NYC, New York–Humanities New York (HNY) today announced $150,000 in awards to 31 grantees for innovative public humanities offerings. Awards were made in every region of the state, from the North Country to Long Island. “To know the humanities one has to experience them personally,” said Executive Director Sara Ogger. “The awarded programs directly engage participants in compelling topics, and ultimately, with each other. In-person opportunities seem rare in today’s climate, but look at what local libraries and museums and service providers are doing every day–HNY strives to give them the investment they need to really go.” These grants are […]
Winning the Vote
A divided movement brought about the Nineteenth Amendment. By Lisa Tetrault In 1869, a bold new idea was born. It would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Upending everything about the balance between state and federal power, this idea strove to remake American democracy. It proved so vexing that we are still sorting out its implications. “Woman’s Suffrage by the proposed Sixteenth Amendment is before the nation for consideration,” one newspaper heralded. Demanding their enfranchisement through a constitutional amendment, “women,” another column remarked, “strike out in a new path.” Women had been demanding the vote for some time, but this […]
Cultural Field Survey – 2019
History Humanities New York first circulated its Cultural Field Survey in 2016, in order to complement other data sets important to the public humanities (these include Data Arts and the National Humanities Indicators). This year’s survey used both quantitative and qualitative questions to build on the previous year’s survey in order to help HNY better serve its grantees and program partners. Method The survey data was collected in the Summer of 2019 using data from 393 responses. Respondents were drawn from the HNY database and community partners, with 94% of respondents having heard of HNY prior to taking the survey. […]
Buffalo Humanities Festival
The Buffalo Humanities Festival, now in its sixth year, is a public humanities project organized by the UB Humanities Institute in collaboration with other local and regional cultural institutions, including Buffalo State College, Canisius College, Niagara University, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and Humanities New York, with the initial support of HNY, the Oishei Foundation, and the ongoing funding of the UB College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and the UB Vice President for Research and Economic Development (OVPRED). In recent years, the Festival has been devoted to engaging the Buffalo community in critical conversations on the big […]
West of Stonewall: The Struggle for LGBT Rights in Western New York
Fifty years since the historical uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Fifty years since the founding of Buffalo’s earliest gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier. Which is the more significant for Buffalo? Humanities New York funded “Gay Liberation NOW: Buffalo Mattachine and the Myth of Stonewall” to shed light on the story of how the struggle for gay liberation in Western New York evolved, in parallel to Stonewall but not because of it. Humanities New York spoke with grantee Adrienne Hill, who co-founded the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project. Hill lays out how teaching […]
Preserving LGBT Historic Sites
How do we preserve a sense of place when its context is constantly changing? We continue our Stonewall 50 blog series by discussing the importance of preserving place-based LBGTQ history. HNY interviewed Ken Lustbader, one of the Project Directors of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, who discusses how digital preservation can be an effective tool for passing stories intergenerationally, particularly when some of the most important historical spaces were illegal, transient, or have since been renovated. Don’t miss the rest of the series, join our newsletter. HNY: Let’s start with Stonewall. Stonewall has arguably become as much a symbol […]
HNY Board News
HNY WELCOMES TWO NEW BOARD MEMBERS Wendy S. Walters‘ current projects address the postindustrial city, intersections between writing and design, and organic form in arguments for the essay. She is the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, and Huffington Post. She is also the author of two books of poems: Troy, Michigan and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. In 2018-19 she was artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn. Other work appears in The Normal School, Fourth Genre, Full […]
Devoted: Alice Austen and Stonewall 50
As New Yorkers geared up for commemorations and World Pride celebrations, Humanities New York spoke with several partners who received Action Grants for Stonewall-related humanities programming. We begin a Stonewall 50 blog series by discussing the legacy of photographer Alice Austen and how her work is situated within LGBTQ history. HNY interviewed Victoria Munro, Executive Director of the Alice Austen House located on the North Shore of Staten Island. Don’t miss the rest of the series, join our newsletter. HNY: For those not familiar with the photography pioneer Alice Austen, why is she important to where we are now in […]
Puerto Rican Migration to New York, Then and Now
In September 2017, Hurricane María struck Puerto Rico, leaving its entire population in complete darkness and scrambling for basic resources. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people left Puerto Rico to the continental United States in an effort to improve their quality of life and escape chaotic conditions. In fact, estimates show that more than 4% of the population left the Island, out of which tens of thousands alone came to New York State.1 As part of our mission to be responsive to cultural shifts, Humanities New York proudly supported Puerto Rican Migration Then and Now Through the Lens of Contemporary […]
HNY Board News
HNY WELCOMES THREE NEW BOARD MEMBERS Herman Bennett is Professor of History at the Graduate Center who has most recently published: African Kings & Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). His previous books include: Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity & Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Indiana 2003) and Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Indiana 2009). Since 2013 he has been the Executive Officer (EO) of the Educational Opportunity & Diversity Programs (OEODP) at the Graduate Center. As EO of the OEODP, Director of the CUNY Pipeline Program, and the Project […]
