1 week Ago By CHRIS DUNKER Lincoln Journal Star
When the first German soldiers arrived at prisoner of war camps erected across Nebraska in 1943, they were given a taste of rural American life. Along with working on area farms and ranches to replace the labor of Nebraskans sent to fight the Nazis and Japanese in World War II, the prisoners housed in more than a dozen camps attended school and went to the movies. In several camps, the prisoners even started their own newspapers, often in their native German, where they detailed the daily goings-on of their surroundings.
One of those newspapers, Der Wassertum, which translates to The Water Tower, chronicled life inside the POW camp built north of Indianola in Red Willow County. While the pages of the newspaper have largely been lost to history, Der Wassertum has been preserved on microfilm held by the New York Public Library and the State Library of Pennsylvania. A University of Nebraska-Lincoln research project was preparing to collect and digitize the microfilm, publishing the pages of Der Wassertum online as part of Chronicling America, an open-access, open-source newspaper database managed by the Library of Congress.
But funding for the program, which was provided through the National Endowment for the Humanities, was abruptly canceled last week as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to slash federal spending. Seven active research projects receiving more than $1.6 million in NEH funding received notification that their grants had been canceled by billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency on Wednesday, university officials said.
An effort to digitize the works of Nebraska author Willa Cather lost funding as part of the cuts, as was funding to gather and publish Genoa Indian School student records and to put historic Nebraska newspapers online. In all, more than 1,000 NEH grants, which account for a small part of the federal budget but are key to promoting national and state history and culture, were terminated across the country last week. Andrew Jewell, a professor of digital projects at University Libraries who serves as co-director for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, said UNL research funded through the NEH has a broad audience.
More than 2 million people access the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities’ free websites each year, Jewell said, including the Willa Cather Archive , which began publishing the Red Cloud novelist’s letters, notes and manuscripts in 2018. Two years ago, UNL received a grant for $304,207 to help fund the latest phase of the archive, which seeks to publish Cather’s literary manuscripts online in an annotated format. Jewell said work this year was focused on finishing the back-end work to put the manuscripts online.
“We have a year of work left, so when the grant goes away, that changes our ability to finish the work,” he said. “We still need to figure out a plan and do our best not to waste the time, effort and resources we’ve already spent.” Another program that lost its NEH funding last week was nearing the expiration date of its grant, leaving researchers baffled as to why it was targeted by DOGE.
The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, which started in June 2019 and was set to end on May 31, had its $449,899 grant canceled last week, according to Margaret Jacobs, director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Jacobs said the project is now scrambling to find alternative funding to keep paying its three employees, which includes two full-time staff and one graduate research assistant, for the next two months as planned. “When you’re in the humanities, there just aren’t a lot of funding sources available,” Jacobs said.
“I don’t know if people recognize how hard it is to get an NEH grant. It’s not some whimsical thing. “They are extremely responsible, know they are a taxpayer-funded agency and want their money to go to legitimate academic enterprises,” she added.
The Genoa Indian School project, which saw UNL partner with the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation Museum and more than 40 Native tribes, sought to locate records generated at the boarding school between 1884 and 1934.
Jacobs said the records, many of which are held in tribal repositories, state historical societies or other archives, are highly sought after by the relatives of Native children sent to the school to be assimilated as they seek to understand and heal. “We wanted to make them easily accessible for tribal members and to repatriate them to the tribes,” she said. “And we wanted to educate non-Native people about the boarding schools, the intent behind them, and the experiences of the survivors and their families.
” While the work is mostly completed, Jacobs said the UNL team was busy working to make the digitized records searchable on the project’s website. Early work was also starting on a project to build an oral history as well as a traveling exhibit. Jacobs said while she believed the next phase of the project would have been eligible for an NEH grant, that opportunity now appears shut off, at least in the immediate future.
“I don’t think what has happened here is legal,” Jacobs said of the grant cancellation. “Congress appropriated these funds, the executive branch shouldn’t just be able to cancel them.” Laura Weakly, a metadata encoding specialist at University Libraries, said her ongoing NEH-funded project to digitize out-of-print Nebraska newspapers was among many similar projects across the country that lost funding.
Newspapers Nebraska, which is in the middle of its sixth grant cycle, has preserved more than a half-million pages since it launched in 2007, Weakly said. All of the newspapers currently available online are from before 1963. Among those preserved are the Omaha Bee, a onetime competitor to the Omaha World and Omaha Herald, as well as the Beatrice Daily Express, a precursor to the Beatrice Daily Sun.
The project has also preserved Czech language newspapers printed in Omaha, Wahoo and Wilber — often referred to as Nebraska’s Czech Capital — as well as old editions of the Daily Nebraskan, UNL’s student newspaper. To kick off its latest grant, a $304,870 award announced last September, Weakly had been preparing to submit a “small batch” of pages to the Library of Congress for review. Those pages were from the South Omaha Daily Stockman, which started publishing in 1886 as one of several newspapers centered around one of the world’s largest livestock markets and meatpacking hubs.
For Weakly, preserving the newspaper with its pulse on South Omaha also took on a personal touch. She found a notice in the paper that her great-grandparents had sold cattle at the Omaha Stockyards as part of their butcher business. “It had a significant impact on South Omaha and to the cattle industry in Nebraska,” Weakly said.
“I’m kind of sad we’re not going to be able to continue.” The loss of funding won't pull the existing newspapers off the internet, Weakly said. Those interested in Nebraska's history with the suffrage movement can still find The Women's Tribune, the newspaper started by women's rights activist Clara Colby in Beatrice.
But it will hamper efforts to compile newspapers like Der Wassertum, Weakly said, and resulted in the loss of one job. And it will also mean less exposure to Nebraska history for students across the state. Approximately 20,000 pages are viewed each month, with web traffic spiking each January and February, Weakly said, as Nebraska students begin working on their National History Day projects.
"It's such a small expenditure, but the good that comes out of it is so important," Weakly said. "Having these newspapers available freely online just seems like such a low cost for their importance.".
