Have you ever wondered what life was like on the harsh wilderness frontier of the early United States?

West Virginia University doctoral student Cathy Rodabaugh has been awarded two prominent fellowships to further research her dissertation,Ambitious Brotherhood: Yankee Masculinity and the American Frontier.

Rodabaugh, who studies in the Department of History in WVU s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, will examine several case studies examining relationships in trans-Allegheny frontier settings.

The fellowships are from the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Ky., and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City.

The Filson Historical Society is a nationally recognized center for the study of the Ohio Valley regions history and culture. It has a library with 50,000 titles, a manuscript collection with 1.5 million items, photograph and print collections and a museum.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is home to a collection of more than 60,000 documents detailing the political and social history of the United States. Its holdings include manuscript letters, diaries, maps, photographs, printed books and pamphlets ranging from 1493 through modern times.

Ill be working primarily with manuscripts at each fellowship archive because my work is so closely tied to intimate, candid sources, such as letters and diaries,Rodabaugh said.Ive been very fortunate to locate case studies that are not only very revealing, but also contain much related historical information on these frontier men and their families.

Receiving these fellowships will enable me to visit archives that are important to this historical research,she said.Awards such as these not only help validate individual work, but they also speak to the quality of the history program here at WVU .It feels good on everyones behalf when any of us receives recognition.

Rodabaugh plans on taking her trip to New York in May and to Kentucky in June. Both of the fellowships pay for scholars to travel, research and reside where archives are located.

Cathy earned these fellowships through her hard work,said WVU history professor Kenneth Fones-Wolf, who encouraged her to apply.It certainly helps that she is a very smart and a gifted writer, but it was her willingness to spend long hours in libraries and archives to lay the foundation for an exciting research project that separates her proposal from many others.

WVUs history department encourages its students to seek research funding as part of their professional development,he said.