Humanities Open Book Collection
In 2018, the Northeastern University Library received a grant from the Mellon Foundation as part of the Humanities Open Book program, which they co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities. This program supports the digitization and open dissemination of out-of-print university press titles in the humanities. The grant permitted the Library to digitize 15 titles related to Boston history, originally published by Northeastern University Press. Local and regional history was a publishing strength of the Press, which ceased publishing new titles in 2015; the focus of this collection also aligns well with the Library’s special collections, which emphasize Boston’s social movements, underrepresented communities, neighborhoods, and infrastructure.
Each of the titles digitized as part of this grant project features a newly written foreword. The forewords were written by scholars and practitioners in a wide variety of fields including U.S. history, architectural history, African American history, medicine, photography, and sociology, mirroring the range of topics covered by the collection. These new digital editions are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Browse the Humanities Open Book Collection
Titles in this collection are freely available in EPUB and PDF format, and print-on-demand copies are available for sale at cost. Additional features of the collection include:
- digitized, high-resolution photographs from two titles (City Limits and To Dwell Is to Garden)
- maps of Boston with geolocated photographs from City Limits and To Dwell Is to Garden
- high-resolution versions of selected maps and downloadable data from eight books in the collection
These features are available from each book’s page on the site.