Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies
May 6, 2005
(As Prepared for Delivery)

Thank you, Pauline, for those kind words, and for your leadership of the ACLS.

It is a great pleasure to be back to Philadelphia with so many old friends and distinguished scholars. I always look forward to this meeting.

As a former ACLS Fellow myself, I’m proud to see much of the work the ACLS does paralleling and complementing our own at the Humanities Endowment.

The discoveries made through ACLS’s grants and fellowships have the power to change lives, and help piece together the puzzle central to all of us passionate about the humanities: that of who we are, where we came from, and what it all means.

At the heart of each of our missions is a desire to chronicle and explain our story--as citizens, and as scholars--in all its complexity: the center and the margins, the bright spots and the dark times.

In an age when student consumerism and pre-professional training threaten a liberal arts education, this story is of heightened import. Not only because such knowledge makes us wiser as individuals, but because it gives us a sense of identity, place, and purpose.

I’d like to share with you today a bit about our mission, initiatives, and progress. When the NEH was founded 40 years ago (yes, this is indeed our 40th anniversary!), its purpose was clear: to foster an environment where the humanities could be explored fully, and the fruits of that research and scholarship disseminated as widely as possible to the American people.

Much of that, of course, has meant cultivating and sharing the history inside our borders. The NEH continues to do this through grants, fellowships, and stipends, and, most recently, through our We the People initiative, supported by President Bush and members of Congress all across the political spectrum.

It is no exaggeration to say that the We the People initiative has been an extraordinary success. Our congressionally-approved budget for the initiative this year is over $11 million--the equivalent of a new division of the NEH. And because our divisions and offices regularly refer excellent applications from the core programs for We the People dollars, this new funding stream directly strengthens all our grant-making by freeing up new funds for the study of other cultures, places, and times. The benefits of the We the People initiative have not merely trickled down; they form a rising tide that has, so to speak, lifted all boats.

Moreover, when the We the People initiative was introduced by the President three years ago, it was considered a three-year initiative. We now have reason to expect that it will be an ongoing program, one that will strengthen public understanding of American history in particular, and the humanities in general for a long time to come. And while budget pressures have forced cuts in virtually all non-defense agencies and programs--in fact, the allocation for the interior appropriations bill, our of which we are funded--is $800 million lower than it was last year, forcing cuts in almost all agencies--we have been able to keep the increased funding gained over the last couple of years, and hope to build on that success in the years ahead.

This broad push to enhance the study and teaching of American history and culture has led to great things: museum exhibitions, documentaries; books on music, art, and literature; preservation projects; and many new fellowships and summer stipends. It has brought thousands of teachers and scholars together at the sites where history was made through our new Landmarks of American History teacher workshops. And, hundred of libraries have received copies of classic works in American literature.

However, the very success of the We the People initiative has led to some concerns that the National Endowment for the Humanities is focused only on pursuing a national story, a story whose chapters are bookended by our borders and whose prologue began just a few blocks from here. I’d like to address that concern today. For while the NEH certainly works to refamiliarize Americans with the our nation’s past and principles, we also honor and seek to discover the full human story--a story whose setting stretches far beyond our coasts, and indeed, far beyond the reach of our experience or intuition.

After all, it is impossible to understand our history or culture without reference to other cultures, lands and times. Nations do not emerge from a vacuum; many streams have flowed into the current of our heritage.

Moreover, I firmly believe that knowledge of our history increases understanding of, and appreciation for, other cultures. Studying the former encourages the study of the latter.

Accordingly, the Humanities Endowment last year awarded a record $25.5 million for research, education and public programs about the histories and cultures of other nations. That’s more than $2 million above what we awarded in 2003--an increase due almost entirely to the We the People initiative.

We have strengthened and extended the work of the core programs. The institutionalization of the We the People initiative has enabled us to significantly increase the number of Fellowships and Summer Stipends we grant to scholars each year. We have also increased the number of summer seminars and workshops available to teachers.

I talked a minute ago about the creation of our new Landmarks of American workshops program, where we fund workshops at key historical sites, enabling history teachers to deepen their subject matter knowledge at the places where history was made. We are proud of this new initiative to broaden and deepen teacher knowledge of American history.

But there is more to the story. Over the last few years from 2000 to 2004, the NEH has funded 339 teacher seminars and institutes--205 of which have focused on humanities topics in nations other than the U.S. Many of these programs are held overseas, so that participants can immerse themselves in the language and culture of the region they are studying--such as the summer seminar on Dante’s Commedia, conducted in Siena.

Our Landmarks program strengthens these institutes by freeing up funds for them.

We have also been able to fund programs that meet urgent needs overseas. Two particularly exciting initiatives focus on preserving the artifacts of the ancient civilizations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the Baathist regime fell, it presented not only the prospect of freedom for millions of Iraqis but a unique challenge: how to help those citizens build their future and reclaim their heritage after decades of war and tyranny.

So last year, the NEH helped launch a special initiative: “Restoring Iraq’s Past.” Its purpose was to help Iraqis preserve and catalog cultural resources in their archives, libraries and museums. NEH grants have reached top-flight institutions like Chicago’s Field Museum, which is helping document more than 100,000 artifacts from the ancient city of Kish. This catalog, compiled in partnership with the Iraqis and Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, will be printed in Arabic and English, and eventually available on the Internet. So far, $800,000 has been awarded for these and other grants to preserve Iraq’s cultural patrimony.

The NEH has begun similar efforts in Afghanistan.

Over the last year, we worked with National Geographic and the Afghan government to see that Afghan antiquities are properly documented and Afghan archivists adequately trained to lead future preservation efforts.

The work has been a remarkable success. Just last month, our Deputy Chairman Lynne Munson and two members of our preservation staff traveled to Kabul to check on the cataloguing of the Kabul Museum collections, which we supported with three grants. They also met with Afghanistan's Minister of Culture and other officials to discuss further opportunities for American scholars in Afghanistan. The time has come for American scholars, curators, and museum directors to think about going once again to Afghanistan to work on collections in the museums and libraries and collaborate with their colleagues at Afghanistan's eight universities.

We are tremendously excited about these initiatives. But of course, this is still a small slice of the globe. And so, at the NEH, we are also at work on an initiative that reaches into the most remote regions of the entire world, to preserve the greatest of human treasures: language.

Of the 7,000 languages spoken or written in the world, it’s estimated that half will disappear within the next century, either because native speakers are dying off or descendents are homogenizing into larger societies.

In the case of some 400 languages, there are less than 100 speakers left. Seventy-four of those languages are here in the U.S., all of them Native American. I don’t have to tell this gathering of the importance of preserving these languages.

The words, sounds, and expressions of a language tell us about the local, natural, and religious environments in which people once lived. They reveal thought processes. They can be used to trace the migratory patterns of peoples. And they can be used to read previously indecipherable documents that reveal history as it happened.

These languages are nothing less than the DNA of human culture. Our challenge is to save them from extinction.

Recently, the NEH launched a partnership with the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution to document as many of these languages as possible, not only in writing or on tape, but digitally. Last month, we were proud to announce the first 25 institutional grants and 13 fellowships through this program. Among these, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, will receive a grant to digitize, translate, and assess 19th century materials in the Cherokees’ own writing system that are housed at the Smithsonian. Another grant to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks will digitize one thousand Yup’ik audio recordings and look into possibly creating a Northern Indigenous Languages Archive for the 200 endangered languages of the Far North.

If you’ll notice, I’m using the word digitize a lot--which, as someone who still only aspires to computer literacy, was previously never part of my vernacular. I still catch myself thinking that a server is a waiter, a megabyte refers to a lobbyist’s dinner at the Palm Restaurant, and a digital display is what you see after cutting someone off on the Beltway.

But digitizing is at the heart of what we’re doing here. What it means is that for many of these grants, we’re able to record native speakers actually speaking their language--recordings that will be entered into a central database being built and which can be accessed via the Internet. These video and audio files will eventually be used to create a phonetic alphabet that will replicate the 350 sounds humans can make and link them to words and languages.

This is amazing technology, and it speaks to a final initiative I want to tell you about: a new approach to research for a new age. As an art historian, I’m unabashedly attached to the leather-bound texts, the original documents, and material objects.

I’m also very aware that, like all of us, these objects aren’t getting any younger. Books are becoming brittle, paper is disintegrating, and preservation regrettably means limiting access to the people who can enjoy and study it.

This presents the challenge, of course, of devising a way to make sure history and culture aren’t shut off to millions of Americans, for digitizing democratizes knowledge.

The NEH must be supporting the latest technology to assure the best we have to offer remains accessible. We must think about our debt to future generations.

In the Endangered Languages program, it involves working through universities to record native speakers and set up a digital database of dialects. In the case of the Iraqi and Afghan projects, it means creating digital catalogs of artifacts that can be accessed over the Internet.

The National Digital Newspaper Program we’ve begun with the Library of Congress will digitize tens of millions of pages of historic papers from 1836 to 1922, so articles can be accessed and searched by everyone at the click of a mouse.

Indiana University and Harvard recently teamed up through an NEH grant to digitize thousands of hours of old jazz and field recordings that were slowly decaying on archive shelves.

The digitizing of all this megadata will not only furnish unprecedented access to it, but will allow us to ask new questions, which will, in turn, produce new knowledge. This is one of the most fruitful and exciting aspects of digitization.

This is some of the work we’ve been doing at the NEH. We are conscious of the importance of the task, as well as the sacrifices that have made it possible. In one of John Adam’s letters to his wife Abigail, he notes: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

We are in the delightful position of being able to study porcelain and poetry as well as politics and philosophy. And indeed, an adequate understanding of our world requires such breadth of inquiry. To be in the position of encouraging scholarly endeavor as broad as the world, and limited only by one’s reach, is a source of deep satisfaction.

Of course, much remains to be done--and it is particularly exciting to meet with scholars who share our goals and interests in preserving the keys to history and unlocking new doors of discovery.

I look forward to working with and alongside you to continue that voyage of discovery, and to ensure that the best of the humanities is valued, preserved, and transmitted to a new generation.