"Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor" will be the first major literary biography of a fascinating and increasingly influential American twentieth-century author. Balancing her background as a Roman Catholic writer, living in middle Georgia, confined to her mother's dairy farm by the lupus from which she died at 39 years old, she wrote two novels as well as two collections of short stories considered masterpieces of the form. O'Connor was chosen as the first postwar figure included in the canonic Library of American series, and is widely taught today in colleges and universities.

A national series of public programs tied to the release of an anthology of Latino poetry.

Library of America, in partnership with the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, plans 400 YEARS OF LATINO POETRY, a national public humanities initiative comprising a groundbreaking published anthology; public programs and conversations with literary scholars, poets, and historians; and a website featuring a permanent digital archive of teaching and learning resources.

Implementation of a book, a public programming resource, and a website, all designed to encourage exploration of the ongoing meaning and uses of Abraham Lincoln's legacy in American history, society, and culture.

The Library of America requests a grant in the amount of $299,750 in partial support of Lincoln in American Memory (to borrow a title from Merrill Peterson's authoritative study): a book, a public programming resource, and a website, all designed to encourage exploration of the ongoing meaning and uses of Abraham Lincoln's legacy in American history, society, and culture. Organized to mark the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in February 2009, Lincoln in American Memory will complement other projects organized to commemorate the bicentennial, including traveling exhibitions and public programming initiatives supported by NEH, for which our project would provide a unique and indispensable resource. The project is designed to make the Lincoln Bicentennial an even more significant and substantive occasion for public conversation.

To support a series of programs using themes in American literature as the sub-ject for lectures and book discussions. Works in the Library of America serieswill be used as the central texts for the programs.

To support the scholarly and editorial expenses for the first complete and authoritative edition of the plays of Eugene O'Neill. The three-volume set willconform to the textual, editorial, and manufacturing standards established for all Library of America publications.

To support the publication of a comprehensive anthology of American poetry and verse to 1900.

Production of an anthology of African American poetry and an accompanying series of reading and discussion programs.

Library of America requests a grant in the amount of $458,418 in partial support of Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters Today, a major national initiative to explore and reassess the multifaceted African American poetic tradition, its complex engagement with American history over 250 years, and its ongoing relevance to our national life. The project has two related objectives. One is to bring together Americans of varied backgrounds around the country to engage with the richness of this essential American tradition in ways that illuminate the continuities and discontinuities between past and present and offer context and insight into questions that remain of vital national importance. The second is to make permanently available a groundbreaking anthology reflecting several generations of scholarly and archival research and rediscovery that will encourage exploration and discussion of the tradition’s meanings and resonances long after the project is over.

The incorporation and launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a groundbreaking project that seeks to digitize and bring together the contents of our nation's libraries and archives, and make them freely available to all online. Project activities to be completed during the grant period will include the creation of four state or regional "service hubs," each responsible for developing a standard set of services to local organizations, and meetings with both service hubs and existing large-scale "content hubs" to formulate content provider agreements.

The DPLA Digital Hubs Pilot will take the first steps to bring together existing United States digital library infrastructure into a sustainable national digital library system. Foundational to the DPLA collection will be the rich historic materials held by archives, public libraries, museums, and historic societies across the country.These materials are important to historians, genealogists, sociologists and scholars of a wide range of humanities disciplines studying every aspect of American life. The goal of the project is twofold: to develop, test and implement the agreements and methods by which existing content hubs -- large scale digital content repositories -- become part of an interconnected national network, and to strengthen local services to institutions and communities and to develop guidelines for sustainable regional digital cooperatives, while enabling hub participation and data ingestion in the DPLA.

In anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the United States, the digitization and creation of freely-accessible ebooks for 50 titles on the history of Georgia.

The Georgia Open History Library (GOHL) will publish open digital editions of 50 out-of-print volumes of broad historical and intellectual significance to the colonial and early statehood periods in advance of the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. Our title selection includes rare primary documents along with scholarly studies of the period, all enhanced with new material representing diverse voices in contemporary scholarship. When shared broadly in a permanent, accessible, discoverable format via multiple online platforms, the collection will be an invaluable resource to both general readers and scholars. A key component of our promotional strategy is public-facing programming with a diverse group of statewide organizations, colleges, universities, historical societies, academic organizations, and public and research libraries.

The publication of "American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" (two volumes) and an expanded volume of selected works by Captain John Smith and other early exploration narratives.

The arrangement and description of 140.5 linear feet of correspondence and manuscripts, 1,500 photographs, and 48 scrapbooks in 18 collections held in the Library of American Broadcasting that focus on women in the broadcasting industry from 1920 into the1980s. A finding aid to the collections would be mounted on the Internet.

Digitization of 182,264 pages of archival records and 291 hours of audiovisual recordings of the Independent and Webster Commissions, convened to investigate the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles.

Our project will digitize for free online public access the records of the Independent and Webster Commissions, which investigated the causes of the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1992 civil unrest. Upon its conclusion, we will publish 182,264 pages of historical records and 291 hours of audiovisual recordings in the USC Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America.

Enhanced description of nearly 4,000 audio recordings in the Radio Haiti Archive and a pilot project to test more effective access channels for Haiti and other underserved areas.

Voices of Change II: Bringing Radio Haiti Home, a twelve-month, $85,753 project at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, will result in the enhanced description of the Radio Haiti Archive and a roadmap for repatriating the Archive’s 5,300 audio recordings to Haiti. The Radio Haiti team will create detailed, trilingual description for all the recordings, vastly improving the ability to search the individual programs and making the collection more accessible to those who do not speak Haitian Creole. They will also complete a pilot to explore whether YouTube, Internet Archive or a low-bandwidth version of the Duke Digital Repository would provide the most effective access for people in Haiti and other underserved areas. Voices of Change II provides far-reaching access to a singular archive of information and voices and provides a model for the repatriation of other such displaced archives.

Digitization of around 17,000 items including paper materials, historic photographs, video recordings, and cultural objects from collections held by six community archives in the L.A. as Subject research alliance.

The L.A. as Subject Community Histories Digitization Project will make publicly accessible via the USC Digital Library and Digital Public Library of America collections held by 6 community archives from the L.A. as Subject research alliance: the Filipino American Library, the First AME Church of Los Angeles, the Go for Broke National Education Center, the Pasadena Museum of History, the Southern California Library, and the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum. The 6 collections document the experiences of post-WWII Filipino immigrants; videos of 400 sermons by Rev. Dr. Cecil "Chip" Murray at a socially engaged African-American church in South Los Angeles; firsthand perspectives of Japanese-American WWII veterans in 1,100 video oral history interviews; the daily lives of late 19th and early 20th century African-American, Asian-American, and Latino communities; and Jewish women's groups. The project will publish 2,950 hours of video and 15,000 photos and pages of paper materials.

The Willa Cather Archive proposes to create a digital library of American novelist Willa Cather's literary manuscripts (broadly construed to encompass all pre-publication forms of her work). These materials are currently distributed across a range of repositories and are largely ignored by scholars and students of her writing. Our plan is to create a digital library of these materials that includes: 1) high-resolution images of each document, sufficient to facilitate close inspection of its details; 2) rich metadata about each item capturing its relationship to Cather's published work and other documents, its physical properties, the editorial hands visible on it, and other details about its creation; and 3) an expert-authored document analysis that describes, in straightforward prose, details about the manuscript that will help users make sense of its meaning and its place in the evolution of a particular work, including its relationship to other documents in the digital library.

A series of community digitization events focusing on the immigrant history of Cambria County, Pennsylvania, through the collection of family photos, mementos, and artifacts. The Cambria County Historical Society, St. Francis University, the Johnstown Area Historical Association, and the Pennsylvania Highlands Community College would each serve as a scanning location and host cultural programs for the public, to include presentations entitled Healing African Dance, Pennsylvania German Groundhog Lodges, and Sevdalinka: A Musical Tour of Bosnia. In addition to the cultural heritage programming, Pennsylvania Highlands Community College in Johnstown would offer two workshops on how to handle and preserve family items using simple preservation materials readily available to the public.

Cambria County, Pennsylvania has a rich history of ethnic immigration. Families in the county have amassed historical relics brought from their native countries by grandparents and great-grandparents. In addition, there is a strong sense of family and genealogy. Many ethnic social organizations exist to keep alive the traditions of these various old world countries. This project will focus on capturing family photos, mementos, and artifacts in digital format. The digital images will be uploaded into a statewide repository, PowerLibrary, which will be a part of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). In order to generate interest in this project, a combination of social media, traditional print, and outdoor advertising will be used. A comprehensive series of public programs will also be offered to reinforce care and treatment of family heirlooms and the history of immigration. This project will highlight best practices and serve as a model for other organizations.

A day-long digitization event and subsequent follow-up to preserve cultural heritage materials held by members of the New Bedford area fishing community, and attendant public programming. The applicant would partner with the University of Massachusetts, Boston, which has run the “Mass Memories Road Show.” University staff would provide support during the digitization day and would also train volunteers. Images would be stored in the University’s digital collections, as well as at New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, the Digital Commonwealth, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Items anticipated for scanning include photographs, documents, and artifacts. Public programming would have three themes: sustaining community, life on shore, and life at sea. Programs would include presentations by members of the fishing community before the digitization day event at the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center; a workshop by New Bedford Public Library staff on proper archival storage on the day of the event; and an exhibit of digitized materials after the event.

The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center proposes to digitize the cultural heritage of the local fishing community. Commercial fishing is often a family activity with skills and knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Consequently, much of this history resides in the photo albums, documents, and artifacts of fishing families. This project will digitize these materials through a day-long public event in combination with “house calls” to digitally document materials from individuals who are unable to attend the event. The project will be bookended by a variety of public programs which will serve to inspire community participation, evoke memories, and provide an interpretive framework for materials that are brought forward. Digitizing these materials, making them publicly available, and using them to tell the story of the fishing community will create a lasting legacy for families who have spent generations working the water in what is one of the nation’s oldest occupations.

Two days of digitizing community contributions, including personal and official correspondence, photographs, diaries, recipe books, beloved objects, scrapbooks, and other materials to illuminate the life and history of the Latino communities of the South Carolina Low Country. The Citadel would partner with several local organizations for this project: the Special Collections department at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library (a local affiliate of the South Carolina Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America), the Charleston County Public Library, El Círculo Hispanoamericano de Charleston, the Hispanic Business Association, and radio El Sol AM 980. The project would recruit bilingual volunteers from the Citadel, the College of Charleston, and Charleston Southern University to help staff the events and translate for the creation of metadata to describe the items brought in for digitization. This project would build on an existing oral history program at the Citadel focused on the Latino community. Of particular interest to the project organizers is the history of the development of Latino-led institutions, such as businesses, civic groups, and churches in the area. During Hispanic American Heritage month of 2017 (Sept. 15 to Oct. 15), the project directors would return to Charleston public libraries to hold community forums to present some of the items brought in during the digitization days.

The Citadel Oral History Program is offering a series of public programs and digitization events for the Latino community. Harvest days will take place in the spring of 2017 at Charleston County libraries (Johns Island and North Charleston). The materials collected will be processed and evaluated during the summer and deposited with the College of Charleston's Special Collections. During Hispanic Heritage month of 2017, we will return to the libraries to hold community forums to present the results of the project. Citadel professors Aguirre and Taylor will draw from the materials that we gathered to facilitate discussions on immigration, identity, exclusion and belonging, community building and civil rights. The forums will attract students, workers, scholars, and activists. The materials will be shared with the public through the Low Country Digital Library. We will continue to promote "Aqui Estamos" and encourage teachers to use the collection in the classroom.

Three day-long digitization events to document and preserve historical sources relating to the African American experience in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. The digitization events would each be held at different venues, including the East Athens Resource Center, the historic First A.M.E. Church, and the Athens-Clarke County Library, and the materials would be accessible online. With this project, the applicant aims to address the paucity of historical materials chronicling the lives of black Athenians in the region’s cultural institutions. The events would not only build out the collections that tell the stories of local residents, but also facilitate the community stewardship of the materials that document these stories, including photographs, scrapbooks, funeral pamphlets, church bulletins, and other objects, mementos, and artifacts. In order to provide deeper understanding of yhe experiences of African Americans in the region, public programs would also take place. Author Michael Thurmond would discuss his book A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History, and tours would be offered of the African American section of the Oconee Hill Cemetery, the First A.M.E. Church, and the Morton Theater in downtown Athens. Also planned are a course on researching ancestry taught by the President of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and presentations on how to preserve, access, and use digitized items.

Spared Sherman's wrath but not the havoc of Great Cities, Athens' Black residents and their historic neighborhoods have fought for their existence.  With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the applicant wishes to aid in the digitization of privately held historical sources relating to the African American experience in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, at a series of three day-long digitization day events. These scan days will take place at the East Athens Resource Center; the historic First A.M.E. Church; and the Athens-Clarke County Library, where patrons will be able to convert special A/V formats using our conversion equipment.  Digitized material would be made available to the public with donor permission via our partnership with the Digital Library of Georgia and the Digital Public Library of America. The project would also include a public lecture series and tours of Black historic sites led by partner groups.

A digitization event held at the Boston Public Library’s central branch in Copley Square at which staff from University Archives and Special Collections of the University of Massachusetts Boston would invite members of the community to share materials related to the city’s hip-hop culture: demo tapes, performance videos, flyers, posters, photographs, clothing, and accessories. Items would be digitized for the participants’ personal use and, with their permission, possibly included in the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive, which is housed on UMass Boston’s Open Archives. The resulting digital collections would be harvested by the Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America, making these materials and the participants’ stories discoverable to a wide-reaching audience. Boston Public Library would also present a series of four public programs celebrating and exploring elements of hip-hop culture: rapping (MCing), DJing (turntabling), breakdancing (b-boying), and graffiti art (graff). The events would include demonstrations by local artists, invite public participation, and be guided by two scholars of hip-hop music and culture, Dasan Ahanu from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Michael Jeffries from Wellesley College.

The University Archives and Special Collections (UASC) in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston requests a Common Heritage Grant in the amount of $11,919. This grant will allow UASC to collaborate with the Boston Public Library (BPL), the Boston hip-hop community, and noted scholars Dasan Ahanu and Michael Jeffries to accomplish two goals: host a digitizing day to collect artifacts and stories that will be uploaded to the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive; and present four public outreach programs showcasing the four original elements of hip-hop culture: rap, DJing, dance, and graffiti art, contextualizing the materials collected at the digitization event. Community members who participated in the development of hip-hop culture in Massachusetts will contribute artifacts to the event and serve as audience and participants in the public programs, thereby documenting, preserving, and celebrating cultural memory from a marginalized part of the state’s history.

One digitization event and two public exhibits and programs focused on the history of Northwest Ohio’s Muslim community.  The proposed project represents a partnership between the Center for Archival Collections (CAC), which is a unit of the Bowling Green State University (BSGU) Libraries, and the Islamic Center for Greater Toledo (ICGT), which was founded in 1954 and represents the first community to build a mosque in Ohio and the third in the nation.  BGSU archivists and students would assist with digitization, and ICGT volunteers would assist with translating information about the historical items brought in by community members, which are likely to include personal documents and family artifacts in Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali.  With donor permission, materials would be featured in an Omeka-based digital exhibit and made available for research in the Digital Public Library of America through CAC’s participation in the Ohio Digital Network.

The Center for Archival Collections (CAC) and the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo (ICGT) will host a community scanning day and two public exhibits and programs focusing on the history of Northwest Ohio’s Muslim community, as well as the role of the ICGT within that history. Members of the ICGT and general public will be invited to bring any historical materials related to the project theme for reformatting and preservation by the CAC. The scanning day will present a significant opportunity for initiating the preservation of the region’s Islamic heritage, which has been anchored by the ICGT and the religious, educational and cultural programs offered to both its members as well as the greater Toledo community. Subsequent public programs and exhibits will allow the community at large - Muslim and non-Muslim - to learn about and engage with Islamic traditions and culture, and to better appreciate the significant role that Muslims and the ICGT have played in the history of the region.

Preparation for publication of Volumes 5, 6, and 7 of a scholarly edition of 6,000 surviving letters of American author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). (36 months)

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, being published by Cambridge University Press, is a comprehensive scholarly edition of the some 6,000 surviving letters of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)--about 85% previously unpublished--in a projected 17 volumes. A 1954 Nobel Laureate, Hemingway made a profound impact on modern prose and still commands enormous popular as well as scholarly interest worldwide. The letters not only provide important new biographical information and insights into the artistic achievement of this most influential American writer, they constitute a running eyewitness history of much of the 20th century. Volumes 1-4 (spanning 1907-1931) were published between 2011 and 2017. We are requesting three-year funding (October 2018-September 2021) to complete and see into print volume 5, to submit and see through pre-production volume 6 (for publication November 2021), and to begin textual and annotation work on volume 7, encompassing Hemingway's letters from 1932 through May 1941.