Lincoln Editor

              April - June 2004 Volume 4   Number 2
NEH AWARDS FIRST FEDERAL FUNDING
BOSTON ACCEPTS POSITION AS RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Kelley Boston, the project s graduate assistant for the
past two years, has accepted a full-time position as
a research associate with the project. She will begin work
in July.
Boston has a Bachelor s degree in history from the
University  of  Illinois  at  Urbana-Champaign.  She
completed a Master s degree in history at the University
of Illinois at Springfield, graduating in May. She wrote
a thesis about an antebellum utopian socialist community
west of Springfield, which was involved in a complex
legal dispute in the Sangamon County Circuit Court.
During  her  graduate  assistantship  with  the
project,  Boston  played  an  important  role  in  double
proofing document transcriptions and in fact-checking
case presentation chapters for the selective book edition
of Lincoln s legal papers. She also participated in the
The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency received the
first  federal  funding  for  the  expanded  Papers  of
Abraham Lincoln from the National Endowment for the
Humanities  (NEH). The  NEH  awarded  the  project  a
three-year grant totaling $170,000. The grant $150,000
in outright funds and $20,000 in matching funds will
help greatly with the progress of capturing images of
Lincoln  documents  at  various  repositories  across  the
country. Since 1991, the NEH has awarded the Lincoln
Legal Papers three separate grants totaling $353,000.
NEH  relies  heavily  on  expert  review  of  grant
applications, and its awards are important to a project s
credibility and budget. All reviewers agreed that a new
edition of Lincoln s papers is an important endeavor, and
one commented that our  proposal looks exceptionally
initial search phase of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
by  helping  to  construct  a  document-control  database,
capturing digital images of documents, and assisting with
the mail survey.
In  her  new  capacity  as  a  research  associate,
Boston will play an active role
in  the  search  and  collection
phase of the Papers of Abraham
Lincoln,  maintaining  the
database  and  traveling  to
various research repositories to
collect digital images of Lincoln
documents. She will also assist
the other editors in completing
the four-volume selective book
edition of Series I: Legal Papers.
well thought out, and well planned.  Several reviewers
commented  on  the  long-lasting  effects  of  the  project;
that a  digitized edition of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
will revolutionize Lincoln scholarship  and that  It would
be  difficult  for  anyone  to  dispute  the  importance  of
Lincoln s papers or to deny that their publication would
not  have  great  benefits  for  historians  and  the  general
public.  Finally, one reviewer noted that  In short, the
Papers  of Abraham  Lincoln  promises  to  be  the  most
important documentary effort, in terms of both discovery
and presentation, of our time. 
We  are  very  grateful  for  the  kind  words  of
encouragement  from  our  reviewers  and  for  the
Endowment s endorsement of the work plan, budget, and
overall scope of the project.