Plains Humanities Alliance awards digital research fellowships

The Plains Humanities Alliance has awarded Digital Fellowships to Great Plains scholars from North Dakota and Indiana. Each $6,500 fellowship will support digital projects in the humanities of the Great Plains. Recipients are Barbara Handy-Marchello, professor emeritus of history, University of North Dakota, and Douglas Hurt, professor and chair of history, Purdue University, Indiana.

Handy-Marchello's project, "'Good Soldiers,' Strong Women: Army Officers' Wives on the Great Plains 1865-1890," draws on the written memoirs, letters, and diaries of a dozen women whose husbands were Army officers stationed on the Great Plains in the last decades of the 19th century. The project will be divided into sections containing a narrative and photographs, and excerpts from diaries, letters, and/or memoirs to tell individual parts of the story and to explain the significance of the Army officers' wives' experience on the Great Plains.

Douglas Hurt will focus his efforts on the Great Plains during World War II, emphasizing home front activities on the Plains from September 1939 until August 1945. His project is designed to help students from junior high through college as well as the general public understand how Great Plains residents prepared for and participated in the war, even before the U.S. entered the conflict in 1941. Topical areas of the site's content will include isolationism, preparation of industry, the military, towns, and rural areas on the home front, as well as the contributions of women, Mexican American, and Japanese workers, both urban and rural, to prepare for the war.

Both projects will become part of the Plains Gateway Project of the Plains Humanities Alliance. The Alliance's Web site hosts the developing Plains Gateway site as an on-line repository of digital projects in the humanities that relate to the Great Plains. In addition to the new projects to be developed by Handy-Marchello and Hurt, another project is currently in process under the direction of Timothy Mahoney, professor of history and director of the Plains Humanities Alliance. His site explores Plains urbanism in the Gilded Age through the notorious murder of Lincoln businessman John Sheedy and the subsequent trial in the early 1890s.

The Plains Humanities Alliance is a regional humanities center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that promotes the interdisciplinary study of the Great Plains. It offers two Digital Fellowships each year, one each in the fall and spring terms. For more information about the organization or its Digital Fellowships, contact the Plains Humanities Alliance, at (402) 472-9478, plains1@unl.edu, or through its Web site, www.unl.edu/rcplains.

Contact: Deborah Eisloeffel, Plains Humanities Alliance, (402) 472-9478.