National Humanities Medals

Stephen Ambrose has written about the great events and extraordinary people who have shaped this nation's history. A biographer of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the chronicler of the expedition of Lewis and Clark, and most recently the storyteller of the American infantryman in World War II, Ambrose has awakened the historical curiosity of the American reading public. For thirty years he taught history at the University of New Orleans. Undaunted Courage, his book about the expedition of Lewis and Clark, caught the public's imagination over the lure of the West and was a best-seller. His recent book, Citizen Soldiers, is a hymn to the quiet strength and fortitude of these soldiers who, under the most dreadful conditions of modern warfare, brought about the destruction of the Nazi war machine. The book had a profound influence on producer Steven Spielberg and the making of Saving Private Ryan, for which Ambrose served as a consultant. His books remind us of the human qualities we aspire to: vision, courage, loyalty, and patriotism.

E. L. Doctorow, the author of The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, and The Waterworks, writes novels of uncommon perception and style about the American past and the American experience. His books begin where mythology and history converge. Informing much of Doctorow's work is his concept of history in the context of the novel. He uses history and imagination as the place to begin a work of literary art. A New Yorker, Doctorow was educated at Kenyon College and Columbia University. His early career as an editor at Dial Press brought him into contact with the leading American writers of the 1950s. He grew up in a family that venerated books and music. He is able to capture the way a time period feels, smells, and sounds. By conveying in his writing the way people moved and the way they spoke, Doctorow gives voice to our fellow Americans across vast distances of time and memory.

Diana Eck, a scholar of America's new religious diversity, believes that Americans must learn and care about each other's religions if our faiths are to endure. She is professor of comparative religions and Indian studies and creator and director of Harvard University's Pluralism Project, which documents the infusion of new faiths in the country and how those faiths and their new country are changing each other. The Pluralism Project has created an award-winning CD-ROM called On Common Ground: World Religions in America for use by teachers and students. Born in Montana, Eck is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the author of six books, including the highly acclaimed Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras.

Nancye Brown Gaj believes in the fundamental and liberating force of being able to read. She founded Motheread in 1987 in an effort to help women inmates in North Carolina be able to read to and with their children. Teaching them to read helped these women reconnect with their children and themselves. While teaching adult literacy, Gaj found that most people wanted to earn a high school diploma, read the Bible, and read to their children. The program quickly grabbed hold and expanded out of the prisons and to entire families. In the past ten years, she and Motheread volunteers have taught tens of thousands of women to read in thirteen states and the Virgin Islands. Today as Motheread/Fatheread grows, Gaj believes being able to read helps us connect to our families and the communities in which we live. What began as a clinical experiment has ended up transforming the lives of those who have participated.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., began a distinguished academic career in the trenches fighting for cultural pluralism. Gates, who now stands at the forefront of African American scholarship, questioned the curriculum in the literature department of Cambridge University twenty-five years ago. He has since then helped the canon grow to include writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright alongside Shakespeare and Plato. In 1991, Harvard University appointed him the W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and director of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. Gates was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He has held professorships at Yale, Cornell, and Duke University. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award at age thirty-three, and in 1997, he was named one of the twenty-five most influential Americans by Time. His books include The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, which won the American Book Award, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and his 1994 book, Colored People, about growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia.

Vartan Gregorian has built a career on saving famous institutions and promoting the world of ideas. The former president of Brown University and director of the New York Public Library, Gregorian is currently president of the Carnegie Corporation. He began his life in Tabriz, Iran, under the influence of a maternal grandmother who gave him a love of learning and ideas. In 1984, after serving in a variety of capacities at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved his sights to the then-failing New York Public Library. With NEH help, Gregorian began an aggressive campaign to rally the city's elite to save the venerable institution. After five years, Gregorian could look back on raising $270 million toward a $370 million fund-raising campaign. As president of Brown University, he brought the same zeal: revitalizing the university's academic departments, dramatically increasing its endowments, and adding more than two hundred new faculty members. Today, Gregorian is president of the Carnegie Corporation, which concentrates on funding social issues, child development, education, and world peace.

Ramon Eduardo Ruiz has always lived his life on the border, at one time or another calling Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California home. A leading Hispanic scholar, he is the author of fifteen books. His 1968 book, Cuba: The Making of a Revolution, is considered the cornerstone work on that event. His controversial 1980 book on the Mexican Revolution, The Great Rebellion, was singularly important for interpreting the revolution as one of the last gasps of bourgeois protests in the nineteenth century. It challenges the notion that the Mexican Revolution freed an oppressed people from foreign domination, military dictatorships, and established popular rule and economic justice. His birthplace and experiences inspired him to write his latest book, On the Rim of Mexico, Where the Rich and Poor Rendezvous. The two thousand mile border that separates both nations, one rich, the other poor, has fascinated Ruiz for most of his life. Ruiz began his teaching career in 1955. In 1970, he joined the University of California, and in 1991, was named professor emeritus. Combining teaching with personal commitment, Ruiz has been a social justice advocate for many decades.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has chronicled presidents and epochs. He has written elegantly about Puritans, the Constitution, and our common American future. He made a reputation with his book, The Age of Jackson, in 1945. In it, he challenged the received wisdom of Jacksonian democracy and wrote that Jackson's era saw the first attempt to establish federal supremacy over the states and broaden the authority of the national government in order to protect the individual from business. The best-selling book brought Schlesinger his first Pulitzer Prize and a Harvard professorship (despite the fact that he had not earned a Ph.D.). Schlesinger served as a presidential special advisor to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an experience that led him to write his best-known book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which brought him his second Pulitzer Prize. Schlesinger is equally well known as the historian of the New Deal. His three volumes on the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt are considered fundamental to the understanding of the early Roosevelt years. In his most recent book, The Disuniting of America, Schlesinger addresses the dire consequences of an America not rooted in its history. He offers hope in the promise of the Constitution-the glue that holds the fabric of the nation together with its promise of equal rights for all citizens.

Garry Wills's writings on history and culture illuminate our knowledge of the national landscape. In his countless articles, essays, and books, he has shared his knowledge on politics, history, religion, and theater. His book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, examined a performance that literally changed the course of the nation's history. The famous address was not spontaneous but carefully worded and thought out. Lincoln's 272 words struck a nerve, while the two-hour speech by orator Edward Everett is lost forever. Through that address, "Lincoln changed the way we conceive of ourselves," says Wills. With equal intellectual curiosity, he has addressed diverse subjects such as Richard Nixon, Shakespeare, the Vietnam War, and John Wayne. Wills was schooled by Jesuits, first as a seminarian studying philosophy at St. Louis University and then at Xavier University. He later took a second M.A. and a Ph.D. in classics at Yale. He teaches at Northwestern University and writes for journals around the country as a scholar and critic. Today, nearly thirty years after he piqued the attention of the reading public with his provocative book, Nixon Agonistes, he is still an American original in thought and letters.