‘A Sporting Chance: On and Off the Field’, opened Friday February 2nd at the Tompkins Center for History and Culture. We had a phenomenal crowd turn out during Gallery Night, with wonderful performances from the Vociferous Cruciferous Chorus, a ceremonial rutabaga curl by Mayor Rob Cantelmo following a heartening cheer performance from the Rutabaga Curl Girls. 

Our thanks to local news WBNG-12, The Ithaca Voice, Ithaca Times, ICTV, What's Hot NY, and WICB for helping spread the word about the new exhibit! You can find their coverage and insights on the displays at thehistorycenter.net/press. 

---------------------------
Our director Ben Sandberg spent the weekend in #WashingtonDC with over 300 other  #museumprofessionals for #MuseumAdvocacyDay 2024 . Museum Advocacy Day is an annual event coordinated by @aamersofficial for museums workers to speak directly with legislators to communicate the value of museums and support their continued funding on the federal level.

The History Center has received major funding in recent years from federal legislation supporting the arts including major funds from National Endowment for the Humanities, American Historical Association, and Institute of Museum and Library Services. Learn about the #tompkinshistory projects and programming these funds supported at thehistorycenter.net/grants
---------------------------
In our fourth year of the annual Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon our 13 History Center volunteers contributed to digitizing over 100 pages from Frederick Douglass' General Correspondence Records held by the Library of Congress. At the start of the day there were 8,763 records to transcribe, over 7,800 of those now have transcriptions thanks to the work of volunteers (including ours!) across the country.