"Democratizing the Humanities"
The Huntington Library - Founders' Day Lecture
February 27, 2007
(As Prepared for Delivery)

Good evening. Thank you, Steve, for your kind words. I am grateful for your hospitality, and for that of the Board of Trustees and the rest of your colleagues here at the Huntington.

I am delighted to be in southern California, particularly at this time of year. And it is a great honor to give this year's Founder's Day Lecture at the Huntington. It takes some courage to give a former professor an open mike and let him say whatever he wants … so I appreciate this opportunity, and I hope I'll be interesting enough that you won't be tempted to sneak a peak at your Blackberries.

The Huntington Library is a magnificent place — an oasis that stimulates the senses, enriches the mind, and enlightens the soul. This treasured institution exists because of the foresight and generosity of Henry and Arabella Huntington. Today, we remain grateful for their gift to the nation.

All of you are here tonight because you are valued friends of the Huntington - and thus, friends of the humanities. I am here tonight to speak about the "democratization of the humanities." As you know, the humanities help us to answer the most fundamental questions about who we are … where we came from … and where we are going. In short, the humanities teach us what it means to be human.

At NEH, we believe the humanities must be more than just a luxury for an elite few. Indeed, because the liberty of the mind is the foundation of all our other liberties, the humanities are essential for the well-being of our democracy, for enlightened citizenship, and even for national survival. The humanities tell us who we are as a people. So our shared goal must be to democratize the humanities, and to bring their glories to all Americans.

Before I became a public official in Washington, I was a professor of Italian Renaissance art. My scholarship and teaching revolved around eternal questions of beauty, truth, history, and tradition. Grappling with such questions is the proper purpose of a liberal education. And this endeavor, while always necessary, is even more crucial today.

It's no secret that the demands on our personal lives leave progressively less time to ponder these eternal questions. The job market and parents tell young people that if they want to get ahead, they should study business, or law, or technology, or medicine. And popular culture encourages us to focus on the ephemeral — the newest gadget, the hippest trend, the latest innovation.

This mindset does have its benefits: It has helped produce one of the most prosperous and powerful nations the world has ever seen. Yet it has also yielded a society less familiar with its origins and key institutions — and citizens less informed about their rights and responsibilities.

Today, young Americans show increasing ignorance about their nation's past and its founding ideals. Dismal survey results still make headlines. For example, last fall the National Civic Literacy Board surveyed thousands of students at 50 colleges and universities. The results were discouraging: College seniors scored an average of 53 percent — an F — on basic questions about American history. According to another survey done last year, 22 percent of Americans could name all five members of "The Simpsons" cartoon family — while just one in 1,000 Americans could name the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Numbers like that often elicit chuckles. Yet at their core, they are of grave concern. This collective loss of memory — this American Amnesia — is dangerous. A nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot be expected to long endure.

Democracy is not self-sustaining; its habits and principles need to be learned and passed down through the generations. Our nation is not bound by common ties of blood, race, or religion; instead, we are united by our devotion to shared ideals. So each generation of Americans must learn our great founding principles, how our institutions work, and what our rights and responsibilities are.

Our nation's Founders were well aware of this. Many of you probably remember the story of what Benjamin Franklin said after he signed the Constitution. He was asked what the Founding Fathers had given the people — a monarchy or a republic. He answered, "A republic — if you can keep it." And how do we keep it? We keep it by ensuring that our young people know our story, the whole story, the center and the margins, the good and the bad … for it is a remarkable story. And we keep it by developing educated and thoughtful citizens who can participate wisely in our government of, by, and for the people.

Since arriving at the National Endowment for the Humanities, I have consistently made this argument to the public and to those in Washington who set our nation's policy and budget direction — and they have responded. Since I became Chairman, the President and Congress have increased the annual budget of the Endowment by over 13 percent, during a time of stringent budgetary pressures across the government — and we are grateful for their support.

During the past five years, the Endowment has used this increased support to lead a renaissance in knowledge about American history and principles among all our citizens. The centerpiece of this effort is our We the People initiative, which was created to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. We launched this program with President Bush at the White House in 2002, and this September we will celebrate We the People's fifth anniversary.

Since its inception, We the People has received over 50 million dollars in support from the President and Congress. Here is just some of what We the People has done during the past four years:

One of the We the People programs we are most proud of is our "Landmarks of American History" workshops for school teachers. Thanks to this program, a teacher from anywhere in our country can now spend a week encountering American history first-hand at a place where it was made — locations like Mount Vernon and Ellis Island and Pearl Harbor. At these "Landmarks" workshops, the teachers not only see the sites — they meet with renowned scholars, who provide them with vivid lessons that they can take back to their classrooms.

The "Landmarks" program has already brought thousands of teachers to these summer workshops. One of these teachers was Mike Wilmoth, who teaches American history and government, and also coaches the baseball team at Wellington High School in Wellington, Kansas. He attended a workshop organized by the Bill of Rights Institute at Mount Vernon in 2004, and had this to say about his experience: "My life was transformed … People around school used to call me 'coach' — and I thought of myself as one. Now they call me 'teacher.'" As a result of the Landmarks workshop, Mike is thinking about pursuing further study and advanced degrees.

This, in a nutshell, is what the Landmarks program does: It makes teachers more knowledgeable and enthusiastic about American history and principles — and that, in turn, helps them bring these subjects alive for generations of their students. We the People funding for the Landmarks workshops has allowed NEH to expand a similar program of Summer Institutes for college and university faculty. In the summer of 2005, the Huntington Library hosted one of these, focusing on the American West's role in healing the nation after the Civil War. One attendee said, quote: "The experience of being at the Huntington Library bordered on the divine!"

As you can see, the Landmarks workshops and Summer Institutes are benefiting students by benefiting their teachers. Yet the We the People initiative also reaches students more directly. For example, under We the People's "Bookshelf" program, we are putting students in touch with the best of classic literature.

Each year under this program, we select books at the K-12 grade levels that explore enduring American themes and ideas. So far, the Bookshelf program has provided free sets of these books to more than 4,000 school and public libraries nationwide — and the response has been tremendous. Wendy Thompson, a librarian at the Trillium Community Charter School in Arcata, California, told us, quote: "We are a small low-income school with only forty students. . . . The books have been loved and appreciated by the students, parents, and staff at Trillium. I am excited and hopeful that the 2006 Bookshelf will inspire more unique and valuable ideas and projects that will connect our local community with the children."

The success of the Bookshelf program has inspired another endeavor that we plan to launch this year — "Picturing America." This program will help students trace our national story through our greatest artistic masterpieces. Schools and libraries across America will receive large, high-quality reproductions of our nation's finest art — a diverse selection ranging from Gilbert Stuart's "Landsdowne" portrait of George Washington, to Dorothea Lange's famous photograph of a "Migrant Mother." Schools will also receive accompanying resources to help teachers display the images and explain their importance in the development of our culture. Additional material will be available on the NEH Web site.

Beyond the classroom, the We the People program is reaching more and more citizens, by sponsoring a variety of public programming, exhibitions, and documentaries. One of the best was developed right here at the Huntington in 2002 — a traveling exhibition called "Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln's Journey to Emancipation." This exhibit incorporates rare documents and drawings and the latest scholarship on Lincoln's role in the emancipation of slaves during the Civil War.

The "Forever Free" exhibition proved so popular that NEH provided additional funding to more than double the number of libraries nationwide that will host the exhibit. Just imagine the impact that "Forever Free" is having in sparking and encouraging interest in one of America's greatest leaders — particularly as we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth in 2009. That's really what the We the People program is all about — ensuring that every citizen knows the great story of our nation, so that they are motivated and prepared to add their own chapters to that ongoing story.

Along with We the People, another key part of NEH's efforts to democratize the humanities is our new Digital Humanities Initiative, which we launched just last year. The application of digital technology to the humanities is a monumental endeavor — and it offers the potential to bring the humanities to a vast audience. Through the Digital Humanities Initiative, the Endowment will take a leading role in this work.

Digital technology is important to the humanities for several reasons. First, it makes humanities resources accessible worldwide.

Second, digital technology allows us to transform today's profusion of new information into wisdom. Technology offers us new ways to conduct research … to collaborate with people from all over the globe … to ask new questions … and to see connections that we couldn't see before. And all this, in turn, will produce new knowledge. We have already seen astounding examples of this in fields like biology and chemistry. For example, consider how the increase in computation power made possible the Human Genome Project.

Yet the benefits of these technologies are not limited to the hard sciences. In the humanities, digital technology will fundamentally change how we read and write and do research — even how we think and learn. This is a whole new frontier in humanities knowledge.

Finally, digitization is crucial for the preservation of fragile records and primary documents. Digital technology will help us ensure that future generations can continue to study and learn from these precious resources.

One recent project that NEH supported here at the Huntington illustrates the dramatic impact that digitization can have on the humanities. In 2004, the Endowment awarded the Library a grant of almost 300,000 dollars to complete an electronic database of vital records from California missions, covering the years 1769 to 1850. This database, which was completed last June, provides easy and widespread access to all the information in the mission registers. They record the births, confirmations, marriages, and deaths of more than 100,000 Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans who came within the orbit of the missions during this period.

Consider for a moment what digitizing a resource like this means for our citizenry. For example, a researcher studying demographic trends in colonial-era California, or someone who is working on a family genealogy. In the past, they needed to visit several different mission sites and spend hours sifting through files to find the items they were looking for. Now they get it all in one place, where it can be easily searched and viewed in an interactive way — creating a picture that you simply couldn't see without digital technology.

Let me give you just a few more examples of how NEH is supporting digital technology in the humanities:

• English Short Title Catalogue (1475-1800) — includes extensive entries on items located at the Huntington
• Documenting Endangered Languages — these languages are nothing less than the DNA of human culture. We are working to save them from extinction.
• IMLS digital partnership
• Digital Humanities Start-Up grants — we just approved our first round of these grants at this month's meeting of our National Humanities Council.
• "Seed money" for people with innovative ideas on how to organize and make the best use of new technology for research, scholarship, and access.
• Over 70 percent of applications were from new applicants.

Finally, in partnership with our We the People program, the Digital Humanities Initiative is bringing the most storied documents and newspapers of our history onto the Internet. In 2004, along with our partners at the Library of Congress, we launched the National Digital Newspaper Program, which will eventually digitize some 30 million pages of newspapers from the years 1836 to 1922. California is one of six states involved in the initial phase of this program, through UC Riverside's California Newspaper Project.

The public will get a chance to see the earliest fruits of these labors next month, when the first 200,000 pages will be available publicly on the Library of Congress's prototype Web site, "Chronicling America." Anyone who is interested — students, teachers, history buffs — will be able to go to their computer at home or at work and, at the click of a mouse, get immediate and searchable access to this incredible source of our history.

What will this treasure consist of? Some are great events we know about. The Chicago Fire … the discovery of gold … the San Francisco earthquake … the Battle of Gettysburg — the news before it was History. But these newspapers tell us more. They give us what lies beneath the headlines — the ordinary daily record of life. You can read about weddings and births, about McGuffey spellers for sale, about gossip, about what people were eating and drinking, about almost everything. Newspapers give us immediate glimpses of the economic, political, commercial, and social dimensions of our country. They give us a view that at the same time offers the details and the panorama. Publisher Philip Graham once said that newspapers are "the first draft of history" — and thanks to NEH, this remarkable resource will be available to the American public for free, forever.

Now, lest you think I have been carried away by techno-enthusiasm, let me re-assure you: As an art historian, I'm unabashedly attached to leather-bound texts, original documents, and material objects. Digital technology is not a cure-all for what ails the humanities. Certain types of scholarship and arguments will always require the time-tested technologies of paper and the printed book. And seeing a digital reproduction of Thomas Gainsborough's painting "The Blue Boy" can never compare with seeing the real thing here at the Huntington.

Yet digital technology does offer an unprecedented chance to make the world of the humanities more accessible and more collaborative — in short, more democratic. Anyone who cares about the future of the humanities will recognize this possibility and embrace it — and that is what we are doing at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

My challenge to you this evening is to join NEH in thinking about how we can best democratize the humanities and bring them to a wider audience. In a note to James Madison in 1787, Thomas Jefferson instructed, quote: "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people . . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." Jefferson's charge continues to define our mission today. We must democratize the humanities — because they are an essential part of a truly good life, and because nothing less than the preservation of our liberty is at stake.

Through your support of the Huntington and the humanities, all of you are helping to carry out Jefferson's charge. I salute your efforts, and I thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you this evening.