Get Grants to Bring Historic Places to Life!

Interpreting America’s Historic Places grants support public humanities projects that exploit the evocative power of historic places to explore stories, ideas, and beliefs that deepen our understanding of our lives and our world. The Division of Public Programs supports the development of humanities content and interactivity that excite, inform, and stir thoughtful reflection upon culture, identity, and history in creative and new ways. Interpreting America’s Historic Places projects may interpret a single historic site or house, a series of sites, an entire neighborhood, a town or community, or a larger geographical region. Grants for Interpreting America’s Historic Places should encourage dialogue, discussion, and civic engagement, and they should foster learning among people of all ages.

To that end, the Division of Public Programs urges applicants to consider more than one format for presenting humanities ideas to the public. NEH offers two categories of grants for Interpreting America’s Historic Places: Planning and Implementation Grants. Planning grants are available for those projects that may need further development before applying for implementation. This planning can include the identification and refinement of the project’s main humanities ideas and questions, consultation with scholars in order to strengthen the humanities content, preliminary audience evaluation, preliminary design of the proposed interpretive formats, beta testing of digital formats, development of complementary programming, research at archives or sites whose resources might be used, or the drafting of interpretive materials.

Implementation grants support the final preparation of a project for presentation to the public. Applicants must submit a full walkthrough for an exhibition, or a prototype or storyboard for a digital project, that demonstrates a solid command of the humanities ideas and scholarship that relate to the subject. Applicants for implementation grants should have already done most of the planning for their projects, including the identification of the key humanities themes, relevant scholarship, and program formats. For exhibitions, implementation grants can support the final stages of design development, but these grants are primarily intended for installation.

Applicants are not required to obtain a planning grant before applying for an implementation grant. Applicants may not, however, submit multiple applications for the same project at the same deadline. If an application for a project is already under review, another application for the same project cannot be accepted.