American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future
American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future is a wide-ranging special initiative at NEH that leverages the humanities to strengthen American democracy, expand opportunity for all, and build resilience for communities and cultural organizations. The initiative encourages humanities projects that elevate the role of civics in schools and public programs, explore America’s expansive history, and build capacity at cultural and educational institutions to benefit all communities. The initiative takes its inspiration from the agency’s 1965 founding legislation and the goals it sets forth for NEH to provide Americans “a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.”
Strengthening Our Democracy
As stated in NEH’s founding legislation, “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.” Since its founding, NEH has supported projects that make the history of the United States available to all Americans. For example, NEH supports scholarly editions, many of them now available electronically, of such iconic figures in American history as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Through the National Digital Newspaper Program, NEH has made millions of pages of historic newspapers from every state in the union available to students, teachers, and the public. NEH has also supported professional development programs for K-12 teachers on such topics as the Underground Railroad and the U.S. Constitution as well as documentary films on the Civil Rights movement and humanities discussion programs on African American poetry. NEH’s state affiliates, the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils, engage audiences of all ages in reflection and discussion on the nation’s founding and its complex history; the core principles of a constitutional government; and the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a democracy.
NEH’s American Tapestry initiative will continue to invest in these humanities projects as well as new programs such as the following:
Expanding Opportunity for All
The humanities are for everyone. Since its founding, NEH has sought to fund programming that reaches all Americans. NEH grants have supported large-scale papers projects that preserve the legacy of major African American thinkers such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois; documentary films such as Latino Americans, a six-hour documentary broadcast on PBS in 2013, and Asian Americans, a five-hour documentary that debuted in 2020; archival projects supporting the historical memory of LGBTQ+ communities; digitization tools such as Mukurtu, an online platform for curating Native American collections in cooperation with Native American communities; Native American language preservation projects, such as a $2.1 million challenge grant to the First Nations Development Institute to promote language revitalization in a network of Native American communities through language-immersion courses; and newer academic fields such as disability studies.
Through American Tapestry, NEH will further strengthen its statutory mission to support humanities programs that reflect “our diverse heritage, traditions, and history,” including the following:
Building Resilience for Organizations and Communities
Through NEH’s American Tapestry initiative, NEH will support projects that preserve our cultural heritage, enhance the resiliency of the nation’s cultural and educational sectors, and promote robust humanities research into history and impacts of environmental disasters on human language, culture, and society. These programs include the following: