MCLA History Professor Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

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NORTH ADAMS, Mass.— Amanda Kleintop, an assistant professor of history at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her continuing research.

The recently announced NEH grants will provide $22.2 million for 224 humanities projects nationwide. The grant awards support the preservation of historical collections, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, scholarly research, and curriculum projects.

Kleintop will use her summer stipend grant to complete additional research in the National Archives (pending their reopening) and use that material to edit her manuscript, "The Balance of Freedom: Abolishing Property Rights in Slaves during and after the Civil War." She will also complete an article based on this research.

Until the U.S. Civil War, stated Kleintop in her research summary, legal recognition of property rights in slaves enabled slaveholders, merchants and investors to buy and sell slaves on credit and to mortgage human beings. The U.S. government's decision to abolish slavery without reimbursing slave owners for the lost value of freed slaves threatened to send this system into chaos. The Balance of Freedom reveals that, after Confederate surrender, Americans reconciled the enormous emotional and political costs of a four-year war and generations of enslavement by contesting who should bear the financial burden of emancipation, estimated at about $13 trillion by today’s standards. It took exceptional circumstances in war and peace to abolish slavery and white southerners' claims that they should be able to profit from the value of people.

Many white southerners insisted they should not be penalized for participating in a legal property system and sought compensation for and debt relief from debts for the value of humans. By expressing their claims in legal and economic frameworks, white southerners avoided making race-based moral statements about who should be held accountable for the price of emancipation and enslavement. Nevertheless, other white and black Americans demanded they absorb the financial costs of dissolving an immoral institution that tainted the entire country. They forced white southerners to shoulder the cost when the Fourteenth Amendment nullified claims for compensation in 1868 and the U.S. Supreme Court forced slave buyers to repay debts for people whom the law no longer considered property in 1871.

Realizing that acquiescing to uncompensated emancipation would help them solidify political power, white southerners erased the history of their resistance and, by 1900, convinced most Americans that they had not fought the Civil War to protect slavery. Thus, white Americans absolved white southerners and the nation of the history of enslavement and a bloody civil war.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.


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North Adams School Finance Panel Reviews Fiscal 2026 Spending Plan

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Finance & Facilities Committee took a deeper dive this week into next year's school spending plan.
 
The draft proposal for fiscal 2026 is $21,636,220, up 3.36 percent that will be offset with $940,008 in school choice funds, bringing the total to $20,696,212, or a 2.17 percent increase. 
 
Business and Finance Director Nancy Rauscher said the district's school choice account would be in relatively good shape at the end of fiscal 2026. 
 
As a practice, the district has been to trying not to exceed the prior year's revenue and to maintain a 5 percent surplus for unexpected special education expenses. However, this year's revenue would be about $500,000 so the amount used would be significantly more. 
 
"But given our current balance, we could absorb that in the net result of what we're anticipating in the way of revenue next year," Rauscher said. "Relative to committing $940,000 to school choice spending next year, that would leave us with a projected balance at the end of FY 26 of a little over $1.2 million, and that's about 6 percent of our operating budget."
 
But committee members expressed concerns about drawing down school choice funds that are projected to decrease in coming years. 
 
"I think mostly we're going to go through this and we're going to see things that this just can't be cut, right? It's just, it is what it is, and if we want to provide, what we can provide," said Richard Alcombright. "How do we prepare for this, this revenue shortfall?"
 
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