The USC Department of History has won a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to sponsor a summer institute for college and university teachers in public history.

The four-week seminar July 9-Aug. 3 in Columbia will serve as an introduction to public history for college instructors who teach undergraduates and want to include an awareness of public history practices and career opportunities for their students.

The institute will explore ways in which heritage and cultural institutions identify, collect, preserve, and interpret cultural resources such as manuscripts and records, objects, sites and landscapes, structures and buildings, and reach out to public audiences.

It will draw on the experiences and contributions of African American South Carolinians in particular as the interpretive content for the seminar's exploration of the many facets of public history.

"We're delighted," said history professor Connie Schulz, co-director of the public history program at USC who wrote the grant proposal. She will serve as co-director of the seminar with history professor Bob Weyeneth, co-director of the University's public history program, which trains students for jobs in museums and historic sites, archives, and historic preservation.

It is one of the leading public history graduate degree programs in the country.

"One of the real strengths of the public history community's collections and interpretive approaches in Columbia is in African American history," Schulz said. "We felt we could offer teachers real grounding in current practices of interpretation of the past in local museums in terms of what South Carolina is doing in that regard."

The institute is open to teachers from two- and four–year colleges and independent scholars with an interest in the field of public history. It will include a three-day visit to Charleston. Participants will be awarded a stipend of $3,000 to help defray the cost of travel, research, and living expenses during the institute.

Additional information about the institute is available by visiting the USC history department's Web site at www.cas.sc.edu/hist/neh/ or by e-mailing the department at nehinstitute@sc.edu. Schulz can be reached at ccschulz@att.net.

The deadline for application to the seminar is March 1.

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