Endowment for staff, education and public outreach, and technology for a Web-accessible resource for the study of early American slavery in the Chesapeake region.

Implementation of traveling and panel exhibitions exploring the complicated role of slavery in our national founding and the experiences of enslaved people at Monticello.

Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty is an exhibition that uses Monticello, the home and plantation of Thomas Jefferson, as a lens through which to explore the dilemma of slavery and the lives of the enslaved families and their descendants. Given the relevance and popularity of this landmark exhibition, initially launched in 2012 in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello (TJF) requests funding to update Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello with new content—including a feature on Sally Hemings—and launch a new national tour to four African American museums. TJF also plans a “pop-up” exhibition that will travel to libraries and schools. Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello presents Monticello as a microcosm of the American story—a lens through which to understand the complicated dynamics of our founding, and the ways in which slavery continues to shape our nation.

To support planning for a temporary exhibition, new interpretive tour, catalogue, and educational programs on Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.

Planning for public interpretation of 13 recently restored domestic activity spaces at Monticello in order to expand understanding of the plantation's economic, social, and cultural activities.

Planning for an exhibition in a new visitor center emphasizing Jefferson’s public contributions to the nation as well as interpretation of Mulberry Row, a site of slave activity at Monticello.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) wants Monticello’s visitors to learn more about Jefferson and to come away understanding more about slavery and the diverse community of whites and blacks who lived and worked at Monticello. Building upon an existing interpretive program, this grant will bring TJF staff together with humanities scholars to determine the content of key parts of this plan: the themes and content of a new exhibition, brochure, audio tour, and film; and the restoration and interpretation of Mulberry Row, a principal area of slave activity. These additions to the interpretation will convey to visitors a richer understanding of Jefferson’s accomplishments, placing these in the context of his historical moment.

To support a national lecture series and a biographical booklet on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson.

Implementation of a permanent exhibition in a new visitor's center, including a film, a model of the plantation, a web site, publications, and four copies of a smaller panel exhibition, exploring how Jefferson applied Enlightenment ideas at Monticello.

To provide more comprehensive understanding of Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, plans to enhance its established interpretive programs with construction of a new Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center (TJVC). The TJVC is designed to educate and excite Monticello?s 450,000 annual visitors about Jefferson?s ideas--not only about Monticello but also about liberty. The new key components are an introductory film, an exhibition pavilion with four galleries, an expanded brochure, a touchable bronze model of the Monticello plantation, four classrooms for school groups, and a hands-on discovery room for families. TJF seeks support from NEH for a permanent exhibition, Jefferson?s American Experiment, the plantation model, the introductory film, the brochure, the Web site, and a traveling exhibition in order to share the ideas with a wider audience. This project was devised with support from an NEH consulting grant awarded in 2004.

Cataloging and digitization of archaeological collections from the Flowerdew Hundred site, a major 17^th-century plantation in the Virginia Tidewater region.  Artifacts, site records, maps, and photographs would be integrated into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, where they would be made publicly accessible along with materials from approximately 80 other slavery sites in the Atlantic and Caribbean region.   

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, in collaboration with the University of Virginia Library, will identify, catalog, digitize, and make accessible to diverse stakeholders collections from four of the earliest and most significant 17th-century archaeological sites at Flowerdew Hundred, a thousand acre plantation near Jamestown, Virginia. The occupations of these four sites span a dynamic period of settlement and agricultural expansion in the region. Fifteen of the first 25 enslaved Africans imported into British North America lived at Flowerdew Hundred by 1619. They joined indentured Europeans, neighboring Weanock Indians, and European landowners in shaping mid-17th century plantation settlements. By making accessible a vital part of the limited material record of the social and economic struggles that comprised the 17th-century Chesapeake, this project will provide data to address complex questions about a critical period of America’s development and survival.

The completion of cataloging and digitization of 132,720 archaeological artifacts from areas along Mulberry Row, occupied from 1804 to 1858 by enslaved African Americans at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation, and making the data freely available on the Internet.

In the 1980s archaeologists excavated sixteen sites along Mulberry Row, a dirt path adjacent to the neoclassical mansion that Thomas Jefferson designed and built at Monticello Plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia. The sites were once the homes and workspaces of enslaved artisans and domestics. The assemblages recovered were never completely catalogued, depriving both scholars and the general public of the possibility of using them to probe the historical dynamics of slavery at Monticello. Monticello's department of archaeology initiated the Mulberry Row Reassessment in 2000 to digitize completely artifacts, faunal remains, and field records from this decade of fieldwork, following protocols established by the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. This proposal seeks funds to complete the project, to make the results accessible to scholars and the public on the web, and to enhance our understanding the changing life ways of people enslaved at Monticello.

The development of an integrated digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of African slaves who labored on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative is an innovative collaborative project designed to further scholarship on slavery. An international team of scholars from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, the University of Southampton's Nevis Heritage Project, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool will digitize and deliver on the Web information from two eighteenth-century plantations and their slave villages, one located on Nevis and the other on St. Kitts. The result will be a first-of-its-kind digital collection of fully searchable archaeological and historical data from multiple slave village sites in the Caribbean. The teams will create a robust digital archive of archaeological and historical data through use of rigorous and well-defined cataloging standards and metadata, insuring interoperability and analytical comparability. DAACS archaeological analysts will catalog all of the archaeological materials to DAACS standards. Ceramicists from the University of Southampton and University of Tennessee will analyze and digitize all slave-made coarse earthenware ceramics. All recovered faunal remains will be digitized at Colonial Williamsburg's Zooarchaeological Laboratory. The rich documentary record of these plantations will be digitized in archives in the United Kingdom and on Nevis and St. Kitts. Both archaeological and documentary data will be freely accessible through two Web-based portals: the research-oriented DAACS Web site and the publicly-oriented International Slavery Museum Web site.

To support the continued excavation and study of the buildings and material remains associated with the artisans and slaves living at Jefferson's plantation, Monticello.

The retention of oral history project management, archival, and interpretation staff and a historian to create a new digital platform for an African-American oral history project on the descendants of the enslaved at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

The "Getting Word" African American Oral History Project is a unique archive of oral histories and associated research files of families whose ancestors were enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, or who lived at Monticello after his death during the Levy period of ownership (1836–1923). The project documents the history – and humanity – of the people who lived in slavery on the Monticello mountaintop, and chronicles a struggle for freedom across generations of descendants, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. One family descendant cites "Getting Word" as an important "archive of Black Freedom" stretching from Jefferson's lifetime to the present day. The work to migrate the oral history archive onto an accessible digital platform has been suspended due to the pandemic, weakening Monticello’s ability to commemorate the nation’s 250th as we wish and we must, with the fullest possible picture of our nation’s founding -- through the lens of those denied the promise of the Declaration.