Organization City Mystic

Funding for Connecticut nonprofit humanities and cultural organizations facing financial hardship resulting from COVID-19, funded by the CARES Act via the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Funding will help underwrite the Mystic Seaport Museum’s 2019 Arts on the Quad Summer Evening Program Series. The four selected performances will support the content of four exhibits currently on display around the Gallery Quadrangle. All the programs in the 2019 series will feature humanities-based discussions or activities linking exhibit content with the performances.

Using the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA) as the technology platform, funding enables this six-month pilot project to test a methodology for improved “tagging” of metadata, with the end goal of facilitating the discoverability of content and the interoperability of disparate databases, to meet contemporary end-user interests. Women’s suffrage was selected as the ideal trial subject, both because of ongoing centennial preparations and for the topic’s illustrative value, demonstrating how historically undermined subject areas like women’s history suffer from inadequate, inconsistent metadata and antiquated cataloging protocols that essentially suppressed women’s voices within the historical record. Building on a successful, 20-year collaboration of Connecticut-based organizations including Connecticut History Illustrated, Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA) technology platform, Mystic Seaport Museum, the Connecticut State Library, Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut League of History Organizations (CLHO), and Connecticut Humanities (CTH), this project will explore a methodology for identifying and correcting historical record keeping discrepancies, so that humanities content can be realized in its fullest expression. The metadata enhancement will take place from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020.

This year, the four selected performances will support the content of the four exhibits currently on display around the Gallery Quadrangle. Each program in the 2018 series will feature humanities-based discussions linking exhibit content with the performances. July and August 2018.

This exhibition places this controversial Vinland Map manuscript on U.S. public view for the first time in 50 years. Purported to be documentary evidence that the Vikings reached North America 500 years before Columbus, the map triggered a firestorm of public and scholarly debates among humanities scholars, scientists, and Italian Americans. This exhibition will examine the map’s mysterious origins; the reasons scholars initially believed it to be authentic; the world’s response to its unveiling; the challenges to that conclusion; and the science that finally turned the tide of scholarly opinion.