Humanities Endowment Funds Trump’s Priorities After Ending Old Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities abruptly canceled virtually all of its existing grants in April, citing a desire to pivot to “the president’s agenda.” Now it has announced its first round of grants since, $34.8 million in funding for 97 projects across the country that helps show what that means.

The grants include many focused on presidents, statesmen and canonical authors, including $10 million to the University of Virginia — which the agency said was the largest grant in its history — that will support the “expedited completion” of editorial work on papers relating to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution and the Founding era.

That grant will include work on the papers of George Washington and James Madison. Other grants will support work on the papers of other presidents including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.

The agency said the awards, which build on decades of funding for such projects, were also a response to President Trump’s call for a “grand celebration” of the 250th anniversary of American independence next July.

“These N.E.H. grants will produce new resources and media that will help Americans meaningfully engage with the nation’s founding principles as we approach the U.S. Semiquincentennial,” Michael McDonald, the acting chair of the agency, said in a statement.

Shortly after the grant cancellations in April, the agency also announced that, in keeping with executive orders by Mr. Trump, it would not support projects promoting “extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”

None of the new grants are explicitly related to L.G.B.T.Q. issues. And while there are several projects about prominent female figures, including Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore, only one appears to take a broader look at gender and women’s history: a $700,000 grant to City Lore, a media company in New York, to support a documentary about female reporters during the Vietnam War.

But the new grants do not entirely bypass projects relating to Black history. Researchers at Indiana University will receive $300,000 for a project to edit and digitally publish more than 13,000 letters, speeches and other writings by the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass. And the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland will receive $300,000 to support its multivolume documentary history of Emancipation.

Some of the new grants fund projects whose previous grants were canceled in April. Among those was the Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Nebraska, which will receive $300,000 to support efforts to track down the poet’s voluminous unsigned articles in 19th-century newspapers.

A spokesman for the endowment did not respond to a request for further information about its funding priorities.

The grant announcement comes as Mr. Trump has continued his efforts to reshape federal cultural institutions like the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, where he has ousted some leaders and called for an end to what he has called “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

At the humanities endowment, the turmoil began in March when the previous chair, a Biden appointee, was forced out. Employees from the Department of Government Efficiency began scrutinizing its programs soon after.

In April, the agency canceled most of the grants approved during the Biden administration, and moved to terminate more than half its staff of about 180. It also announced it would dedicate millions of dollars to the National Garden of American Heroes, Mr. Trump’s planned patriotic sculpture garden.

Those moves have prompted an outcry among historians, along with lawsuits.

Last week, a federal judge in New York ruled against the administration in a case brought by the Authors Guild, saying that the cancellation of already approved funding for 1,400 research projects violated the First Amendment. In a pointed ruling, Judge Colleen McMahon said that while the administration could focus the agency’s grant making on its own priorities, it did not have the right to “edit history” to exclude perspectives it disliked.

Another lawsuit concerns the termination of the agency’s funding for 56 state and territorial humanities councils, which by law are entitled to a portion of the agency’s funding, which they use to support local projects, including many in rural areas. Those cuts prompted a lawsuit by Oregon Humanities and the Federation of State Humanities Councils, which expect a ruling next week.

“Congress designated the funding and then from our perspective the notification and the process of peeling that funding back once it was already obligated, our argument is that that’s illegal,” Adam Davis, the executive director of Oregon Humanities, said in an interview.

In June, after the lawsuit was filed, the agency said it would restore some funding for the 2025 fiscal year. And this month, it said it would also provide some funding for the 2026 fiscal year, at the acting chairman’s “discretionary authority.” But what that means in practice remains unclear.

Phoebe Stein, the president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, said that virtually every council has cut staff or programs. “The uncertainty has made it extremely difficult for councils to plan, including for the 250th,” she said.