NEH

It is impossible to quantify the vital role that the NEH has played in our national search for meaning and self-knowledge, but the endowment’s website begins to tell the story.

Since its inception in 1965 by Congress, the NEH has funded more than 70,000 projects in all 50 states.

Out of money and facing dwindling support, I was fortunate to receive a dissertation fellowship from the NEH that allowed me a final year to complete my thesis.

The fellowship allowed me to take chances, and in the book that the thesis became — whose writing was also in part funded by the NEH — I argued that California had its own colonial history that for reasons of “chronology, geography, and teleology” had been left out of our national narrative, one historically focused on the Founding Fathers and the 13 British colonies.

In what now appears to have been a Golden Age of federally funded humanities projects, over its 60 years of existence the NEH disbursed about $6.5 billion, all of it administered through a rigorous peer-review process.