Salaries for museum staff who will create virtual education experiences and access to the museum’s digital collection.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has launched the Safe at Home program to make its educational curriculum and live online education programs available at no cost to parents and students. Additionally, the Museum has continued to provide access and add content to its digital collection, and has undertaken a legacy collections data cleanup project to improve the user experience for students and researchers. This project will support the continuation of these programs, when the need for online educational resources is great than ever.

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for eighty school teachers on Duke Ellington and his world.

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for eighty school teachers on Duke Ellington and his world. This workshop illuminates the life and music of Duke Ellington (1899-1974) in cultural and historical context, using eight compositions (including "Mood Indigo" and "Take the 'A' Train") as "anchor works" for the week's study. Under the direction of music professor Laura Nash, participants engage with Ellington's work and his world through lectures, discussions, hands-on musical participation, and two all-day visits to historic and cultural sites in New York City. Taking the A train to Harlem, participants visit the Sugar Hill Historic District, where Ellington lived, and are guided on a private tour of the National Jazz Museum by Executive Director Loren Schoenberg. The second day trip to New York features the resources of Jazz at Lincoln Center with curator Phil Schaap. Participants explore the role of Ellington's radio and television broadcasts at the Paley Media Center with Jim Shanahan (Boston University) and learn about Ellington's long form music at Carnegie Hall, where "Black, Brown, and Beige" premiered in 1943. A jazz show at Birdland Jazz Club and a performance of swing dance music conclude the day visits to New York. In Fairfield, historian and director of Black Studies Yohuru Williams provides relevant grounding in twentieth-century African-American history and addresses intersections of race and popular culture. During the days on campus, music professor and bassist Brian Torff leads a specially assembled live big band in presentations and performances to give participants direct experience with the anchor works and with improvisation, as well as opportunities for discussion with band members. Workshop guest faculty include jazz critic and journalist Gary Giddins; educator and composer David Berger (Juilliard), who transcribed and edited the majority of Ellington's works; and Monsignor John Sanders, trombonist and librarian for the Ellington Orchestra, who shares his first-hand knowledge of playing, working, and traveling with Ellington, and of developing the Ellington archives. Prior to and during the workshop, participants read Ellington's Music is My Mistress; Harvey Cohen's Duke Ellington's America; John Edward Hasse's Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington; and Mark Tucker's The Duke Ellington Reader. They also have access to a password-protected website with Ellington recordings, sheet music, and video clips.

Endowment for humanities programming and interdisciplinary teaching and research in the humanities to engage MWCC students and the public in the discussion of enduring themes and ideas from the world's rich cultural and intellectual traditions.

The purpose of the MWCC Humanities Initiative Endowment is to support collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching and research in the humanities and to engage MWCC students and the north central Massachusetts region in the discussion of enduring themes and ideas from the world’s rich cultural and intellectual traditions. The endowment will fund common annual themes to be integrated across campus curricula and woven into campus and community humanities programming. The MWCC Humanities Initiative will serve as a model for humanities programming at other two-year colleges. Community college graduates are increasingly being produced in technical and career programs that have little emphasis on a liberal arts education and exposure to the humanities. An emphasis on global issues in general and introductory courses in the humanities curriculum will better prepare all graduates and expose career and technical program students in particular to global issues affecting society and workforce.

My project is a history of the Baltimore Black Sox and its 1929 pennant-winning season. Although interest in Negro league baseball has steadily increased for the last thirty years, teams like the Black Sox have largely faded from memory and been ignored by history. This project, a microhistory and a meditation on cultural memory and our ability to know the past, retells the stories of forgotten men who were simultaneously ordinary and remarkable. It uses a specific event to illustrate and reflect on African-American cultural history, local race relations, politics, business practices, and social life, and the ways in which the past can be reconstructed.

No project description available

No project description available

No project description available

No project description available

A history of the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the book will highlight the role of six largely Mexican-owned restaurants and their clientele (including movie stars, baseball players, boxers, activists, musicians, and artists) in building a community for immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. The book will also address gentrification and the loss of historical memory it often entails. 

For decades, outsiders dismissed Echo Park, a neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles, as just another barrio, dirty and dangerous. In the last ten years, gentrification has transformed it into a trendy, hipster zone. Neither label captures Echo Park’s unique reality as a crossroads where a variety of communities intersected with the wider cosmopolitan city. "Placemakers" examines a century of change in Echo Park’s diverse history. At the heart of the book is an in-depth look at six Echo Park restaurants during the 1950s and 60s that served to form community and preserve memory. "Placemakers" will open new dialogues focusing on the immigrant, urban, multicultural experience, social relations and political structures. These dialogues are urgently relevant for every American neighborhood struggling to maintain its history and identity in the face of the transformational and history-erasing force of gentrification and displacement.

A narrative history of New York City as reflected in the old and new Yankee Stadiums. The book traces changes in public finance, ethnic politics, and the business of baseball.

"Stealing Home" (Macmillan) is a narrative history of New York City as reflected in the lives of the old and new Yankee Stadiums. The buildings' stories capture the evolution of New York over the last century as well as the changing business of baseball, public finance, and ethnic politics. The book unfolds as three narrative strands--the stories of the South Bronx, the Yankees, and City Hall--are braided into a saga of modern New York. The last half of the book focuses on the ways the preceding history shaped the city in the decade after 9/11, as it chronicles how the world's most expensive stadium project--built with the largest government subsidy ever for a sports arena--took public parkland from the nation's poorest Congressional district.

Research and writing leading to a book for a popular audience on the history of race, labor, and the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the 1970s.

Playing on the multiple meanings of the expression “Black Ball,” my book recasts the history of the NBA’s “Dark Ages.” According to popular wisdom, the league’s waning profitability and popularity in the seventies was the fault of a new generation of immature, selfish, lazy, and greedy Black players who came to dominate the professional ranks. Only after white league executives and team owners regained control did the NBA rebound in the 1980s. However, the actual history is much more complicated. It is also more revealing about the ongoing significance of anti-Black racism in U.S. sport and society in the post-Civil Rights era. Combining narrative history and cultural analysis, Black Ball argues that the misnamed “Dark Ages” were pivotal years in the rise of the NBA as a profitable powerhouse, thanks largely to the efforts of Black players in fighting for greater compensation and control over their labor and in reshaping the game with aesthetics and ethics of urban Black streetball.

To support a long-term exhibition, a catalog, and public programs on St. Louis from the end of the Civil War to the 1890s.

To support the production of a nine-part 20-hour series on the history of baseball.

Development of a location-based notification system that will be tested through the creation of three new heritage tours in Kansas City, and then deployed for the 1400+ local history trails within the Clio website. 

Working with a diverse team of scholars, software developers, and organizations, our team will develop and test a new interpretive platform in Clio that will connect the public to humanities scholarship as they explore thematic three Kansas City history trails centered on jazz, baseball, and barbecue. The centerpiece of this prototyping project is the creation of a two-way geofencing system that will offer location-based media on the user's mobile device as they move along the trail while also sending a Bluetooth signal that triggers events within the user’s physical surroundings. Our team will add more accessibility features and user options during the grant period that will enhance the 1400 existing trails and walking tours in Clio.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition that would tour to 20 libraries, examining African Americans' participation in organized baseball from the Civil War to the present.

The American Library Association, in cooperation with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y., proposes to develop a traveling exhibition for 20 libraries based upon the permanent Hall of Fame exhibition, "Pride and Passion--The African American Baseball Experience." The exhibit tells the story of African Americans' participation in baseball beginning with the Civil War Period and continuing to the present time, shows a national audience how baseball has long reflected the complicated and painful history of race relations in the United States, and gives libraries the opportunity to work with scholars and other speakers, such as players from the Negro League, to present public humanities programs that will attract a wide audience. A planning seminar, large array of educational and support materials, and web sites will support the tour. The tour will begin in Fall 2008 and continue through Fall 2010.

"Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience" is a collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Library Association (ALA), and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. "Pride and Passion has been designated as part of the NEH's "We the People" initiative, exploring significant events and themes in our nation's history and culture and advancing knowledge of the principles that define America. The story of African Americans in baseball is a remarkable and fascinating slice of American history. It parallels the failures of the greater American society in solving the racial problems resulting from slavery, the Civil War and the confusion of Reconstruction. Baseball is one of America's central institutions, and it has long reflected the complicated and painful history of race in the United States. "Pride and Passion" tells the story of black baseball players in the U.S. over the past century and a half.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters,scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of the segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000 square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000 square foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro League in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.