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In 2005 the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was awarded a $500,000 challenge grant through NEH's "We the People" initiative to support the building of a permanent endowment for the Walt Whitman Archive. With the successful raising of $1.5 million in required matching funds, the Archive has achieved a new measure of financial stability that will allow us to retain key staff and continue to develop the Archive as a rich resource free to everyone.
The innovative nature of our work in digital editing and the vastness and complexity of Whitman materials to be included will demand considerable effort well into the future. The Archive is expensive to produce, and so we hope to continue to build the endowment. We welcome your donation at the University of Nebraska Foundation's website. We recognize all gifts of at least $25 (Contributors), $50 (Friends), $500 (Supporters), $1,000 (Partners) and $5,000 or more (Patrons).
If you prefer, you can support the project's editorial work by sending a check to The Walt Whitman Archive Fund, University of Nebraska Foundation, 1010 Lincoln Mall, Suite 300, 68508-2886. Your contribution is tax deductible. We appreciate your help in making the work of Whitman, "the poet of democracy," available to everyone everywhere.
At key moments since its inception in 1995 the Walt Whitman Archive has received major support from the following institutions, to whom we are deeply indebted.
Our ongoing effort to collect, transcribe, and encode Whitman's poetry manuscripts has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities divisions of Collaborative Research (2000-2003) and Preservation and Access (2003-2005). A "We the People" Challenge Grant (2005-2009) enables us to retain key staff as work on all aspects of the site progresses. A Scholarly Editions grant (2008-2011) helped advance our work in editing 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). A new grant from Preservation and Access (2012-2015) enabled us to develop an integrated catalog of all of Whitman's literary manuscripts, a resource that brings together all of Whitman's poetry manuscripts and all of those prose manuscripts that led to a publication. A Scholarly Editions grant (2013-2016) is helping to advance work on "Whitman as an Author before Leaves of Grass." Two grants have supported work on Whitman’s marginalia and annotations (2011-2014; 2018-2020). A bilateral DFG-NEH grant (2014-2015) will support the development of "Diachronic Markup and Presentation Practices." Finally, a Scholarly Editions grant is currently advancing work on "Unearthing the 'buried masterpiece' of American Literature: A Digital Variorum of the 1855 Leaves of Grass," (2017-2020). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We have received grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (2008-2009; 2010-2011; 2011-2012; 2012-2013; 2013-2014; 2014-2015; 2015-2016; 2016-2017; 2017-2018, 2018-2019) to edit Walt Whitman's two-way correspondence from the beginning of the Civil War through Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years, and currently through his old age—his years of fame and infamy.
Our project to create an integrated finding guide to Whitman's manuscripts received start-up funds from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (2001) and was supported through a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (2002-2004). A second grant from IMLS supported a project entitled "Interoperability of Metadata Standards for Digital Thematic Research Collections: A Model Based on the Walt Whitman Archive" (2005-2007).
"The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture" was funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (1997-2000).
From 1997-2007 the Whitman Archive was affiliated with Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. IATH offered technical advice, provided networked data storage, and helped in the application of international standards. The Institute further assisted us with project design and with publishing issues. We also cooperated with and benefited from the expertise of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia.
The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa generously funded the week-long seminar, "Walt Whitman International: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive," held May 15 through May 21, 2011.
The University of Iowa's Digital Studio for Public Arts and Humanities has provided support allowing us to hire a graduate student in library science (2013-2015) and a digital humanities librarian (2015-2016) to help in editing Whitman's correspondence and fiction.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has been a partner of the Whitman Archive since 2000. In 2007, the Archive was transferred from Virginia to a server in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at UNL. The work of CDRH staff has led to major advances, including a redesign of the site, a complete overhaul of the underlying architecture, development of a new tracking database, and improvements in our search functionality (additional work on the search is underway).
We wish to thank the University of Iowa, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University, Yeshiva University, and the College of William & Mary for their generous support.