Newswise — The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to expand permanent exhibits at the university's Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

The grant will support a new exhibit, "Jane Addams and the Hull-House Settlement: Redefining Democracy," which will nearly double the current exhibition space in the Hull mansion at 800 S. Halsted St.

It will re-create Addams' second-floor bedroom, an area previously closed to the public. Personal artifacts will be on display, including Addams' childhood rocking chair, the desk at which she wrote many of her books and essays, her letters to friends and associates, and telegrams she wrote to protest injustice around the world.

An innovative aural history space on the first floor will allow visitors to hear previously unheard recordings of Addams and other reformers of her era, and oral histories of community members who participated in Hull-House activities.

Other exhibits will tell of history-making social reformers associated with the Hull-House Settlement, including Ida B. Wells, Florence Kelly and Upton Sinclair.

"This is a wonderful acknowledgment of the importance of Hull-House, Jane Addams and other social reformers who lived and worked here," says museum director Lisa Yun Lee.

"It also acknowledges all the public programming we have been doing in the last few years to make the Hull-House Museum a center of civic engagement, where diverse people from Chicago and around the world can stake a claim to their history in Chicago," she said.

Lee said she expects the new space to open in late 2010.

The grant is from the NEH's "We the People" initiative to advance the teaching of American history, culture and democratic principles. Projects competing for grants must be approved by a panel of 20th-century historians and museum practitioners; a congressionally appointed committee of 26 museum practitioners, university researchers, public school teachers and librarians; and the NEH chairman.

For more information about UIC, please visit www.uic.edu