NEH Announces $41.4 Million for 81 Humanities Projects 

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $41.4 million in grants for 81 humanities projects across the country. These include an online version of Noah Webster’s 1806 and 1828 dictionaries, a new permanent exhibition at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library on Roosevelt’s global influence, and a book about the creation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the novel’s reception from publication to the present. 

“Grants from the National Endowment support organizations and scholars working to  illuminate and educate about the great ideas and events of the past,” said NEH Acting Chairman William English. “As we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary this year, NEH is proud to help foster robust public engagement with our national history, ideals, and intellectual achievements through funding for an array of exhibitions, preservation projects, books, education initiatives, and advanced research.” 

Several grants will support scholarly, educational, and public programs designed to enhance ongoing national celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. NEH funding for these projects responds to the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order “Celebrating America’s Birthday,” and is part of the agency’s larger A More Perfect Union initiative focused on exploring America’s story and celebrating its 250 years of cultural heritage. 

Among these are thirty-three grants awarded under NEH’s new Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition funding opportunity, which supports efforts to preserve and improve access to primary source materials relating to the United States’s Founding Era and the history of American government. Awards in this category include funding to preserve and digitize archival records of the Dakota Territory documenting the region’s governance and relationship with the U.S. federal government prior to North and South Dakota’s admission to the Union in 1889. A grant to the Mariners’ Museum and Park in Virginia will stabilize fragile maritime artifacts excavated from the York River site where some 40 ships were sunk by American cannons during the 1781 Battle of Yorktown. Other awards will enhance access to records documenting Alaska’s transition from a U.S. territory to statehood in 1959 and preserve more than 100,000 archaeological artifacts and archival records from Revolution-era settlements in Kentucky. 

Endowments for Advancing the Humanities awards, which leverage federal matching funds for 20-year endowments to support long-term work in the humanities, will help establish an endowment for the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government to support graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, visiting scholars, and faculty scholarship. And a grant to Ohio State University will create endowed professorships to recruit and retain faculty focusing on Natural Law and Natural Rights for the university’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics.

Grants awarded today will also make possible new exhibitions and interpretive programs at historic sites that bring the ideas and insights of the humanities to life for the American public. Newly funded projects include a traveling panel exhibition, Conceived in Liberty: Lincoln and the Founders, examining how the ideals of the Founding generation inspired Abraham Linoln; an immersive multi-media exhibit on the history of the Old Idaho Penitentiary and its role in Idaho’s justice system as it moved from a frontier territory to a modern state; and the development of an interpretive site plan at the Canterbury Shaker Village highlighting 200 years of Shaker entrepreneurship and technological innovation.

NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grants will enable completion of the final volumes of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, a landmark 12-volume editorial project that has received longstanding NEH support, and fund an annotated translation of writings by Albert Levy (1897-1963) and Moise Soulam (1890-1967), journalists who wrote for the American Jewish press in the early 20th century in Ladino, the traditional vernacular of Sephardi Jews. 

This funding cycle also includes a $6 million cooperative agreement for a partnership between Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars on a three-year program of scholarly convenings, publications, and podcasts on addressing antisemitism as a global challenge. This cooperative agreement is part of NEH’s implementation of the January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order on combatting antisemitism and follows other NEH efforts to counter antisemitism through humanities education and programs, including a previous $10.4 million grant to Tikvah for the center’s “Jewish Civilization Project.” 

Other awards will support a team of curators, archaeologists, and conservators in studying and documenting two 4,000-year-old Egyptian boats undergoing conservation at the Carnegie Museum of National History and the Field Museum of Natural History for what the vessels reveal about ancient Egyptian trade, craftsmanship, and culture along the Nile River. A grant to North Carolina State University will allow researchers to analyze the DNA of parchment from 13th-17th-century court records to track changes in agricultural practices and the emergence of disease in medieval and early modern England. 

NEH Public Scholars grants will enable writing and publication of new nonfiction books aimed at general audiences, including a biography of poet Walt Whitman and a book on the friendship between George Washington and French officer and philosopher François-Jean de Chastellux, based on a newly discovered trove of documents. 

National Digital Newspaper grants awarded in six states will support the ongoing digitization of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 for inclusion in the Chronicling America online database of historic American newspapers.

A full list of grants by geographic location is available here. 

NEH awarded grants in the following categories:

National Endowment for the Humanities: The National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.