National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Announces $22.2 Million for 224 Humanities Projects Nationwide

From NEH:

 The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $22.2 million in grants for 224 humanities projects across the country. These grants will enable the production of a 90-minute documentary on singer and civil rights pioneer Marian Anderson, support a Norman Rockwell Museum exhibition on Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series, and bolster the digital infrastructure of the Walt Whitman Archive to allow greater access to this online scholarly repository.

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Several grants awarded today support the development, production, and distribution of radio and television programs, documentary films, and podcasts that bring the humanities to public audiences. Among these are grants for a two-hour film on author L. Frank Baum and the legacy of his classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and for a documentary on the life of Rywka Lipszyc, a 14-year-old girl whose diary was discovered in the rubble of the Auschwitz crematorium in 1945.

This funding cycle also includes the first grants made under NEH’s new Short Documentaries grant program, which includes a grant award for a series of 30-minute films about historic rural churches in the South. Other Public Program grants will fund production of the Kitchen Sisters’ podcast series “The Keepers,” which tells the stories of archivists, librarians, curators, and historians and the humanities collections in their care.

Newly funded projects include the cataloging and digitization of archival objects, photographs, and films at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, and the preservation of 540 hours of recorded Native Alaskan song, dance, and oratory from four decades of Sealaska Heritage Institute cultural festivals.

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In addition, NEH made six new Chairman’s Grants since December 2019, totaling $168,452. Grantees include the Supreme Court Historical Society, which will receive $30,000 to create new content for its Landmark Cases website, a civics education tool used nationwide by secondary school educators and their students. Oglala Lakota College will receive a Chairman’s Grant of $28,516 to preserve and create access to unique audio and video collections held in its Woksape Tipi Archives and Tribal Repository, which document the tribe’s history and culture.

As recently announced, NEH also will receive $75 million in supplemental funding to assist cultural institutions and humanists affected by the coronavirus pandemic as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act economic stabilization plan appropriated by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump. NEH Chairman Peede has confirmed that 100 percent of this supplemental funding will be distributed to grantees; none will be used for the federal agency’s operational expenses. These emergency relief grants will be awarded on a rolling basis and will be announced separately.

Note: 32 grants, totaling $7.7 million were made in the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants  

Direct to Complete NEH Announcement

Direct to List of All Grants (Except President Grants, by Geography)
39 pages; PDF.

Direct to Information About Chairman’s Grants
2 pages; PDF.

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Awards, Digital Preservation, Funding, News, Open Access, Podcasts, Preservation