Topics: Inclusive Excellence, College of Sciences and Humanities
August 21, 2018
Ball State University students recently laid the groundwork for a virtual museum of historic African-American sites across Indiana.
Under the direction on Ron Morris, a Ball State history professor, a group of students compiled a list of 100 prominent sites in African-American history located across the state of Indiana.
This list will be used as part of the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grants program to create a new virtual museum of African-American sites for public education and as the basis for creating historic trail tours. This is the first grant from this program awarded in Indiana. This grant program is funded through the Historic Preservation Fund.
To find the sites featured on this list, students have been researching on Indiana’s government website, online history databases, and back issues of history magazines such as Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, previously published by the Indiana Historical Society.
The two-year grant project that will use this information is funded with a National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights grant, said Christine Thompson, an archeologist at Ball State who is a partner in the project as a member of the University’s Applied Anthropology Laboratories (AAL) in the Department of Anthropology.
The mission of the Applied Anthropology Laboratories (AAL) in the Department of Anthropology is to expand education beyond the classroom through practical experience in the application of anthropological knowledge.
The AAL uses student employees, interns, and graduate assistants on its grant-funded and contract-research projects. “This project furthers this mission and contributes to Ball State’s mission to become a model community engaged research university,” said Kevin Nolan, AAL Director and co-PI of the grant.
By Marc Ransford, Senior Communications Strategist