We, humans, if we want to live an intentional and thoughtful life, almost always go back to a series of timeless questions: who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? To answer these questions, some turn to religion. Some to psychology. Some in literature. And others in history, philosophy or arts.
I spent 30 years as a history teacher trying to answer fundamental questions about the history of California and its peoples. This work was largely made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a small under-funded government agency emptied by President Trump and his ministry of government efficiency.
It is impossible to quantify the vital role that the NEH has played in our national research of meaning and self -knowledge, but the endowment website begins to tell the story. Since its creation in 1965 by the Congress, the NEH has financed more than 70,000 projects in the 50 states. He made possible the research and publication of 9,000 pounds, including 20 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the creation of 500 cinematographic and media programs, as well as the modification and publication of the newspapers of 12 American presidents as well as imposing personalities such as Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Willa Cather, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ern Plus Hemingway.
In the creation of the organization, the Congress sought to assert and recognize that a healthy democracy “requires wisdom and vision among its citizens” and that the federal government must give “full value and support” to the human sciences “in order to better understand the past, a better analysis of the present and a better vision of the future”. If it would be difficult to argue that Congress has never been up to these words, the money it allocated was vital to the humanities across the country.
In what now seems to have been a golden age of human science projects funded by the federal government, during its 60 years of existence, the NEH disabled around $ 6.5 billion, all administered by a rigorous process compared to peers. This reaches an average of around $ 100 million a year over three generations. The majority of this funding has been filed in subsidies of $ 50,000 or less, and more than half of this funding rushed directly to the human sciences of individual states.
The financing of the NEH was an extremely successful investment in the cultural fabric of our country which has enriched the lives of countless individuals and reinforced our union. Some of the projects, such as the publication of the presidents of the presidents, go to the heart of the ideas of those who founded the United States and informed generations of researchers. Others, such as creating a database Transatlantic slave tradehave touched the lives of millions and have changed the way the history of the United States and its peoples is understood.
My own studies on colonial California have had a more regional impact, with a little money that goes very far. In 1993, I was a graduate student who had trouble writing a thesis on colonial California. Without money and faced with the decrease in support, I had the chance to receive a NEH thesis scholarship which allowed me a last year to finish my thesis.
It was one of the first studies of colonial California anchored in Spanish language sources and the experiences of Aboriginal Californians. Communion allowed me to take risks and in the book The fact that the thesis has become – whose writing was also funded in part by the NEH – I argued that California had its own colonial history only for reasons of “chronology, geography and teleology” had been excluded from our national story, a historically focused on the founding fathers and the 13 British colonies. It can be a few words in the introduction of the book, but this declaration and the book he introduced was a first call to historians of colonial America to look beyond Virginia and Massachusetts and to work collectively towards a more comparative and continental vision of the first America, that today largely adopted as a vast early America.
In the early 2000s, I worked with the research division of the Huntington Library to guarantee a large NEH subsidy to help create a Online database Of all the people – Aboriginal, soldiers, settlers, missionaries – who were in one way or another affiliated to the Missions of California before 1850. The database informed dozens of articles and books on the start of California and allowed thousands of people to retrace their own ancestry for 18th century Pueblos California, presidios and native villages. In a real way and that changes life, this database funded by NEH helps people today understand who they are, where they come from and how they integrate into contemporary California.
In the years 2010, once again with the support of Neh, I worked with a team of researchers to create visualizations From the movements of the natives to the Californian missions which were presented in museums in southern California and which allow us to see how California was transformed by Spanish colonization.
And in 2022, I received a subsidy supported by the NEH of the National Trust for Historic Preservation which made possible the creation and installation of a new gallery exhibition at Mission San Gabriel which centers the history of the mission on native experiences and helped to decolonize the collection by inviting native voices and native practitioners in the conservation process. Visit by 1,000 people per month, the exhibition again helps South Californians to understand their place around the world.
These projects are only a small fraction of NEH contributions to the cultural fabric in southern California.
The financing of the NEH in 2024 amounted to $ 200,000,000, or 0.0029% of the federal budget of $ 6.8 billion. The savings in zero of the endowment are trivial, but the loss for our society today and for future generations will be incalculable. When every day brings new challenges to the constitutional order, the economy and the fabric of our society, and education and science are distinguished for budget cuts and ideological compliance, more than ever, we need a robust human science sector while we strive to understand and live the motto of the nation, “among many, one”.
While the legislation of the congress creating the national endowment for the articulated human sciences, the federal government has a “necessary and appropriate” role “to help create and maintain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination and the investigation, but also material conditions” facilitating the humanist investigation. Wise words deserve to be listened to then and now.
Steven W. Hackel, president of the Department of History of the UC Riverside, is the author of, among other books, “Junipero Serra: Founding father of California. »»
