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Major & Mini Grants - Project Examples - Abstracts

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The following examples highlight the types of projects that NJCH generally funds and at what levels. This is not a comprehensive list.  An abstract should be a concise statement describing the project, its goals, and its meaning.

Major Grants

(1)

Working from a definition of the humanities as those disciplines that focus on critical analysis of the human condition, we seek a grant for a three-part lecture/conference series on “genocide as a process.”  Our first program will present Dr. Gregory Stanton speaking on his “Eight Stage Theory of Genocide.”  The second program, “Exploring Hate as a Social and Political Process” will focus on the early stages of genocide: people are classified, symbols communicate a differential evaluation of those who have been classified, and the devalued group is dehumanized.  The last program, a one-day conference, will present a “case study” of Stanton’s next two stages – organization and polarization – by focusing on what happened during and immediately after Kristallnacht.  Keynote speaker is the eminent historian, Professor Henry Feingold.  A panel of first-person witnesses to Kristallnacht is also scheduled. 

(2)

The New Jersey Historical Society seeks the New Jersey Council for the Humanities’ consideration of a $10,000 grant toward “What’s Going On?”  Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties, a 1,500-square-foot interactive exhibition of photographs, objects and multiple audiovisual programs that will explore civil unrest that took place in Newark in 1967 within the context of the nation’s history of episodic violence along the color and ethnic divides as well as within the climate of global turbulence of the 1960s.  This exhibit will draw on scholarly research and period media, with significant emphasis on information gathered as a result of an oral history project.  During the summer of 2007, the Historical Society began to collect current perspectives on the violence in New Jersey in 1967.  The Council’s support will help incorporate these newly-gathered personal accounts into the exhibition, bringing them forward for examination, intellectual discussion and public discourse.

(3)

Hudson West Productions seeks $15,000 toward the production and completion of a one-hour documentary intended for national PBS broadcast about the New Jersey Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in Bordentown, New Jersey.  The school, founded in 1886 and closed in 1955 in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, represented a unique experiment in African-American education as a segregated, public boarding school that gained a reputation as the Tuskegee of the North.  The documentary, titled “Bordentown: A Place Out of Time,” will weave interviews of alumni and scholars with contemporary and archival footage to portray this unusual institution and its legacy.  In a time of increased attention and debate on black education – the broken promises of equal access, and the failed expectations of racial integration – we believe this is a story that needs to be told now. 

(4)

The Filipino American National Historical Society/New Jersey Chapter is seeking funding for an oral history project focused on Filipino veterans, primarily of the Second World War, who currently reside in New Jersey.  The story of Filipino participation in the Second World War has not been fully documented.  In addition to their contributions to the war effort for the Allies, their story is unique in that Filipino veterans have been denied veterans benefits by the U.S. government.  The aging Filipino veterans who remain represent the last living links to this untold American story.  The grant will be used to implement the oral history project.  Funding will support the collection of the interviews as well as their transcription and dissemination through publications and a range of public programs.

Mini Grants

(1)

A one-day conference, hosted by Rutgers University-Camden, in conjunction with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, aims to break new ground in addressing Walt Whitman’s physical presence in the landscapes where he lived and worked, including southern New Jersey.  Papers by scholars will focus on the engagement of his poetry with these landscapes and their ideologies, the reception of Whitman and his poetry in various regions of the U.S. and around the world, the experience of encountering Leaves of Grass in precise places, including cyberspace, and the “place” or siting of cultural constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in his work.  The intended audience includes scholars and teachers, with the aim to offer new ways to approach Camden’s most famous resident in a secondary school classroom setting, showing educators how to make full use of place-based resources available to them.

(2)

The Arts Council of Princeton is requesting funding for two interpretive public programs in conjunction with its exhibition, Return: Home.  In works ranging from photography, painting, installation, collaborative public arts projects, video, and textiles, the eleven New Jersey-affiliated artists in this exhibition explore personal and cross-cultural concepts of home – and in the process – raise pressing, contemporary issues such as cultural and political displacement, urban dwellings in transition, migration, and spirituality.  The two panel discussions will bring the public into direct contact with eight of the eleven artists in the exhibition, allowing them to learn about each artist’s working process and artistic goals.  The discussions will also allow the artists and audience to exchange ideas about different meanings of home, and consider how these ideas affect our daily lives.  

(3)

The Hoboken Historical Museum requests funding for the printing of Sweet Cigar Charlie, Rigger Specialist, an oral history publication that features the recollections of a worker at Hoboken’s former Bethlehem Steel Shipyard, once one of the nation’s foremost marine construction and repair yards.  This is the seventh chapbook in the “Vanishing Hoboken” Oral History Project series.  It will be released to the public at a museum event, “Shipyard Stories,” which will also include the screening of a recent documentary about the Shipyard’s history and a reunion of former Shipyard workers, allowing participants to consider issues shaped by the past: the ethnic diversity of the region, labor politics, and the use of our waterfront.

(4)

Brookdale Community College is requesting funding for an evening of poetry and discussion with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn.  Mr. Dunn will give a reading and discussion of his own work followed by a question and answer period that will allow the audience to participate in the event.  The reading is an opportunity for people to be exposed to literature by a nationally acclaimed author whose last two books focused on New Jersey.  The discussion will encompass poetry, issues of craft and prosody, and contemporary poetry in today’s society.