Washington, DC/CMEDIA: $41.4 million in grants reportedly for 81 humanities projects across the country has been announced by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Included in these are: An online version of Noah Webster’s 1806 and 1828 dictionaries, a new permanent exhibition at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library on Roosevelt’s global influence, and a book about the creation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the novel’s reception from publication to the present.
“Grants from the National Endowment support organizations and scholars working to illuminate and educate about the great ideas and events of the past…celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary this year…foster robust public engagement with our national history, ideals, and intellectual achievements through funding for an array of exhibitions, preservation projects, books, education initiatives, and advanced research,” NEH Acting Chairman William English has said.
Several grants will support scholarly, educational, and public programs designed to enhance ongoing national celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
NEH funding for these projects responds to the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order “Celebrating America’s Birthday,” and is part of the agency’s larger initiative A More Perfect Union focuses on exploring America’s history and celebrating its 250 years of cultural heritage.
Of these, thirty-three grants support efforts to preserve and improve access to primary source materials relating to the United States’s Founding Era and the history of American government and are awarded under NEH’s new Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition funding opportunity,
Included in this category’s awards are funding to preserve and digitize archival records of the Dakota Territory documenting the region’s governance and relationship with the U.S. federal government prior to North and South Dakota’s admission to the Union in 1889.
To stabilize fragile maritime artifacts excavated from the York River site, a grant has been given to the Mariners’ Museum and Park in Virginia where some 40 ships were sunk by American cannons during the 1781 Battle of Yorktown.
To preserve more than 100,000 archaeological artifacts and archival records from Revolution-era settlements in Kentucky, NEH awards other awards will enhance access to records documenting Alaska’s transition from a U.S. territory to statehood in 1959.
Endowments for Advancing the Humanities awards, which leverage federal matching funds for 20-year endowments to support long-term work in the humanities, will help establish an endowment for the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government to support graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, visiting scholars, and faculty scholarship.
To create endowed professorships to recruit and retain faculty focusing on Natural Law and Natural Rights, NEH has agreed to give a grant to Ohio State University for the university’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics.
Grants awarded will also facilitate new exhibitions and interpretive programs at historic sites that bring the ideas and insights of the humanities to life for the American public.
Also included in newly funded projects are: a traveling panel exhibition, Conceived in Liberty: Lincoln and the Founders, examining how the ideals of the Founding generation inspired Abraham Linoln; a multi-media exhibit on the history of the Old Idaho Penitentiary and its role in Idaho’s justice system as it moved from a frontier territory to a modern state; and highlighting 200 years of Shaker entrepreneurship and technological innovation is the development of an interpretive site plan at the Canterbury Shaker Village.
To enable completion of the final volumes of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, a landmark 12-volume editorial project that has received longstanding NEH support, and fund an annotated translation of writings by Albert Levy (1897-1963) and Moise Soulam (1890-1967), journalists who wrote for the American Jewish press in the early 20th century in Ladino, the traditional vernacular of Sephardi Jews, NEH has awarded Scholarly Editions and Translations grants.
Also included in this funding cycle is a $6 million cooperative agreement for a partnership between Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars on a three-year program of scholarly convenings, publications, and podcasts on addressing antisemitism as a global challenge.
Being part of NEH’s implementation of the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order, this cooperative agreement focuses on combating antisemitism and follows other NEH efforts to counter antisemitism through humanities education and programs, including a previous $10.4 million grant to Tikvah for the center’s “Jewish Civilization Project.”
Other awards will support a team of curators, archaeologists, and conservators in studying and documenting two 4,000-year-old Egyptian boats undergoing conservation at the Carnegie Museum of National History and the Field Museum of Natural History for what the vessels reveal about ancient Egyptian trade, craftsmanship, and culture along the Nile River.
To facilitate North Carolina State University researchers to analyze the DNA of parchment from 13th-17th-century court records. NEH has awarded a grant to track changes in agricultural practices and the emergence of disease in medieval and early modern England.
Enabling writing and publication of new nonfiction books aimed at general audiences, NEH Public Scholars grants include a biography of poet Walt Whitman and a book on the friendship between George Washington and French officer and philosopher François-Jean de Chastellux, based on a newly discovered trove of documents.
Supporting the ongoing digitization of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963, National Digital Newspaper grants awarded in six states will include the Chronicling America online database of historic American newspapers.
A full list of grants by geographic location is available here.
NEH awarded grants in the following categories:
Collaborative Research: 7 grants, totaling $858,364 would support interpretive research undertaken by a team of two or more collaborating scholars that adds significantly to knowledge and understanding of the humanities.
Endowments for Advancing the Humanities: 5 grants, totaling $12.3 million would provide funds for 20-year term endowments to support long-term work in the humanities. These challenge grants require a one-to-one match with non-federal funds
Exhibitions and Historic Places: Planning and Implementation Grants: 9 grants, totaling $2.4 million support museum exhibitions and interpretations of historic places that bring the ideas and insights of the humanities to life for general audiences.
National Digital Newspaper Program: 6 grants, totaling $1.8 million support the creation of a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1690 and 1963, from all states and U.S. jurisdictions
Public Scholars: 5 grants, totaling $250,000 Support well-researched books in the humanities aimed at a broad public audience
Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition: 33 grants, totaling $13.4 million support activities to preserve and improve access to primary source materials related to the history of American independence, the establishment and expansion of the nation, and federal, state, and local government
Scholarly Editions and Translations: 15 grants, totaling $4.3 million Support the preparation of editions and translations of texts that are valuable to the humanities but are inaccessible or available only in inadequate editions.
National Endowment for the Humanities: Supporting research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities, The National Endowment for the Humanities funds selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.
