I am delighted to announce that the Jane Addams Papers has received two federal grants, one from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are extremely grateful for this support!
These grants are critical to our work which centers on bringing Jane Addams’ story to the public. Our digital edition (https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/) provides free access to documents (letters, speeches, articles, and reports) along with resources that make them accessible to every American. Jane Addams (1860-1935), America’s preeminent social worker, peace activist and progressive philosopher, was an icon of her time — called by some “the most dangerous woman in America,” and by others “the world’s best-known and best-loved woman.”
One thing that sets the Jane Addams Papers apart from other projects is its reliance on undergraduate students to create its digital edition. Ramapo College students learn how to work in digital humanities by analyzing and entering data on each document, transcribing it, and researching the people, organizations, and events that are mentioned in it. With a grant from the New Jersey Humanities Council, teacher’s education students at Ramapo have also worked to build student and teacher resources using the digital edition. The unique hands-on experiences we provide make a difference as students look to joining the workforce or apply to graduate school.
Cathy Moran Hajo is the Editor and Director of the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She is an experienced scholarly editor, having previously worked for over 25 years as Associate Editor at the Margaret Sanger Papers at New York University. Dr. Hajo received her Ph.D. in history from New York University in 2006, and is addition to her work on the Sanger Papers, published “Birth Control on Main Street, Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1940,” in 2010.
Her teaching interests include scholarly editing and digital history, and she currently teaches for the Institute for Editing Historical Documents, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. She teaches a digital history course at Ramapo College.