National Arts & Humanities Month

When Congress created the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1965, America was in a moment of great change. We were in the midst of a cold war on the world stage, the advance of computer technology, the space race was pushing human imagination beyond the earth, and the Civil Rights Movement was fueling debates about justice, identity, and freedom in classrooms and living rooms throughout the nation and world.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, he noted, “A great nation is a compassionate nation. Our strength lies not only in the size of our economy or our armed forces, but in the wealth of our spirit.”

The Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC), as an affiliate to NEH, has sought to build upon the strength of our nation by providing grants to support museums, libraries, teachers, scholars, filmmakers and community organizations, to ensure that the stories, knowledge, and that the ideas of all its people remain alive and accessible to all.

We fully embrace the idea that democracy demands the wisdom of all its citizens and that the American Experiment is an ongoing dialog between people, generations, and communities. We therefore work hard to ensure that we elevate:

• Veterans, through programming such as our Veterans Voices work, Minnesota Writers Off the Page series, and Objects of War
• Indigenous stories through projects such as the Native American Lives Series of books
• Minnesota history through films such as Reconstruction Destructed
• Minnesota’s diverse communities to celebrate their unique stories and embrace their future with our Sketches of Minnesota Comedy Tour
• K-12 classroom excellence by working with teachers and scholars to provide professional development materials such as the Era History project

Recently, there have been efforts at the federal level of government to eliminate funding for the humanities and organizations such as the MHC as being unnecessary.

This is a mistake. If we truly aspire to be a great nation, we must invest in the humanities as they teach us not just how we have lived and what we can do, but how we can live together and teach us to ask ourselves what we should do.

The academic disciplines of the humanities – ethics, philosophy, literature, history, civics, art – teach us not what to think, but how to think.

Through ethics and philosophy, we learn humility and test our assumptions and reason about right and wrong. When we read literature, we get an opportunity to see the world from a fresh perspective and begin to develop empathy for those who might have originally been called the stranger.

When we commit ourselves to exploring history and civics, we come to understand the hard–won struggles that lead to freedom, justice, and liberty and how to prevent the rise of tyranny. As we learn to appreciate wonder of art, we see beauty in our lives and how interconnected we are with one another.

As we face a moment of great technological change in our society through artificial intelligence, let us find the tools in our humanities toolbox to help us find the proper means to harness new and evolving technologies and manage the flood of information we encounter every day.

In recent years, we’ve seen the harm that the divisions in public life have left where many feel unseen, unheard and far too often demonized. We need to embrace the humanities to help us to become more aware, better listeners, and remind us that we all have more in common with one another than we have differences.

So let us celebrate Humanities Month and the study of the humanities in every corner of this country — from classrooms to community centers, from universities to public libraries. Because when we invest in the humanities, we invest in the soul of America.