NEH Grant Supports Jackson Papers Project
A substantial new National Endowment for the Humanities grant helps continue and expand UT’s Papers of Andrew Jackson project.
UT’s Papers of Andrew Jackson project received a grant worth over $2.8 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the largest grant ever awarded to the project, which launched in 1971.
The goal of the ongoing project is to collect and publish the entire literary record of the seventh president of the United States. Jackson is one of the most critical and enduringly controversial figures in American history—a dominant actor on the American scene in the period between the Revolution and Civil War. In collecting his personally written materials, the project preserves an important historical resource for journalists, documentarians, and the people of Tennessee.
This latest NEH grant builds on a long and fruitful partnership the research team has had with that agency. Over the years the project has also received funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Watson-Brown Foundation, and the Tennessee Historical Commission.
“Over the next five years, the grant will allow us to expand our staff and accelerate our work to identify, transcribe, annotate, and publish Andrew Jackson’s full written record,” said Professor Michael Woods, director of the project and Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of History. “We have already completed 12 of our projected 17 volumes and we anticipate making much more rapid progress on the final volumes thanks to this support.”
The Jackson project currently has a staff of three including Woods and associate editors Laura-Eve Moss and Tom Coens, both research associate professors in the history department. The new grant will allow the team to hire two postdoctoral researchers for one year each and an assistant editor and a digital humanities editor.
“The digital humanities editor will help us expand our online presence and make more of our materials accessible to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Woods. “Grant funds will also help us host a conference on parties, elections, and politics in nineteenth-century America. We plan to organize this conference for the summer of 2028 to coincide with the bicentennial of Jackson’s election to the presidency.”
The grant will also help the team purchase equipment and supplies to facilitate research and support essential travel to visit archives in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Nashville, and other locations. Ongoing archival research helps in annotating the documents in the archive and in finding previously unknown Jackson documents.
The twelve finished volumes of the Papers of Andrew Jackson project are available in print from the University of Tennessee Press and are also in two digital editions, one through the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda initiative, and the other available free as a downloadable and searchable PDF through Newfound Press.
This year’s grant awards honor the nation’s 250th anniversary, supporting research, education, and public programs on the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding. Similar grants advance the editing and publication of the collected papers of three other US presidents who played significant roles in the founding era and the evolution of American democracy: John Adams, James Monroe, and Martin Van Buren.
by Randall Brown