policy and advocacy

Issue Brief - National Endowment for the Humanities

Enriching America's Cultural and Intellectual Life

ACTION NEEDED
We urge Congress to support funding for the NEH in the FY06 Interior Appropriations bill to:

• Provide an increase for NEH's successful initiative, We the People
• Provide an increase to strengthen the NEH's core programs:  Education, Research, Preservation and Access, Public Programs, Federal/State Partnership, Challenge Grants.

Table: NEH Annual Appropriations, FY90 to Present (in millions of dollars)
Figures are not adjusted for inflation. Source: NEH

BACKGROUND
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency, is the largest single funder of humanities programs in the United States, providing grants for high-quality humanities projects in four funding areas: preservation, education, research and public programs.  Grants typically go to cultural institutions such as museums, archives, libraries, colleges, universities, state humanities councils, public television and radio stations, and to individual scholars.  NEH extends its reach through annual grants to its partner institutions, the state humanities councils, located in every state and U.S. territory.  It is funded at $138 million in FY05.   The President has requested flat funding for the agency for FY06.

What are the humanities?
According to the NEH’s founding legislation, “The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods.”

We the People
Numerous polls and surveys over the past decade indicate that many Americans lack even a basic knowledge about their nation’s history.  The NEH We the People initiative was launched by President Bush in 2002 to advance understanding of American history, culture, and civics.  Underlying this program is the belief that “the study of history and citizenship should be at the core of every American’s education."  We the People furthers NEH’s core functions:  advancing scholarship, education, preservation, and access to intellectual and cultural resources, and public understanding of the humanities.  The administration pledged $100 million in support of this program.

NEH and the Arts
The National Endowment for the Humanities plays an important role in promoting knowledge of and appreciation for the arts in America.  NEH provides critical support for scholarly research in the history, theory, and criticism of the arts.  NEH professional development seminars for K-12 and college teachers help improve the teaching and learning of art history in classrooms across the United States.  NEH-supported film and radio programs reach millions of viewers, helping to advance the public understanding of and appreciation for the arts.  NEH provides critical resources to the nation's art museums in the form of grants to support exhibitions, exhibition catalogs, facilities improvements, collections enhancement, and preservation training.  NEH-supported preservation projects have helped save millions of culturally and historically significant objects at risk due to their composition or storage conditions.

TALKING POINTS

• The humanities are essential to democracy.  They are the basis for reasoned civic discourse and make possible the shared reflection, communication, and participation upon which a democratic society depends.  In the 1965 legislation that created NEH, Congress stated:
  "...an advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future."
• Federal support for the humanities has historically received bipartisan support in Congress, from the creators of the NEH almost 40 years ago to the present.  Since 1965, every U.S. president has said that the humanities play an essential role in American life and are worthy of federal support.
• Small investment through NEH goes a long way.  NEH provides seed money for high-quality projects and programs that reach millions of Americans each year.  This money, and NEH's reputation, leverage millions of dollars in private support for humanities projects.
• The endowment’s competitive peer review process encourages excellence. NEH-supported works have earned nearly 600 awards, including nine Pulitzer Prizes, eight Bancroft Prizes, and six National Book Awards.
• NEH is critical to addressing the nation's future needs in education. More than two-thirds of our nation's K-12 curriculum is dedicated to the humanities; 2 million new teachers will be needed in our classrooms over the next decade, and four out of five teachers feel inadequately prepared in their subject area.
• NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes address these very issues, and are the catalyst for revitalized teachers for tens of thousands of students each year.
• The NEH-supported web portal EDSITEment is a nationally recognized gateway for teachers seeking rich humanities resources and materials on the Internet. Over the next two years, approximately 75 new lesson plans will be mounted on EDSITEment and made accessible to the nation's elementary and secondary school teachers, as well as to students and parents.
• The NEH Landmarks of American History program supports enrichment workshops for K-12 teachers at important historical sites around the nation.  The program supported 17 projects in its first grant competition.  Building on the success of this new program, the Endowment has broadened the competition to include workshops for community college faculty.
• NEH provides critical leadership in preserving of our historical and cultural heritage, from a 20-year effort to film crumbling books ("brittle books") to programs that assist museums with the stabilization of material culture collections.  At-risk objects include books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, archival collections, maps, photographs, films, sound recordings, oral histories, archaeological and ethnographic objects, decorative and fine art, and textiles.
• This year, NEH will begin making awards to support its new National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).  The NDNP will convert microfilm of historically important U.S. newspapers into fully searchable digital files and post the files on the Internet.  This long-term investment ultimately will make millions of newspaper pages accessible online.
• The NEH special initiative "Recovering Iraq's Past," will continue in FY06 to support projects to preserve and document Iraq's cultural resources and to develop education and training opportunities for Iraq's librarians, archivists, and preservation specialists.
• NEH provides critical support for humanities scholarship and facilitates the flow of scholarly research to the public through books, articles, educational television and radio programs, and other media.  Recent examples of works made possible by NEH include Ken Burns' film The Civil War, the documentary MacArthur, and the award-winning book Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose.
• NEH engages Americans at all levels of learning through public programs in the humanities, including exhibits in museums, libraries, and historical organizations; through the programs of the state humanities councils; and a variety of other activities, such as radio, film, and television productions.