Virginia Humanities (VH), formerly the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, is a humanities council whose stated mission is to develop the civic, cultural, and intellectual life of the Commonwealth of Virginia by creating learning opportunities for all Virginians. VH aims to bring the humanities fully into Virginia's public life, assisting individuals and communities in their efforts to understand the past, confront important issues in the present, and shape a promising future.
Since its founding in 1974, VH has sponsored more than 40,000 humanities programs across the Commonwealth. VH is one of 56 state humanities councils that are part of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Humanities councils were created by the United States Congress in 1974 and receive an annual congressional appropriation through the National Endowment for the Humanities, which for most councils is supplemented by state and private funding. In March 2018 it assumed the new, shortened name Virginia Humanities. [1]
VH is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia on the campus of the University of Virginia. [2]
VH activities are conducted through direct funding, through working partnerships with other organizations, and through statewide and national initiatives. VH's areas of focus are broken down into:
VH operates both the Virginia Center for the Book and the annual Virginia Festival of the Book. [3]
VH produces the radio show With Good Reason.
BackStory was a radio show, and later weekly podcast, that used current events in America to take a deep dive into the country's past. [4] Hosted by noted U.S. historians, each episode provides listeners with different perspectives on a particular theme or subject. The podcast is hosted by Brian Balogh, Ed Ayers, Nathan Connolly, and Joanne Freeman. [5] Peter S. Onuf, along with Balogh and Ayers, founded the podcast in 2008. [4] The show ended in 2020. [6]
Encyclopedia Virginia (EV) is a multi-year project of Virginia Humanities. "The purpose of EV is to become the first point of reference for all users interested in Virginia and to provide authoritative and accessible information for students, teachers, scholars, and business, industry, and government when they have a question about Virginia's history and culture." [7]
On May 24, 2007, the then-Virginia Foundation for the Humanities announced a $100,000 grant from Dominion Energy's Dominion Foundation for Encyclopedia Virginia. [8]
Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a public research university in Richmond, Virginia. VCU was founded in 1838 as the medical department of Hampden–Sydney College, becoming the Medical College of Virginia in 1854. In 1968, the Virginia General Assembly merged MCV with the Richmond Professional Institute, founded in 1917, to create Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2022, more than 28,000 students pursued 217 degree and certificate programs through VCU's 11 schools and three colleges. The VCU Health System supports health care education, research, and patient care. It was the only school in the South to have graduated a class every year during the Civil war.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is housed at 400 7th St SW, Washington, D.C. From 1979 to 2014, NEH was at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., in the Nancy Hanks Center at the Old Post Office.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a private, nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations in the humanities and related social sciences founded in 1919. It is best known for its fellowship competitions which provide a range of opportunities for scholars in the humanities and related social sciences at all career stages, from graduate students to distinguished professors to independent scholars, working with a number of disciplines and methodologies in the U.S. and abroad.
Historica Canada is a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to promoting the country's history and citizenship. All of its programs are offered bilingually and reach more than 28 million Canadians annually.
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), formerly the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), is a research center specializing in digital history and information technology at George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was one of the first digital history centers in the world, established by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994 to use digital media and information technology to democratize history: to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Its current director is Lincoln Mullen.
The Dominion Post is the only commercial daily newspaper in Morgantown, West Virginia. It formed from the merger of the Morgantown New Dominion and the Morgantown News into the Morgantown Dominion-News which, in turn, merged with the Morgantown Post. The term New Dominion was a reference to Virginia's state nickname of "Old Dominion", referencing the separation of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863.
The University of Virginia College of Arts & Sciences is the largest of the University of Virginia's ten schools. Consisting of both a graduate and an undergraduate program, the College comprises the liberal arts and humanities section of the University.
The Mattaponi tribe is one of only two Virginia Indian tribes in the Commonwealth of Virginia that owns reservation land, which it has held since the colonial era. The larger Mattaponi Indian Tribe lives in King William County on the reservation, which stretches along the borders of the Mattaponi River, near West Point, Virginia.
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
The Missouri Humanities Council, also known as Missouri Humanities (MH), is a 501(c)(3), non-profit organization that was created in 1971 under authorizing legislation from the U.S. Congress to serve as one of the 56 state and territorial humanities councils that are affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Rufus Adolphus Ayers was a Virginia lawyer, businessman, and politician, who served as Attorney General of Virginia.
A dominion was any of several largely self-governing countries of the British Empire. Progressing from colonies, their degrees of colonial self-governance increased unevenly over the late 19th century through the 1930s, and some vestiges of empire lasted in some areas into the late 20th century. With the evolution of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, finalised in 1949, the dominions became independent states, either as Commonwealth republics or Commonwealth realms.
Ricardo Ainslie is a Mexican-American documentary filmmaker. A native of Mexico City, his work is highly interdisciplinary in character, which explains his formal affiliations with the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and the American Studies programs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the department of Educational Psychology. He holds dual US and Mexican citizenship. He earned his bachelor's degree (Psychology) at the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan. He serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals including Psychoanalytic Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society.
The commemoration of the American Civil War is based on the memories of the Civil War that Americans have shaped according to their political, social and cultural circumstances and needs, starting with the Gettysburg Address and the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery in 1863. Confederates, both veterans and women, were especially active in forging the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities is a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the education of residents of the state of Louisiana. In its mission, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities pledges to provide access to and promote an appreciation of the history of Louisiana and its literary and cultural history. It was founded in 1972 as a result of initial funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Joanne B. Freeman is a U.S. historian and tenured Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Freeman has published two books as well as articles and op-eds in newspapers including The New York Times, magazines such as The Atlantic and Slate. In 2005 she was rated one of the "Top Young Historians" in the U.S.
Brian Balogh is an American historian, author and emeritus professor at the University of Virginia. Balogh was the director of the National Fellowship Program hosted by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. He also co-hosted the radio program, "Backstory with the American History Guys". In 2015, he received a Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award.
The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit support corporation of Duke University dedicated to the documentary arts. Having been created in 1989 through an endowment from the Lyndhurst Foundation, The organization’s founders were Robert Coles, William Chafe, Alex Harris, and Iris Tillman Hill. In 1994, CDS moved into a renovated nineteenth-century home, named it the Lyndhurst House. That structure and a large addition house the main activities of CDS on the edge of Duke University’s campus in Durham, North Carolina. The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a CDS program, has its offices on the American Tobacco Campus in the American Tobacco Historic District in downtown Durham.
Nathan Daniel Beau Connolly is an American historian and professor. He is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and co-host of the U.S. history podcast BackStory. He is also the author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. A self-professed "desegregationist," Connolly, in 2016, became the first African-American U.S. historian tenured at Johns Hopkins University, and the first African American to win either the Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association (2015) or the Bennett H. Wall Award from the Southern Historical Society (2016).
Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC) is a non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is one of 56 state humanities councils founded in the wake of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965. The Executive Director is Laurie Zierer.