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NEH & California

Between 2008 and 2012, institutions and individuals in California received $47 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and California Humanities for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples of projects since 2006.

  • The Mark Twain Papers Project at the University of California, Berkeley, has given birth to one of the great surprise bestsellers of recent times, but work on this 26-volume edition has been under way for decades, supported by many grants, three in this period totaling $1.2 million.
  • The Martin Luther King Papers project has received two grants in this period for editing and publication, totaling $429,000. The relevant volumes range in subject from the Freedom Rides (volume seven:1961–62) to the march on Washington (volume eight:1963) and the passage of the Civil Rights Act (volume nine:1964).
  • Over two summers, fifty K–12 teachers have attended summer institutes on the life and writings of John Steinbeck, more recently at San Jose State University, with funding from two separate grants totaling $257,400.
  • The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, recently accepted a donation of the San Francisco Examiner’s photographic archive from 1919 to 1998, including 3.6 million negatives and over one million prints, a collection so large it doubled the library’s holdings. To help preserve, arrange, and describe 180,000 images, the university has received two grants totaling $419,000.
  • Over four summers, sixty-two high-school teachers attended six-week seminars on the Political Theory of Hannah Arendt at San Diego State University to study her writings on evil, terror, and the origins of totalitarianism. The project was supported by four grants totaling $577,000.
  • Legal historian Stuart Banner at UCLA received a $50,000 research grant to support a study of the history of property in the United States from 1770 to the digital age, in which property rights have been extended to genetic material and digital music files.
  • The University of California Press, one of the largest and most respected scholarly presses in the country, releases 180 new books and fifty journals annually. It raised $1.2 million to match a $400,000 challenge grant to endow its future publications in history (including that of the western United States), literature, and film studies.
  • Hollywood Chinese, an award-winning documentary about Chinese contributors to American filmmaking and the image of the Chinese people in American film, was supported by a grant from California Humanities.
  • We Are California, a program of California Humanities, is a website for reading about state and pre-state history stretching back to the 1500s. Visitors are invited to contribute their own stories of immigration and settlement.
  • The Center for Media Change received a $15,000 grant from California Humanities to support a series of short radio documentaries on how economic shifts and cultural trends are remaking the face and idea of the small rural town.