NEH awards funding for “Bracero History Archive” and “Children and Youth in World History”

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are pleased to announce that we have received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create websites that will separately explore Bracero history in the United States and childhood in world history.

The Bracero History Archive will preserve and provide access to the history of the Bracero program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States from 1942 to 1964. Working with our partners at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, we will create a collaborative, standards-based clearinghouse for dispersed collections relating to Bracero history, including more than 400 oral history interviews, approximately 600 scanned documents, and over 1,700 digital images.

The Children and Youth in World History project aims to promote a fuller exploration of the record of human experience by brining the scholarship on childhood and youth to U.S., European, and World history courses and working within existing curricula to enhance understanding of societies and events of the past. Children and Youth in World History will provide a reliable and accessible web resource that will enable high school teachers, community college and university instructors, and their students, to access scholarly essays and teaching materials and to utilize instructional strategies and primary sources.