Our humans, if we are to live a purposeful and thoughtful life, almost always return to a set of eternal questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Some of the answers to these questions turn to religion. Some psychology. Some literature. and others enter history, philosophy, or art.
It took me 30 years for the history professor to try to answer fundamental questions about the history of California and its people. The National Humanities Foundation basically makes this work possible, the humanities discipline is a small, underfunded government agency polluted by President Trump and his administration’s Department of Efficiency.
The crucial role that NEH plays in our country’s pursuit of meaning and self-knowledge, but the endowment’s website begins to tell the story. Since the founding of Congress in 1965, NEH has funded more than 70,000 projects in all 50 states. It makes it possible to study and publish 9,000 books, including 20 Pulitzer Prize winners, creating 500 films and media shows, as well as 12 U.S. Presidents’ papers and editing and publishing of towering figures such as Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Willa Cather, Willa Cather, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ernest Hemingway.
When establishing organizations, Congress attempted to affirm and acknowledge that healthy democracy “requires citizens to need wisdom and vision” and that the federal government must “have “full value and support” for the humanities in order to better understand the past, better analyse the present, and better view the future.” While it is hard to say that Congress has endured these words, the money it allocates is crucial to the humanities nationwide.
In what seems to be the golden age of federally funded humanities projects, NEH paid about $6.5 billion in its 60-year existence, all managed through a strict peer review process. This averages about $100 million per year in three generations. Most of these funds were packaged with grants of $50,000 or less, and more than half of the funds went directly to the state’s humanities councils.
Funding NEH is a hugely successful investment in the cultural structure of our country, enriching the lives of countless individuals and strengthening our alliances. Some projects, such as publishing a presidential paper, are at the heart of the minds of those who built the United States and informed generations of scholars. Others, such as creating a database Transatlantic slave tradetouched millions of lives and changed the history of the United States and its people.
I myself have had a greater influence on the research of the California Colonials, and a little money has gone a long way. In 1993, I was a graduate student working hard to write a paper about the California Colonial. I was lucky enough to receive a dissertation scholarship from NEH for money and facing reduced support, which led me to finish my dissertation for the last year.
This is one of the first studies of the California colony, which is based on Spanish origins and the experience of Indigenous Californians. Scholarship gives me a chance Book The paper becomes – My writing is also partially funded by NEH. The book’s introduction may be just a few words, but the statement and book it introduces is an early appeal to American colonial historians, outside of Virginia and Massachusetts, and a joint commitment to a more comparative and continental vision of the early America, is widely accepted today as a broad early America.
In the early 2000s, I worked with the Huntington Library Research Department to receive a large NEH grant to help create Online database Of all, in one way or another, all those related to the California mission before 1850-Indigenous people, soldiers, missionaries. NEH-funded databases help people understand people today, where they come from and how they adapt to contemporary California in a real and life-changing way.
In the 2010s, I was backed by NEH again, and I worked with a team of researchers to create visualizations of locals’ movement toward California missions, missionaries who were presented in the California Features in Museums in Southern California, which allowed us to see how California changed California through Spanish colonization.
In 2022, I received a grant from the National Historic Preservation Trust’s NEH support, which allowed a new gallery exhibition to be created and installed in Mission San Gabriel’s new gallery exhibition to categorize its history as the history of the original experience and to disband the collection by inviting local voices and indigenous practitioners into the curator’s process. The exhibition is visited by 1,000 people a month, once again helping Southern Californians understand their place in the world.
These projects of mine are just a small part of NEH’s contribution to the cultural structure of Southern California.
NEH funding in 2024 is approximately $2 billion, accounting for 0.0029% of the federal $680 million budget. The savings to zero are insignificant, but today the losses of our society and future generations will be immeasurable. When new challenges are brought to the constitutional order every day, the economic and structure of our society, as well as education and science, are chosen to cut budgetary and ideological consistency, requires more than ever a strong humanities sector as we strive to understand and live up to the nation’s motto, “One.”
As Congress legislation gives the state of the humanistic body the state gives the state the “necessary and appropriate” role, the federal government has “a role that not only helps create and maintain the climate, not only encourages freedom of thought, imagination and inquiries, but also promotes material conditions”, promoting humanistic inquiries. A wise word worth paying attention to at that time and now.
Steven W. Hackel, chair of the Department of History at UC Riverside, is the author of other books.Junipero Serra: Founding father of California. ”
