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Liberty Legacy Foundation Establishes Endowment with the OAH
Inspired by OAH President Darlene Clark Hine's call in her 2002 OAH presidential address for more research on the origins of the civil rights movement in the period before 1954, the Liberty Legacy Foundation (LLF) has joined forces with the OAH to present the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on any aspect of the U.S. civil rights struggle from the nation's founding to the present day. Each year the OAH will select a prize committee of qualified scholars to judge entries.The inaugral Liberty Legacy Foundation Prize will be awarded at the ninety-sixth annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Memphis on 5 April 2003. Founded by Neal Baker in 2001, the LLF aims to support the study of nineteenth-century American history through focusing on the discovery, understanding, and dissemination of information regarding the elimination of slavery as well as present-day vestiges of racism in the United States.
OAH Teams Up With Teaching American History Grant Recipients
In keeping with its continuing efforts to promote excellence in history instruction and foster collaborations, the OAH will work with three recently funded Teaching American History (TAH) grant programs in implementing strategies to enrich history teaching. The three grant recipients are the Stratford, Connecticut, Board of Education, the Pitt County Schools in Greenville, North Carolina, and the Williamsburg-James City County Schools in Williamsburg, Virginia, and their partners--institutions of higher learning, local libraries or museums, and other history or humanities organizations. In the case of Williamsburg, the schools will also be collaborating with early American National Park sites. The OAH will join with each school district and their partners in assisting in programs to advance history education at the precollegiate level. The combined grant allocations, totaling nearly $3,000,000 over a three-year period, will enable local education districts to support activities aimed at improving student achievement by increasing teachers' knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American history.
The OAH will provide services and publications tailored to the specific needs of each individual school district. More broadly, it will make available its national network of historians for forums, presentations, and workshops and furnish material from its growing store of education resources for precollegiate teachers. OAH's partnerships will also further exchanges and connections between precollegiate and collegiate faculty and afford opportunities for professional development through discussion networks and participation in the Organization's annual meeting. In addition to its work with the three named districts, the OAH has informal agreements with a number of funded programs to deliver other less specified services.
For fiscal year 2002, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) awarded TAH grants ranging from $19,561 to $1,000,000 to one hundred-fourteen local educational agencies (LEAs) in thirty-nine states plus the District of Columbia. Last year, the first of the program, the DOE distributed $50 million to sixty projects. This marks the second entry of the OAH into the TAH grant application process. With the newly created position of education coordinator, OAH staff members have begun preparing for the third round of grant competitions. OAH will continue to disseminate information about TAH grants, offer advice and consultation to prospective applicants on strengthening proposals, and plans to expand its outreach activities. It anticipates an increased number of cooperative agreements with local schools districts in 2004.
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