Crafting Freedom

FAIN: GE-50647-12

Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
James Lorand Matory (Project Director: January 2012 to February 2014)

Planning of two versions of a traveling exhibition that would present the biographies of 12 individuals to tell the history of African Americans in the antebellum South.

The Center for African and African American Research (CAAAR) at Duke University (Durham, NC) requests a planning grant of $75,000 to design and prototype "Crafting Freedom: Black Artisans, Entrepreneurs, and Abolitionists of the Antebellum Period," a traveling exhibit based on an acclaimed NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop of the same title. This engaging, youth-informed, technology and artifact-enhanced, learning experience will bring this critically important history to a much larger national audience by illuminating free and enslaved black life using scholarship and approaches to history advocated by Dr. John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). It is timed to be a critical component of the centennial celebration and commemoration of Franklin's birth.