NEH Wants Your Proposal

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Cab Calloway demonstrated his hide-ho style during a public lecture at Fisk University Library. . . Some 2,000 Central Valley residents participated in an all-day discussion of "Hill People in the Valley: Hmong and Mien Refugees in Merced, California" at the Merced College Library. . . Rural Vermonters gathered to talk about "Women in Literature" at the Montpelier Public Library. . . . Devotees of Baker Street attended a two-day conference on "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota" at the Radisson Metrodome in Minneapolis.

All these events occurred within Humanities Projects in Libraries programs recently funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities General Programs Division. That division is only one of many NEH grant-awarding entities: the endowment also awards funds through its research, education, state, and fellowships and seminars divisions and the NEH challenge and planning and policy assessment offices.

When Congress created NEH in 1965, it declared that "the term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the …