We humans, if we are to live intentional and thoughtful lives, almost always return to a series of timeless questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? To answer those questions some turn to religion. Some to psychology. Some to literature. And others to history, philosophy or the arts.
I have spent 30 years as a professor of history trying to answer fundamental questions about the history of California and its peoples. That work has largely been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a small, underfunded government agency gutted by President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency.
It is impossible to quantify the vital role that the NEH has played in our national search for meaning and self-knowledge, but the endowment’s website begins to tell the story. Since its inception in 1965 by Congress, the NEH has funded more than 70,000 projects in all 50 states. It has made possible the research and publication of 9,000 books including 20 Pulitzer Prize winners, the creation of 500 film and media programs, and the editing and publication of the papers of 12 U.S. presidents as well as such towering figures as Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Willa Cather, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ernest Hemingway.
In creating the organization, Congress sought to affirm and acknowledge that a healthy democracy “demands wisdom and vision in its citizens” and that the federal government must give “full value and support” to the humanities “in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.” While it would be hard to argue that Congress has ever lived up to those words, the money that it has allocated has been vital to the humanities across the country.
In what now appears to have been a Golden Age of federally funded humanities projects, over its 60 years of existence the NEH disbursed about $6.5 billion, all of it administered through a rigorous peer-review process. This averages out to about $100 million per year over three generations. Most of that funding has been parceled out in grants of $50,000 or less, and more than half of that funding flowed directly to individual states’ humanities councils.
Funding the NEH has been a tremendously successful investment in our nation’s cultural fabric that has enriched the lives of countless individuals and strengthened our union. Some of the projects, such as the publication of the papers of presidents, go to the heart of the ideas of those who founded the United States and have informed generations of scholars. Others, such as the creation of a database of the transatlantic slave trade, have touched the lives of millions and changed how the history of the U.S. and its peoples is understood.
My own studies of colonial California have had a more regional impact, with a little bit of money going a very long way. In 1993 I was a graduate student struggling to write a dissertation on colonial California. Out of money and facing dwindling support, I was fortunate to receive a dissertation fellowship from the NEH that allowed me a final year to complete my thesis.
It was one of the first studies of colonial California anchored in Spanish-language sources and the experiences of Indigenous Californians. The fellowship allowed me to take chances, and in the book that the thesis became — whose writing was also in part funded by the NEH — I argued that California had its own colonial history that for reasons of “chronology, geography, and teleology” had been left out of our national narrative, one historically focused on the Founding Fathers and the 13 British colonies. It may just have been a few words in the book’s introduction, but that one statement and the book that it introduced were an early call for historians of colonial America to look beyond Virginia and Massachusetts and to work collectively toward a more comparative and continental vision of early America, one that today is widely embraced as Vast Early America.
In the early 2000s I worked with the Huntington Library Research Division to secure a large NEH grant to help create an online database of all people — Natives, soldiers, settlers, missionaries — who were in one way or another affiliated with the California missions before 1850. The database has informed dozens of articles and books on early California and has allowed thousands of people to trace their own ancestry back to 18th century California pueblos, presidios and Native villages. In a real and life-changing way, that NEH-funded database helps people today understand who they are, where they came from and how they fit into contemporary California.
In the 2010s, again with NEH support, I worked with a team of researchers to create visualizations of the movements of Natives to the California missions that have been featured in museums across Southern California and that allow us to see how California was transformed by Spanish colonization.
And in 2022, I received an NEH-supported grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation that made possible the creation and installation of a new gallery exhibition at Mission San Gabriel that centers the history of the mission on Native experiences and helped decolonize the collection by inviting Native voices and Native practitioners into the curatorial process. Visited by 1,000 people a month, the exhibit again helps Southern Californians understand their place in the world.
These projects of mine are just a small fraction of the NEH’s contributions to the cultural fabric of Southern California.
NEH funding in 2024 amounted to about $200,000,000, or 0.0029% of the $6.8-trillion federal budget. The savings in zeroing out the endowment are trivial, but the loss to our society today and to future generations will be incalculable. When each day brings new challenges to the constitutional order, the economy and the fabric of our society, and education and science are singled out for budget cuts and ideological conformity, more than ever, we need a robust humanities sector as we strive to understand and live up to the nation’s motto, “out of many, one.”
As the congressional legislation creating the National Endowment for the Humanities articulated, the federal government has a “necessary and appropriate” role “to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions” facilitating humanistic inquiry. Wise words worth heeding then and now.
Steven W. Hackel, chair of the Department of History at UC Riverside, is the author of, among other books, “Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father.”
