Library Awards New Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative Grants to Organizations Developing Resources for History, Civics and Democracy Students
The Library of Congress has awarded Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative grants to six organizations that are working to develop digital educational projects that teach history, civics, and democracy to secondary students using creative arts materials from the Library’s collections.
The Legislative Branch Appropriations Act of 2023 appropriated money for the new Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative, which honors the service and democratic ideals of Reps. John R. Lewis and Amo Houghton. The Library has awarded each organization $100,000. Grantees who make sufficient progress toward agreed-upon goals may apply for an additional two years of funding.
The grantee organizations and their projects include:
City Lore, New York City
From Harikatha to Hip-Hop: Integrating Library of Congress Primary Sources on Traditional Music and Dance into the Humanities Curricula integrates primary sources from the Library’s collections depicting culturally-rooted music and dance traditions from around the world into instruction.
Culture Works, Ltd., Seattle, Washington
TIME OUT OF JOINT: Fostering Civic Engagement, Creative Expression, and Empowering Students' Voices uses primary sources from the Library to engage students in historical understanding of Shakespeare, theater, society and issues about race and incarceration.
FableVision, Boston, Massachusetts
The Library of Congress Mixtape is an analytical and creative tool that help students understand the structure and content behind musical works in the Library.
Rock and Soul Forever Foundation, New York City
The Rock and Soul of America: U.S. History Course Using Music as a Primary Source includes listening to music, examining photographs and films of musical performances and investigating other artifacts related to music culture. Students will discover a “people’s history” of the United States while identifying the historical events, people and documents required by national and state social studies standards.
Snow & Co., Ltd., Newburyport, Massachusetts
The Music of Us is a cloud-based platform and tool that will enable inquiry-based exploration of music and sound primary sources — providing ways for students to explore the musicians, history, social context and styles of pieces of music.
Songmasters, New York City
The American Road Education Collaborative Tapestry Project is an online history and civics curriculum in which music plays a significant role, connecting to a wide variety of Library resources focused on patriotism, protest and the songs that made a nation.
These new grantees will join the Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium, a group of partner organizations that collaborate to design and deliver programs that promote learning with Library of Congress resources in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
The creative arts collections that grantees will draw from for their programs include:
- The Music Division holds approximately 27 million items spanning over 1,000 years of Western music history and practice.
- The American Folklife Center’s collections feature music and creative arts collections that include historical and modern folk music associated with diverse communities across the United States and its possessions.
- The National Jukebox presents recordings issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings. At its launch, the Jukebox included more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925.
- The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a partnership between the Library and GBH, features over 1,000 recordings of jazz music from the early 1920s to the 1970s from solo artists and bands with styles that range from traditional to modern.
Collections featuring other types of creative arts are available in Prints and Photographs, Poetry and Literature, Fine Prints, and the Moving Image Research Center.
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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Media Contact: Leah Knobel, lknobel@loc.gov
Public Contact: Vivan Awumey, vawu@loc.gov
PR 23-087
10-05-2023
ISSN 0731-3527