The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) turns fifty today and is kicking off a year long celebration. Fifty years ago, on September 29, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 at a White House Rose Garden ceremony.
The law created the National Endowment for the Humanities as an independent federal agency, the first grand public investment in American culture. It identified the need for a national cultural agency that would preserve America’s rich history and cultural heritage, and encourage and support scholarship and innovation in history, archeology, philosophy, literature, and other humanities disciplines.
In the five decades since, NEH has made more than 63,000 grants totaling $5.3 billion, including leveraging an additional $2.5 billion in matching grants to bring the best humanities research, public programs, education, and preservation projects to the American people. Examples of NEH impact include funding that has led to the discovery of a lost Jamestown settlement fort, brought the scholarship of famed linguist Deborah Tannen to a broader audience, created the first museum exhibit of the now cultural icon King Tut, preserved the papers of ten presidents including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, invested in the career of then relatively unknown documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and thousands of other examples.
Go to 50.neh.gov to see highlights the top grant projects from NEH’s history. Learn about the role NEH grants have played in:
- underwriting the collection and editing of the papers of George Washington and other Founders
- changing our understanding of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade
- deciphering an ancient Incan language written entirely in knots
- the re-discovery of the original Jamestown colony fort
- the preservation, publication, and interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls
- the creation of the field of digital humanities
- crowdsourcing transcriptions of historic menus at the New York Public Library