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About the Archive
News & Updates
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June 2008
Whitman Archive Receives Grants
The Archive has recently received grants to edit Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings. Funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) will support editorial work on Whitman's incoming and outgoing correspondence. Funding from the NEH will support editorial work on Whitman's Civil War notebooks, daybooks, literary essays, journalism, poetry manuscripts, and his so-called Blue Book (a personally annotated copy of Leaves of Grass that cost him his government job). Ken Price has received an ACLS Digital Innovation Award to support his role in these editorial efforts.
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April 2008
New material added to the site:
Two Russian translations of Whitman; the third volume of With Walt Whitman in Camden ; and an editorial policy statement.
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December 2007
The Walt Whitman Archive adds sixty-eight new reviews of Whitman's writings.
The reviews newly added to the site are reprinted from a recent issue of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. These reviews span the entire range of Whitman's poetic career, from his temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842) to the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). These reviews represent the views of critics on both sides of the Atlantic (and include Irish and Scottish perspectives). The reviews treat a wide range of Whitman’s publications, addressing every edition and the so-called deathbed printing of Leaves of Grass, as well as "A Child's Reminiscence," As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Two Rivulets, Memoranda during the War, November Boughs, Good-Bye My Fancy, William Michael Rossetti’s 1868 British edition (Poems by Walt Whitman), and Ernest Rhys’s 1886 British edition (Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman).
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November 2007
Why the new design?
We've now been more than five years in phase two of the Archive, 2000-2006, and again arguments for a redesign are becoming compelling. The reason for even considering a redesign boils down to the problems associated with frame-based layouts. In the current view, one of our typical pages is actually made up of four distinct frames. Three of the frames are stable, allowing the navigation bar to remain in one constant place on the screen as the text scrolls down. But there are disadvantages to this design. Printing is a problem since a printer ordinarily will print a sheet for each frame. Searching is an even bigger problem: a person who uses an internet search engine to find, say, Pfaff's at the Whitman Archive will get our online biography but without any of the three "stable" frames, so the page is shorn of the navigation bar and all obvious indications that the person is even at the Whitman Archive.
Most of these problems have been resolved through the use of CSS-based layout, which is becoming a more common way for large web sites to deal with similar display issues. Each page will print more easily, have a unique and visible URL, and will overall be more easily navigable. It is important to move our design forward with technology standards and tastes to keep current.
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January — October 2007
Recent publicity for the Whitman Archive.
The Whitman Archive has been fortunate to receive a great deal of positive publicity. Wai Chee Dimock recently remarked: “The Walt Whitman Archive is not just chronicling literary history of the past; it is making literary history at this very moment—a history of variants, each speaking to its particular locale, a continuum of ‘exaptation’ that might well resemble the evolution and adaptation of biological species” (PMLA October 2007). And William Pannapacker and Paul Crumbley in the current volume of American Literary Scholarship, indicate that the Archive “may be the most important editorial undertaking in the history of Whitman studies.” The Archive has also received very positive notice recently in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Scholar.
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August 2006
Integrated finding guide to Whitman's poetry manuscripts is honored with the C.F.W. Coker Award for Description from the Society of American Archivists.
The Society of American Archivists has awarded the Walt Whitman Archive the prestigious C.F.W. Coker Award, based on the IMLS-funded Integrated Guide to the Dispersed Manuscripts of Walt Whitman. Kay Walter and Ken Price co-directed the grant; other participants from UNL were: Mary Ellen Ducey, Brian Pytlik Zillig, Andrew Jewell, Brett Barney and various graduate students.
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September 15, 2005
Great News! NEH offers $500,000 challenge grant to the Archive. Read more and help us meet the challenge.
We are delighted to announce that the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has been offered a $500,000 "We the People" NEH challenge grant to support the building of a permanent endowment for the Walt Whitman Archive. The grant carries a 3 to 1 matching requirement, and thus we need to raise $1.5 million dollars in order to receive the NEH funds. Building an endowment will allow us to retain key staff and will enable the work of the Archive to continue.
Read more at the Support page.