MHS News

Recent MHS Grant Announcements - September

Support Received from the LOC, Mass Humanities, MCC, and Linn Foundation

The MHS’s Education and Public Programs Department continued its successful pursuit of grant funding. The department received $15,000 in funding from the Library of Congress (LOC) for its program entitled The End of Slavery: Document and Dilemmas.  MHS staff will take 20 documents from the LOC From Slavery to Freedom digitized collections and 20 documents from the MHS African Americans and the End of Slavery and Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts digitized collections to develop educational materials for teachers based on both institutions' resources. Working with Boston-area teachers, the MHS will create curriculum units available through the MHS website. These materials will then become the core of a wide range of professional development programs for educators, including primary source-based workshops to be held at the MHS in 2010 and conference presentations with partners at local and national conferences for historians and educators.

The MHS was also part of a team of organizations awarded funding by Mass Humanities for John Brown and New England, a series of public programs commemorating the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. John Brown and New England is a collaborative project of the MHS, American Antiquarian Society, Thoreau Society, Worcester State College, and Mechanics Hall.  The MHS will contribute two lectures to the series. The first, The Kaleidoscope of History: John Brown after Fifteen Decades, will be presented on 27 October by Bruce Ronda, professor and chair of the Department of English at Colorado State University. On 7 November, David S. Reynolds, distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York will discuss Warriors for Freedom: John Brown and Henry David Thoreau. For more information on these events visit the MHS online calendar.

On a separate note, the MHS received a matching grant of $22,100 from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC), a state agency.  This grant was awarded through the MCC's Organizational Support Program and will help the Society create and promote exceptional public programs and exhibitions to the community. As an investment in the MHS, the grant signifies that the Society provides a high level of quality in its programs, services, and administrative ability.  The staff of the MHS would especially like to recognize MHS Fellow Gov. Deval Patrick and the state legislators who supported the MCC, and in turn the MHS, particularly Sen. Steven A. Tolman and MHS Fellow Rep. Byron Rushing.

Last but not least, the Trustees of the Ruby W. and LaVon P. Linn Foundation awarded the MHS Library a grant to replace a traditional microfilm reader with a microfilm scanner. The new equipment produces high resolution digital scans of microfilmed manuscripts, allowing researchers and staff to print, e-mail, or save the relevant pages to a CD, USB drive, or hard drive.  The microfilm scanner will also give the MHS the capacity to create direct digital scans of 60 years of microfilm, simultaneously preserving its collections while making them more accessible to researchers around the world.  Researchers interested in taking advantage of the new scanner should contact the Reference Librarian before visiting the Library to determine when it will be installed.