Humanities foundation receives $600,000 grant
By Jacob Kohn | April 14, 2010The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities was awarded a $660,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to be used for work on an electronically-based collection of sources related to the lives of early Americans. The project, entitled People of the Founding Era, combines a biographical dictionary and "prosopography" - a type of biography used in social history to examine relationships and connections between people and locations - to preserve those figures largely unknown to history who lived during the early 18th and 19th centuries, said Mark Saunders, manager of the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press. With this system, "one could look up where leading attorneys in 1820s Virginia came from, and if there is a correlation between place of origin and success," said Holly Shulman, founding director of the Documents Compass group, part of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The effort will collect information about individuals in such fields as gender, slave status and place of birth, and seeks to provide a broader view of historical figures that makes it attractive to scholars who study more obscure groups that usually are not included in other databases, Saunders said. "We may know that a craftsman worked on the University of Virginia because he is referenced in Jefferson's papers ... We may know where he lived or how old he was ... but little else," Saunders said.
