GRANTS AND OUTREACH
The Lepage Center provides educational resources and funding opportunities to promote the importance of historical scholarship, methods and inquiry for the public interest.
Grant Program
The Lepage Center sponsors an annual public grant program that supports individuals and institutions pursuing historical projects in the public interest. The Center seeks to inspire a wide range of submissions from a diverse pool of applicants that are original and imaginative in content and form. Examples of the types of projects include a series of blog posts, a series of podcast conversations, digital and in-person exhibits, an oral history project, an initiative with a local newspaper to write a series of op-eds, a mapping project, a digital timeline, a crowd-sourced syllabus, an educational workshop, a multimedia resource, a collaboration with local activists, and other creative ideas.
2024-2025 Grant: Labor in Historical Perspective
This year, the Center funded projects that creatively engage with the broad range of questions, concerns, policies and practices raised by the study of labor in history, and how historical study can further public understanding of the present moment.
See our winners below!
Industrial Athens: Child Labor in the New South - classroom and virtual connections
In 2022, the Athens Historical Society initiated a project to excite local public school children about history by telling local stories that relate to what they learn in 11th grade social studies classes. With guidance from teachers and students, AHS produce 5-7-minute documentaries on selected aspects of Athens history. Athens is generally known for its university, its college football team, and its prolific 1980s alternative rock scene.
Their short documentary, Industrial Athens Part I, shows how the manufacture of cotton thread and cloth dominated the city’s economy in the decades preceding the Civil War and how that industry intersected with slavery. Industrial Athens II: the End of Child Labor will pick up the story after the Civil War, as industrialists shifted almost entirely to poor white workers, and relied increasingly on children who worked 11-hour days.
Dr. Cindy Hahamovitch, B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of History and Co-organizer, Athens Film Project
Cindy Hahamovitch is the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia. A historian of international and US labor migration, she is the author of The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (UNC Press, 1997) and the triple-prize winning No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton University Press). Past president of the Southern Labor Studies Association and the Labor and Working Class History Association, she is now writing about skilled welders and fitters from India who were trafficked into the United States and criminal (in)justice in Jim Crow South Florida.
Nuestra Historias: A Public History and Public Art Project
“Nuestras Historias: A Public Art and Public History Project in Ybor City, Florida” is a digital and public history initiative that blends locally-based historical markers and historical murals with digital-storytelling through a web-based exhibit. This project centers on the community of Ybor City—the first, sustained Latino community in Florida which developed as a result of the collisions of international labor unionism, political activism, and anti-colonial organizing. This project is an act of historical and preservation that reminds public and scholarly audiences the importance of remembering the past to understand our present.
Sarah McNamara, PhD Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M
Dr. Sarah McNamara is Associate Professor of History and core faculty in the Latinx & Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. Her research examines the histories of Latinxs, women and gender, race and ethnicity, immigration, and labor in the modern United States. Dr. McNamara’s book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (UNC Press 2023), received the Sara A. Whaley Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Bronze Medal in Nonfiction from the Florida Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
Larry Spivack, President of the Illinois Labor History Society
Pullman Revisited: A New Look at Touring Pullman Guide
The purpose of Pullman Revisited is to update a pocket-sized walking tour book of the Pullman neighborhood, one of the most historically significant labor spaces in the United States, with increased emphasis on African American and gender history, and to collabroate with local community stakeholder organizations to foreground their voices in developing this guide. There is arguably no location in the United States with more potential to realize engagement with the renewed public interest in labor history than Pullman, on the far southside of the city of Chicago, one of the mot renowned company towns in the world in the 19th century.
The Project will be led by the Illinois Labor History Society and the team of Principal Investigator Stephanie Fortado, PhD; Project Researcher Bleue Benton; ILHS President Larry Spivack; Project Editor Debby Pope; and ILHS staff member Carole Ramsden.
Reckoning with Industrial Accidents, Indenmnity Claims and De-Industrialization in the Colombian Chocó: What did so-called "good jobs" mean for our great-grandparents?
This project led by Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Phd, seeks to support a group of young Afro-Colombians as they research the labor history of gold and platinum extraction in their home region of the Chocó, a part of Colombia that is densely forested, economically impoverished, and littered with abandoned mining equipment. The project will produce an illustrated booklet of short essays and a single episode podcast that together offer starting points for understanding the labor history of industrial dredging in the region.
Through the 1970s, a Manhattan-based firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange as South American Gold and Platinum (SAGAP) maintained a fleet of electrically powered dredges in the Colombian state of Chocó. The dredges scraped bedrock 24 hours a day and used mercury amalgamation to extract gold and platinum, leaving tailings and toxic deposits along the tropical waterways of the San Juan River region. In the Chocó, this history of industrial mining is usually narrated either in terms of ecological plunder or through nostalgia for the relatively well-paid jobs once available in the company town of Andagoya, which was run by a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAGAP, the Compañía Minera Chocó Pacífico (CMCP). Support from the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest will expand access to a complex set of primary sources for understanding local labor history and thus allow Chocoanos of a new generation to rethink the regional past.
Lynne Calamia, PhD, Executive Director of Roebling Museum
Rediscovering Roebling: A Public Dialogue on Underrepresented Labor Histories
Roebling Museum will launch an interactive Zoom series to bring hidden stories of labor, (im)migration, and life in a company town to light. This project will help establish a diverse, worker-centered interpretive approach at our museum. Using the history of Roebling as a lens, we will explore themes such as (im)migrant labor, industrialization, workers’ rights, and life in a company town. By combining historical scholarship with community voices, Roebling Museum will encourage public dialogue about the past and its relevance to modern-day labor issues. The outcome of the project will include sharing research into underrepresented stories, communicating our new interpretive direction, and illustrating how we use historical methods to learn more about Roebling.
Dr. Lynne Calamia is a leader in the field of public history with over 15 years of experience in museums, historic sites, and archives. As Executive Director of Roebling Museum, she brings the story of Roebling, NJ—a former steel mill and company town—to life. The museum shares stories of the immigrant workers who built iconic suspension bridges like the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges. Under her leadership, the museum has deepened relationships with descendant families, partnered with the Smithsonian on an exhibit, and acquired a historic worker’s house in the former company town to create an immersive visitor experience.
Dr. Dawson Barrett, Associate Professor of U.S. History at Del Mar College
South Texas Rabble Rousers: A Primary Source History of Protest & Struggle
This public history project provides curated online collections of primary source documents related to the activist history of South Texas, centered in Corpus Christi but spanning from the Coastal Bend to the Rio Grande Valley. Each entry walks readers through photographs, newspaper articles, maps, oral histories, and other sources, making it an easy-to-use tool in high school and college history courses in the region. The project was launched in Summer 2024 through an open educational resource (OER) development fellowship at the CUNY Graduate Center, building on local history research projects that Dr. Barrett has assigned to college and high school students over the last ten years. This public resource will be used in numerous US history courses at Del Mar College, and beyond, for years to come.
Dr. Dawson Barrett is associate professor of US History at Del Mar College in Texas. He is the author of The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America (New York University Press, 2018) and Teenage Rebels: Successful High School Activists from the Little Rock Nine to the Class of Tomorrow(Microcosm Publishing, 2015), and the co-author, with Jonathan Wright, of the award-winning Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland (University of Illinois Press, 2021). His writing on protest, punk rock, and youth has appeared in a range of academic and popular media, including Teen Vogue and the Washington Post.
Dr. Fiona Vernal, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, UCONN History
Tobacco Labor, Livelihoods, and Legacies
Through the lens of the Connecticut River Valley and the boutique shade tobacco industry that it spawned, the multimedia exhibition Tobacco Labor, Livelihoods, and Legacies in Connecticut explores key intersections of US imperial, labor, and immigration history. World War I and World War II threatened New England farmers’ reliance on Southern and Eastern European labor pools and led to watershed experiments with Black southern labor then transnational guest worker programs. These decisions about sourcing and sponsoring labor migration transformed cities like Hartford, Connecticut and Springfield, Massachusetts into African American and Caribbean spaces as Southern, West Indian, and Puerto Rican migrants settled in urban hubs closest to tobacco farms.
Alongside this mélange of stories, public and popular scholarship have featured flattened narratives of how many local teenagers took a turn at summer or seasonal labor in the tobacco fields—commonplace local narratives that hide the systemic reliance on deportable, seasonal, and migrant labor to maximize price ceilings for a boutique crop used for cigar wrappers. This multi-media exhibit will place these disparate narratives in conversation with each other, asking audiences to consider how the global circuits of labor have linked tobacco cultivation to broader social and economic networks.
This project is led by Dr. Fiona Vernal, Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut; Dr. Jason Oliver Chang, Professor and Department Head of Social and Critical Inquirry at the University of Connecticut; and Elena Marie Rosario, PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan.
Voices from the Factory Floor: ACME Steel and Living Deindustrial
Voices from the Factory Floor work to initiate the process of centering the history of Acme Steel, a regional steel economy, and the industrial, working-class heritage of the Calumet Region from the factory floor outwards. In doing so, the project will start an oral history project to complement the rich material collection and create a small pop-up exhibit to share initial findings. The primary goal will be to develop narrative threads that will foster further work, research, and cataloging of deindustrialization in the Calumet Region.
Dr. Emiliano Aguilar, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame
Voices from the Factory Floor
Emiliano Aguilar is a political and labor historian of the United States, specifically the Latina/o Midwest. His manuscript-in-progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform, explores how the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community of East Chicago, Indiana navigated machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics. The project further outlines this inclusion’s costs (and paradoxes) for generations of residents and reformers. In grappling for political power and claiming rights to their community, these Latina and Latino residents renegotiated their place within the city, particularly under the threat of urban renewal and later deindustrialization.
Joseph Coates, Assistant Professor of the Practice and Assistant Director of the University Library, Purdue University Northwest
Joseph Coates is Assistant Professor of Practice/Assistant Director, University Library at Purdue University Northwest. His focus is small repository management, oral history and information literacy. His focus is to ensure students, faculty and staff understand information literacy concepts, the dangers of fake news and the preservation of institutional knowledge. He is active in the Society of Indiana Archivists, the Midwest Archives Conference and Academic Libraries of Indiana.
Educational Resources
Recorded Events
The Lepage Center hosts an annual series of events, exploring contemporary issues of societal significance from a historical perspective. All events are recorded and accessible to the general public on YouTube.
- 2023 – 2024: Cities in Historical Perspective
- 2022 – 2023: Climate Change in Historical Perspective
- 2021 – 2022: Turning Points in History
- 2020 – 2021: Decolonizing History
- 2019 – 2020: Revisionist History
- 2018 – 2019: Histories of Democracy
- 2017: Fake News and Fake History; Endless War
"1968: In Hindsight" Podcast
Released in 2018, the 50th anniversary of this tumultuous year, "1968: In Hindsight" looks at key global issues, then and now. Through scholarship and conversation, this six-part series dives into questions from 50 years ago that still matter today.
Listen on: iTunes | Google Play