Support the project
Friends of the Archive.
The Highlands History Project is a small program with a long horizon. The chapters ship, the archive grows, the oral histories get recorded, year over year. That work is paid for by members — not by ads, not by data, not by upsells.
What your membership funds
- Oral history recording. Every hour we spend at a kitchen table in Highlands, with a microphone and a family album, is time-critical and irreplaceable. Membership underwrites the recording, editing, transcript, and archival storage of one interview per member per year.
- The archive. Scanning, cataloguing, verifying, and hosting photographs, deeds, logs, and posters. Every item published on the site is one an archivist has touched.
- Building 600 advocacy. The Sandlass family home on Sandy Hook is the strongest unbuilt preservation opportunity on the coast. The project funds the research and documentation that support ongoing advocacy for its stabilization.
- Public chapters. The site itself, the maps, the software, and the tiny team that ships them all.
Ways to give
Formal membership tiers open with the Phase 2 launch. In the meantime, if you want to be part of the founding cohort, write to us directly and we'll set it up over email.
Write to become a founding member
Partnerships we are looking for
The site is in a beta launch. What is here now is a starting point — enough of the archive standing up to show what the project is, put out in the open early rather than held back until it was finished.
It is meant as a gift to the town, and it is unfinished on purpose. The version worth having gets built with the people and institutions who already hold this history: the historical societies, the county collections, the park service, and the families with a box of photographs in a closet.
We have no institutional partnerships to announce yet. We are looking for them. If you represent an organization with a collection, an archive, or a story that belongs here — or if you want to talk about a joint exhibit, a shared grant, or an oral history program — please write to hello@abovethehook.com.