University of Nebraska project to publish Walt Whitman’s journalism receives federal grant

The University of Nebraska was selected to receive a grant to continue its work uncovering and publicizing the journalistic writings of famed poet Walt Whitman.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected the project as one of 97 recipients across the country receiving grants for August 2025.

The university will receive $300,000 over the course of three years for its research.

Kevin McMullen, the project manager for the Walt Whitman Archive, said the project had been put on hold after a previous grant was cut off.

“We were pretty reliant on external funding of one kind or another, and we've tended to have pretty good luck with federal grants,” he said. “So the fact that they were seemingly being cut off or greatly reduced was very bad news for us.”

But news of the NEH grant changed his tune.

“This grant was very good news, both for what it represented for this particular project, but also that it just shows that there hopefully is still federal support for the humanities out there that's able to be able to be gotten,” he said.

McMullen said the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has become one of the leading schools in the country for digital humanities research and the primary global resource for studying Walt Whitman.

The Walt Whitman archive includes collaborators from four other institutions but is centered in Nebraska.

Much of its recent work has centered around identifying and digitally publishing Whitman’s journalistic writings.

Before becoming known as the Father of American Poetry, Whitman worked as a reporter and editor at several New York newspapers.

In the mid-nineteenth century, most articles didn’t include bylines, making it difficult to determine which articles were written by Whitman and which were from his colleagues.

But researchers have been able to make confident claims regarding his authorship by matching articles with other archived manuscripts, looking at what topics he was interested in at the time and using a “stylometric algorithm” to detect similarities in writing styles with Whitman and his newspaper colleagues.

“If all of those methods suggest that something is by Whitman, then we feel pretty confident saying this is something he wrote, and then that's what we end up ultimately putting up on the website,” he said. “It's a fairly rigorous process.”

McMullen said Whitman’s journalism helps scholars and the public better understand Whitman as a poet.

“Some of it's fairly dry and boring, and it's about sort of the city council meetings and updates to city streets that were happening in Brooklyn and sort of mundane stuff,” he said. “But some of it is quite important and interesting and can tell us things about stuff that appears in his poetry and about him as a person.”

Much of Whitman’s work is published on the website, whitmanarchive.org, and is free to access.