Hall Center at KU receives Kansas Humanities Council grant for history site

LAWRENCE -- The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas has received a $10,000 grant from the Kansas Humanities Council for the project "This Day in Kansas History: An Online History of the State of Kansas."

The Web site will be a date-driven, easily accessible site that will focus on key events in the history of Kansas. Visitors to the site will be able to view a daily compilation of key events in Kansas history, read original articles illustrated with archival materials and access an electronic collection of primary source documents. The site will provide detailed information about Kansas museums, heritage tourism destinations and special events, an annotated list of recommended readings and links to related Web sites.

The Kansas Humanities Council's generous grant will support research, writing, editing and final preparation of articles for the Web site that will focus on the territorial Kansas period. The articles are being written by KU history department Ph.D. candidates and will be reviewed for accuracy by leading historians from KU and other institutions of higher education. Many pieces will relate to the subjects and locations of the Kansas Humanities Council's 2004 Chautauqua programs including: Clarina Nichols, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, and David Rice Atchison, as well as Lawrence, Fort Scott, Junction City and northwest Kansas.

"This Day in Kansas History" represents a major contribution to humanities outreach programming and will enhance the quality, scope and usefulness of historical content available on the Internet. Victor Bailey, Hall Center director and professor of history at KU, is responsible for the overall direction of the project.

"We are trying to do something new in state history: to create a body of work that bridges the divide between academic writing that appeals to a limited audience and popular work that too often verges on the celebratory," Bailey said.

Henry Fortunato, who completed a master's degree in American history at KU after a 20-year career in magazine journalism, is the project's editor-in-chief. The Web site project is a joint undertaking of the Hall Center for the Humanities and the Kansas State Historical Society.

The official launch of "This Day in Kansas History" will coincide with the sesquicentennial of the Kansas Territory in 2004.