National Endowment for the Humanities Stipend to Support Trinity Professor's Next Book

(June 10, 2024)

Trinity College News

Christopher Hager, Hobart Professor of the Humanities and professor of English at Trinity College, has received a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his project, “The Public Library and the Unfinished Civil War.” The stipend will cover research and writing leading to a book about how the ascendancy of U.S. public libraries during the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) has shaped their subsequent history.

Hager said that the modern idea of the public library—funded by taxes and freely accessible to everyone—became popular around the Civil War. “But nobody ever talks about why this happened when it did,” Hager said. “Was the Civil War in any way relevant to the birth of this now widely accepted public institution? In what ways were the politics, the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction necessary for or conducive to the creation of public libraries? Why was this the moment? I want to find out more about that.”