The development of a digital resource to support the preservation and revitalization of the Ojibwe language and culture.

This proposed project involves four partnering institutions who are interested in developing a unique digital resource to support the preservation and revitialization of the Ojibwe language of the Anishinaabeg people of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The institutions include Itasca Community College (ICC), the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), the University of Pennsylvania (PENN) - specifically the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the White Earth Tribal and Community College (WETCC). This consortium, working together with the faculty at White Earth, will combine state-of-the-art technology with traditional Anishinaabeg ways of knowledge to create a digital archive of stories and artifacts from the community.

A two-year project that would organize a substantial archive of Ojibwe culture and produce interpretive materials to enhance Native understanding of the resources.

This grant proposes to bring together a partnership of cultural institutions--the Library of Congress, the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical Society--to repatriate materials to the Ojibwemowining Resource Center at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, which has the infrastructure and central location to preserve digitized materials and to provide access to tribal colleges, communities, and high schools to enhance language preservation and cultural revitalization.

The retention of nine library staff positions, which would enable the creation of online humanities course modules and improve access to the college’s special collections.

The CSB/SJU Libraries will carry out two projects—developing online course modules on humanities topics and building a portal to the Libraries’ Special Collections—that will enhance the Libraries’ ability to support humanities teaching and research during and after the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Both proposed projects expand access to the Libraries' Resources, either by creating content that supports learning objectives in information literacy and the humanities or by breaking down barriers to Special Collections that are used regularly by faculty, students, and researchers.

Planning for a five-course interdisciplinary Honors Program curriculum, “Humanities in Action.”

Humanities in Action (HIA) is a five-course honors curriculum which places the skills and values cultivated by the humanities at the center of student learning. We are seeking funding to develop and integrate two key features of HIA: interdisciplinary team-taught courses and a culminating experiential learning component. The interdisciplinary courses examine scientific, social scientific, and mathematical knowledge and reasoning in specific social and cultural contexts to illustrate how these factors complicate the acquisition and application of “objective” results. Armed with this knowledge and the tools and skills of different disciplines, students will design and operationalize experiential learning projects for the Humanities in Action capstone. During the planning year, a diverse team of faculty and staff will design team-taught interdisciplinary courses, develop experiential learning and leadership modules, and design a community-engagement capstone.

To support a project to reassess the World Educational Crisis which will conduct staff seminars at cooperating agencies to collect useful ideas and documentation and to make arrangements for specific contributions by these organizations such as special analytical papers and data compilations, to collect, process and synthesize data, to commission papers on key topics and to refine plans for future phases of the project.

The development and teaching of a new undergraduate course on the relationship between the mind and the body.

Plato postulated that whereas the human body partakes from a lower material order characterized by change and decay (the order of becoming), the soul, by contrast, belongs to a higher and unchanging eternal order (the order of being). This proposition set in motion a millennial concern with questions about body and soul, and attendant debates about the preeminence of materiality or spirituality. Arguably all canonical schools, from Christianity to Materialism, from Idealism to Surrealism, to Third Wave Feminism, have grappled with these questions. The class I propose will survey the history of these debates about body and soul, and their second-order order variants: flesh/spirit, materialism/idealism, profane/sacred and becoming/being. Students will examine the competing answers that writers and artists have provided, and whether and how these debates have marked Western culture, particularly the modern imagination: the ways we understand and indeed experience the world and the self.

The development and teaching of a new upper-level undergraduate course to examine the marketplace critically and morally.

Market values are at once the source of, and solution to, many of the world’s greatest challenges. This course enables students to examine the marketplace critically and morally. We begin by considering the ethics associated with trade, and by situating wealth within broader philosophical notions of what makes life worthwhile. Because private ownership is at the heart of much market ideology, we consider John Locke’s The 2nd Treatise of Government in relation to works such as Madhavi Sunder’s From Goods to a Good Life. At the course’s core is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which considers consequences of material markets, including their moral implications. Central to this discussion are markets for surrogate mothers and kidney purchases and how market behavior plays out in family life. Polarizing ideologies dominate current discourse about the marketplace. This course enables learners to investigate values they do not hold as they weigh social, economic and personal choices.

The development of a course for undergraduates that explores ancient, religious, and scientific cosmologies.

This proposal requests support for the development of an Enduring Questions course pursuing the question, What is the nature of the cosmos and how do we, as humans, find our place within it? The course focuses on comparative analysis of the cosmologies of several cultures from the ancient period to the 19th century. It presents three comparative unit on 1) Antique Cosmologies, 2) Western Monotheisms, and 3) The Beginnings of Modern Scientific Cosmology. Overall, the course uses deep historical inquiry and predisciplinary textual and visual analysis to empower students to recognize and scrutinize the cosmological assumptions at play in their own lives.

The development of a fourteen-week course on the question, How do people respond to severe cultural upheaval and loss?

Project directors Linda Johnson, a historian of East Asia, and Stewart Herman, a theological ethicist, design a new upper-level "global perspectives" course, open to all Concordia College students, that enables students "to explore the ethical, cultural, and historical dimensions of human experience with a heightened sensitivity to contingency and vulnerability." Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart provide a framework of theoretical questions and vocabulary for discussing the ways that humans and human societies respond to "radical cultural upheaval" and loss. The course is built around six "strategies," each strategy represented by a pair of readings from different cultures and time periods, that help individuals cope with such loss. Augustine's City of God and Albert Camus' The Plague, for example, are paired to illustrate how some individuals, facing societal collapse, re-envision their lives in either religious or humanistic terms. Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy and Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World are used to show how some individuals turn to religion to cauterize the wounds of individual loss. Euripides' Andromache and Nguyen Du's The Tale of Kieu illustrate how some individuals await (or renounce) a personal rescue that restores wholeness and liberty. Sophocles' Antigone and Chikamatsu Monzaemon's Chushingura demonstrate how individuals can reassert traditional cultural and political values by noble self-sacrifice. Elie Wiesel's Night and Peter Gay's My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin demonstrate how individuals can devote themselves to living out their lives "without slipping into the cultural abyss." Finally, Winona LaDuke's Last Standing Woman chronicles the decline and reconstruction of Anishinabe Indian culture in northern Minnesota by returning to traditional ways. The latter reading is paired with a visit to White Earth Tribal and Community College fifty miles from campus.

The development of a senior capstone course course on the question, What good is leisure?

The first principle of all action is leisure, wrote Aristotle. In his study of tribal societies, Durkheim found that individuals understood their social identity in the division between sacred and profane time. As Tocqueville wrote, Americans define themselves largely by work. Still, we spend significant time in voluntary associations, essential to a worthy culture. In this course, we will examine five responses to the question "What good is leisure"?, defining leisure as what we do apart from family duties and work. Leisure restores a balanced relation to time, is necessary for a liberal education; provides opportunities to create essential social capital; is a respite from work; is a commodity whose recreational products are marketed to satisfy individual preferences. Because everyone worries about the use of time, the course will have practical as well as philosophical applications.

A two-year archival and curricular-enhancement project to engage students in studying the history of racial covenants and segregation in central Minnesota.  

The proposed project by Saint John's University will conduct research and develop learning materials on racial covenants and segregation in Central Minnesota. The project will develop five humanities learning modules around property deeds and other primary sources for use in general education courses at CSB and SJU. To make research opportunities accessible for students traditionally underrepresented in higher education, we will hire underserved students to research materials for use in the modules under the mentorship of project faculty. The modules will allow faculty to embed humanities-based instruction about structural racism in their courses, benefitting underserved students across the institutions.

Veteran-led public discussion programs in three Minnesota communities, with a focus on war, place, and memory through World War I, and the Vietnam, and Iraq wars.

Echoes of War, a project of the Minnesota Humanities Center, will explore the multiplicity of Veterans’ experiences by examining the roots of war in a place and its past and the echoes of war in a people and their memories. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq will be studied in the context of colonial conflicts and World War I using literature, memoir, and personal histories. The project includes presentations by and discussions with visiting scholars including renowned poet Brian Turner, Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and noted historian Ron Milam. 10 NEH Discussion Leaders will participate in an intensive residential preparatory program that is grounded in the literature of war and training in discussion facilitation. A series of public discussions will be conducted in St. Paul, Northfield, and Winona, Minnesota.

The applicant requested a Chairman's grant of $20,905 to run a one-day teacher training institute that focuses on the images and themes of Picturing America (PA), together with the PA Teachers Resource Book. The institute, to take place in late June or early July 2009, will serve 100 teachers from the Minneapolis public schools, which have adopted PA system-wide, as well as teachers from PA-adopting private, charter, church, and home schools in the Twin Cities and upper Midwest. The teachers will be drawn from arts, humanities, and social studies fields, with the goal of advancing instruction in American history, civics, government, literature, and culture. The distinguished American collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will receive attention for its relevance to the PA portfolio; however, the primary emphasis and the majority of time will be spent on actual PA reproductions and the Teachers Resource Book. The institute presenters, who are well-established humanities scholars at local universities, will impart rich humanities content and background knowledge to participants. Training in basic visual analysis of art objects will be included. The themes of Picturing America-Leadership, Freedom and Equality, Democracy, Courage, Landscape, Creativity and Ingenuity-will inform presentations and discussions; and the institute will devote approximately equal attention to works from the several centuries. The NEH Chairman's Grant of $20,905 will cover the total budget for running this institute, including modest teacher stipends and working lunches, speakers' honoraria, and museum staff and facilities.

In accordance with the NEH Picturing America Chairman's criteria, the MIA proposes a one-day training institute that will engage up to 100 teachers with Picturing America resources, scholars, from the Twin Cities academic community, and strategies for integration of digital resources in the classroom and visual literacy enrichment.

To support a regrant initiative "We the People: Tradition and Change" that will address Minnesota topics in the light of national history, and two teacher seminars that will explore the Dakota Conflict of 1862 and the signing of the Mille Lacs Ojibwe Treaty.

For its 2005 WE THE PEOPLE PROJECT, MHC will develop two initiatives: 1) a RFP regrant initiative that explores significant themes in American history and culture; and 2) two teacher seminars for educators analyzing the history of American Indian-European encounters in Minnesota in light of new regional and national scholarship. Regrants of $1000-2000 will be made, with special outreach to minority organizations and community colleges. Up to eighty educators will attend the seminars, with significant on-line content materials available.

Conferences will consider the impact of statehood on the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples and the contributions of native people to Minnesota and American history, targeted grants will help develop reference and curriculum guides for native language courses, and a content-rich website will collect Dakota and Ojibwe materials and resources.

In 2008, the Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC) will examine the significance of Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial by considering how Minnesota and American history was and is influenced by interactions between peoples. MHC's project will highlight the historic and cultural contributions of the Dakota and Ojibwe to Minnesota and American history. It includes a wide variety of programming formats to reach a broad audience: public programming; resource development; and a theme-based re-grant program.

The development of programs that explore Minnesota's ethnic heritages and what it means to be an American, including community conversations, a web site, podcasts, a public conference and a grant program.

In times of crisis, we must consider what is most fundamental about our culture and work to preserve that which we hold dear. One risk of the economic crisis of 2009 is that Minnesotans and Americans will lose sight of the ideas and experiences that bind them. Such a time is upon us -- a time to examine and expand the meaning of what it is to be an American and a Minnesotan. The Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC) requests funding to support community conversations and additional programming that will highlight its rich ethnic heritage, namely the accomplishments and contributions of the states original residents, the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk; the state's African American peoples, and the state's newest residents of Hmong, Somali, and Latino peoples. Programs to accomplish this include a web site, public events and podcasts, a public conference, and a re-grant program.

Two one-week workshops for 100 school teachers to study the early years of historic Fort Snelling as a representative military post in the context of Indian relations, economic growth, and westward expansion.

The Minnesota Historical Society (MHS)is requesting funds to offer two five day workshops tentatively scheduled for July 2006. The teachers will study the early years of historic Fort Snelling as a representative military post in the broader national narrative of Indian relations, economic growth, and westward expansion. By analyzing key moments in Minnesota’s history, teachers will gain the techniques they need to illuminate analogous experiences in their states and to understand the national policies and events that framed them. The workshops will provide classroom tools to illustrate the consequences of territorial expansion in the nineteenth century United States.

Two one-week workshops for eighty school teachers to explore the role of Minnesota's Iron Range in American history.

Minnesota's Iron Range supplied late 19th and 20th century America with the iron needed to fuel industrialization, economic expansion, and military might. During the summer of 2010, the Minnesota Humanities Center will offer two week-long, residence-based workshops that use this unique region of Minnesota to address themes and issues central to American history. A National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History and Culture: Workshops for School Teachers program, these workshops will help K-12 educators increase their knowledge and appreciation of Minnesota's Iron Range, a region significant to American history and culture, but often overlooked. The workshops will provide teachers with training and experience in the use and interpretation of this historic landmark region, and make available the material resources and archival evidence unique to this significant place in American history and culture.

No project description available

To support the endowment of conservators' salaries and the costs of refitting a conservation laboratory, purchasing equipment, and providing computer documentation of the anthropology collections.

To support an endowment for a new sequence of core humanities courses, including support for faculty and course development, library acquisitions, and guest lectures.

To support the initiation of an endowed library fund for humanities materials; to support a humanities forum, and an endowed humanities professorship.

To support construction of a wing to the library, and to establish endowments for library operating costs and a chair in Norwegian Studies.

No project description available

No project description available