NYU Historians Receive Federal Grants to Enhance Curriculum, Continue Book Series

By James Devitt

NYU’s Archives and Public History Program and the University’s Margaret Sanger Papers Project have both received grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), which is affiliated with the federal National Archives and Records Administration and promotes the preservation and use of America’s documentary heritage essential to understanding its democracy, history, and culture.
    The Archives and Public History Program received an $83,000 award for its “Digital History Across the Curriculum” initiative, which will enable the program to develop courses and educational offerings that fully incorporate new media. The NHPRC anticipates that this endeavor will serve as a model for other educators in the archival, documentary editing, and public history communities. The grant to NYU constitutes the only award made this year in the agency’s new “professional development” initiative.
    “The NHPRC grant will help NYU develop a more integrated and coherent approach to digital and electronic records issues, thus providing new professionals with the necessary skills to make historical materials more widely accessible to the American public,” said Peter Wosh, director of the Archives and Public History Program and a faculty member in NYU’s Department of History.
    The Archives and Public History Program, whose roots trace back to the mid-1970s, is designed to provide students with a theoretical grounding in such topics as memory, heritage, commemoration, historic preservation, and the role of the archive in humanities scholarship. Courses emphasize contemporary standards and engagement with new technologies, as public historians and archivists continually use new methods to engage non-traditional audiences. Students work with NYU’s Division of Libraries in the areas of digital librarianship, preservation, and collection development. In addition, the program fosters close involvement with New York City’s array of archival and public history institutions.
    The $89,480 award to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project will support continuation of work on The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, a four-volume scholarly edition of the papers of America’s best-known birth control activist. The grant will enable the project’s editors to publish the third volume in the series, The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939-1966, and to continue its research on Sanger’s efforts to globalize birth control, which will be detailed in the fourth and final volume, Round the World for Birth Control, 1920-1966. All volumes in the series will be published by University of Illinois Press.
    “Support from the NHPRC has been critical to our ability to make these important documents available to scholars, students, and the general public,” said Esther Katz, director of the Sanger Project and an adjunct professor in NYU’s Department of History.      
    The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, at NYU since 1989, has produced a 101-reel microfilm edition of documents located within the Sophia Smith Collection, an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals, and other primary sources in women’s history, and gathered from more than 1,000 other archival collections. Its editors work to locate, select, transcribe, and annotate the most historically significant of Margaret Sanger’s correspondence, speeches, writings, diaries, organizational records, and other documents, covering the period 1900-1966.  The first three volumes, The Woman Rebel, 1900-1929 (2003), Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939 (2007), and the forthcoming Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939-1966 focus on Sanger’s personal life and her work in the United States.