MANHATTAN — The Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University, directed by Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, associate professor of history, has been selected as one of 15 “high impact” National Endowment for the Humanities recipients by the National Humanities Alliance.

The center is featured in a new National Endowment for the Humanities, or NEH, brochure that will be distributed to members of Congress and donors nationwide.

In addition, the center, an interdisciplinary undergraduate research center in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, is one of five featured units on the alliance’s new website, nehforall.org. This interactive site helps users find NEH projects in their respective states.

The featured projects and programs illustrate the endowment’s primary goals, including engaging youth, reaching rural communities, serving veterans, catalyzing local tourism and preserving cultural heritage. The Chapman Center for Rural Studies is noted as an institution safeguarding the country’s historical and cultural legacies.

The brochure and website feature the center’s Lost Kansas Communities project, a digital archive of the state’s lost and disappearing places. Students comb through archival information, create maps and collect oral histories to ensure the stories and people of Kansas’ small towns are not forgotten. Student research recently supported a major exhibition at the Flint Hills Discovery Center from September 2016 through January 2017.

The center’s maintains digital archives of its research projects at k-state.edu/history/chapman/.