Legacy-funded programs at the Minnesota Humanities Center demonstrate our determination to collaboratively create humanities programs for the broader public by forging strong partnerships with local, state, and national cultural organizations. These programs show the broader community how the humanities can be used to address issues important to their everyday lives. Each activity, event, and program shares an Absent Narrative with participants, which help residents across the state engage in a more sophisticated understanding of their community.
The Civics Education Coalition will create opportunities for students, enrich teacher capacity to engage students, and build state-wide networks. Work will include an interactive website, online youth summit, youth conference, new lessons for educators, teacher institutes, and expansion of the statewide Civic Education Network and its activities.
The model for Minnesota bluegrass has changed from attending stage shows to community involvement. Once a part of Country Music, it became allied with the folk music revival, and the repertoire changed. Eleven experienced bluegrass music participants were interviewed who reflect on the evolution of Minnesota Bluegrass music, as well as the changes in how the music is accessed. The interviews reveal specifics of the structure of bluegrass performance, business and sociability as they evolved from the end of WWII to the current scene.
Year 1: Arts and Cultural Heritage funding will allow us to identify and plan a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) exhibit experience, design and develop the exhibit, select a fabrication partner, and fabricate the exhibit components between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020. The STEM exhibit will be designed to help children practice critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Mankato State University (MSU) will work with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) to plan a stakeholder process kick off meeting for the Minnesota River Ag/Urban partnership project. MSU will help to plan and facilitate the meeting.
Minnesota Statutes from 1982-1996 were scanned and with the help of OCR (optical character recognition) software, were made available and searchable on the Revisor's office pages of the Minnesota legislature's web site. This is the first phase of the scanning Minnesota Statutes project.
This online availability improves access to legal materials, previously available only through books. Online versions of the statutes also serve as a preservation method for these records.
The Will Steger foundation initiated the documentation of Will Steger's collection of journals, media and images found in a wide variety of formats and locations. A professional archivist was contracted to conduct a basic artifact inventory. The objects were then prioritized for cataloguing and digitization. The collection has been consolidated and the inventory record established. This is phase 1 of 3 for the project; "A Minnesota Hero: Preserving the Will Steger Story".
Twelve oral histories, discussing the history of psychiatry in Minnesota, were recorded in the late 1970's on audiotape. To preserve them, they were digitized, transcribed and archived along with 2 other oral histories taken in 1996. Forty years later twenty-three more interviews of senior MN psychiatric leaders were conducted, digitized and transcribed. These additional oral histories were added to the archive. A full set of the transcripts will be catalogued into the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.
The Minnesota Statutes from the earliest territorial days of 1851 to the more recent 1981 are important historical documents which capture the development and governance history of our state. Statutes from the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's are still relevant today for living persons, especially in reference to persons with criminal convictions. Whether the individual looking for an archived statute is interested because of direct relevance, or more indirect historical relevance, it is important that these historical documents be accessible to the public and preserved for future g
