The Center’s origins lay in an agreement between the American Social History Project (ASHP) and GMU in 1990 that provided time for Roy to work with his longtime ASHP collaborators Steve Brier and Josh Brown on a CD-ROM edition of ASHP’s Who Built America? textbook. After the first disk was finished, in August 1993, Roy proposed establishing a Center for History and New Media at GMU. The Center’s first funded projects were collaborations with ASHP and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), beginning in 1995 with a second Who Built America? CD-ROM, followed in 1997 by Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and in 1998 by History Matters.
Three postdoctoral fellows and two faculty arrived in 2001, as well as two additional GRAs, doubling the staff, which doubled again the next year. Also in 2000, the NEH awarded the Center a challenge grant of $500,000, which it matched in 2001 to establish a $2 million endowment. To accommodate the new staff, in Fall 2001 the Center relocated from Robinson Hall to the Pohick Modules, a set of trailors apart from the History Department. In 2002, the Center was involved in the first of what would be a series of grants from the US Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) program, which opened new opportunities for collaborations with teachers. In 2002, CHNM was also awarded the first of a series of NEH-funded teaching grants that expanded the approach taken in History Matters to fields other than US history.
