Bob Reinhardt, an assistant professor in the Department of History, recently received a Discovery Grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public program.
The $30,000 grant, “Recovering the Histories of Communities Inundated by Snake River Dams,” is for the planning stages of his research project, An Atlas of Drowned Towns.
Reinhardt described his work: “This project will bring together humanities scholars, digital media experts, and community stakeholders to design a digital history project that will recover the histories of communities inundated by the construction of major dams on the Snake River in the twentieth century. This will launch a larger project that will expand beyond the Snake: The Atlas of Drowned Towns, a multimedia and multi-platform public history project on the topic. Recovering the submerged pasts of lost Snake River communities will reveal the historical significance of marginalized places in the American West, encourage appreciation of the complexity of such places, and provide lessons for the future of river development and community displacement. This Snake River project will serve as a platform for expanding this historical experience first to other western watersheds such as the Missouri, Colorado, Columbia, and Sacramento, and then to drowned towns elsewhere in North America and beyond.”
Read a past Update feature about Reinhardt’s project.