The state agency that serves as the official humanities council for Virginia has made its latest round of grants to nonprofit organizations that seek to tell new stories about the people who have lived in the Commonwealth.
“We want Virginians to connect with their history and culture and, in doing that, we hope we’ll all get to know each other a little better,” reads the About section of the website for Virginia Humanities.
In all, Virginia Humanities awarded $153,200 to eighteen organizations including several in this general area.
- The Catticus Corporation of Berkeley, California will get $10,000 for a project to build a website intended to tell the story of Barbara Johns and the 1951 student walk out in Prince Edward County to a larger audience across Virginia and the nation.
- James Madison University will get $5,400 toward a project called A Miserable Revenge: Recovering 19th-Century Black Literature from the Shenandoah Valley. This will transcribe a handwritten novel by George Newman around 1880. Newman was an African American educator from the Winchester area.
- The Louisa County Historical Society will get $7,000 for a project called Representing our Residents: African American History at the Louisa County Historical Society. This will be a series of oral history interviews and public outreach activities.
- The National D-Day Memorial in Bedford will get $8,000 for a project called Someone Talked! A Podcast of the National D-Day Memorial. This will include conversations between the prolific WWII historian John McManus and other scholars and is intended and designed to reach and engage new audiences now that the generation that lived through WWII has passed.
- A project to add two Louisa County churches to the National Register of Historic Places received $3,000.
- Piedmont Virginia Community College will receive $10,000 for the PVCC Prison Creative Arts Project. The idea is to collect original writing from incarcerated PVCC students and then create a theatrical production based on the stories.
- The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum will get $8,250 to make three videos to introduce the Monacan Nation as “custodians of the lands and waters in and around Charlottesville” to serve as land acknowledgments
- The Virginia Tech Foundation will receive $20,000 for a podcast to be called Tribal Truths on the histories and cultures of state and federally recognized Tribes in Virginia.
To see the rest, visit the release at Virginia Humanities.
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