners’ Museum and Park in Virginia will stabilize fragile maritime artifacts excavated from the York River site where some 40 ships were sunk by American cannons during the 1781 Battle of Yorktown. Another award will preserve more than 100,000 archaeological artifacts and archival records from Revolution-era settlements in Kentucky.
Other recent grants awarded by NEH will also make possible new exhibitions and interpretive programs at historic sites that bring the ideas and insights of the humanities to life for the American public. Newly funded projects include a traveling panel exhibition, Conceived in Liberty: Lincoln and the Founders, examining how the ideals of the Founding generation inspired Abraham Linoln; an immersive multi-media exhibit on the history of the Old Idaho Penitentiary and its role in Idaho’s justice system as it moved from a frontier territory to a modern state; and the development of an interpretive site plan at the Canterbury Shaker Village highlighting 200 years of Shaker entrepreneurship and technological innovation.
NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grants will enable completion of the final volumes of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, a landmark 12-volume editorial project that has received longstanding NEH support, and fund an annotated translation of writings by Albert Levy (1897-1963) and Moise Soulam (1890-1967), journalists who wrote for the American Jewish press in the early 20th century in Ladino, the traditional vernacular of Sephardi Jews.
This funding cycle also includes a $6 million cooperative agreement for a partnership between Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars on a three-year program of scholarly convenings, publications, and podcasts on addressing antisemitism as a global challenge. This cooperative agreement is part of NEH’s implementation of the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order on combatting antisemitism and follows other NEH efforts to counter antisemitism through humanities education and programs, including a previous $10.4 million grant to Tikvah for the center’s “Jewish Civilization Project.”
Other awards will support a team of curators, archaeologists, and conservators in studying and documenting two 4,000-year-old Egyptian boats undergoing conservation at the Carnegie Museum of National History and the Field Museum of Natural History for what the vessels reveal about ancient Egyptian trade, craftsmanship, and culture along the Nile River. A grant to North Carolina State University will allow researchers to analyze the DNA of parchment from 13th-17th-century court records to track changes in agricultural practices and the emergence of disease in medieval and early modern England.
NEH Public Scholars grants will enable writing and publication of new nonfiction books aimed at general audiences, including a biography of poet Walt Whitman and a book on the friendship between George Washington and French officer and philosopher François-Jean de Chastellux, based on a newly discovered trove of documents.
National Digital Newspaper grants awarded in six states will support the ongoing digitization of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 for inclusion in the Chronicling America online database of historic American newspapers.
Press releases provided by the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
