UWG
News Item
Contact: University Communications & Marketing
Phone (678) 839-6464, FAX (678) 839-6645
ucm@westga.edu
Political Heritage program receives $37,000 grant
March 7, 2003
CARROLLTON, GA - The Watson-Brown Foundation Inc., a Georgia nonprofit corporation, has awarded a $37,000 grant to Georgia’s Political Heritage Program, a research program of the University of West Georgia Department of History and Department of Special Collections.
Through the program, West Georgia history faculty conduct video- and audiotaped interviews with prominent Georgia political figures, such as former governors, lieutenant governors and House speakers, as well as U.S. senators and representatives. The grant will be used to purchase digital video equipment to switch the program to DVD recording, as well as to help underwrite the costs associated with completing transcription of the interview tapes already archived.
According to Dr. Mel Steely, director of Georgia’s Political Heritage Program and professor of history, the program began in 1985 as a video/audiotape collection designed to capture valuable but disappearing historical resources, the memories of Georgia’s political leaders as they retell their role in the state’s political history. It includes not only video- and audiotaped interviews with the politicians, but has expanded to include their political papers and memorabilia as well.
The Watson-Brown Foundation supports higher education primarily through its undergraduate scholarship program and its grant program. Watson-Brown Foundation grants are usually awarded to programs in the humanities.
Watson-Brown Foundation President Tad Brown said the foundation’s Board of Trustees “felt that efforts made by Georgia’s Political Heritage Program to capture and preserve interviews with Georgia’s prominent political figures was of particular merit, and the board wanted to fund efforts to preserve, collect and index these valuable primary source materials to benefit researchers and scholars.”
The materials collected through Georgia’s Political Heritage Program are archived in the Department of Special Collections in the Ingram Library. The collection currently includes interviews with former Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives Tom Murphy; Lieutenant Governors Pierre Howard, Garland Byrd and George T. Smith; and Governors Ernest Vandiver, George Busbee, Zell Miller, Joe Frank Harris and Roy Barnes. The political papers and memorabilia of former Speaker Murphy are slated to be housed in a replica of his state Capitol office to be built on campus.
Tapes of national politicians Newt Gingrich, Elliott Levitas, Jack Flynt, Mack Mattingly, Bob Barr, Buddy Darden, Phil Landrum, Bo Callaway, Doug Barnard, Griffin Bell, Robert Stephens, Fletcher Thompson, Ben Blackburn and Lindsay Thomas, and a number of other state and national figures will also be part of the transcription effort.
The University of West Georgia has benefited previously from a $250,000 Watson-Brown Foundation grant for scholarships to the Advanced Academy of Georgia, one of fewer than 12 programs in the nation that allow gifted high school juniors and seniors to live and study at a University while they complete their high school graduation requirements. The current grant to Georgia’s Political Heritage Program is supportive of the foundation’s historic preservation mission.
For more information about Georgia’s Political Heritage Program, contact Steely at 770-836-4559 or msteely@westga.edu, or visit the program’s web site at www.westga.edu/~history/heritage.htm.
-30-