NEH Support for Scholarly Editions

Bruce Cole

This January and February the NEH is reviewing applications for the Scholarly Editions program. Over the years, NEH has supported the editing of historical materials from musical compositions to the papers of philosophers and social crusaders; among the most significant have been the great documentary editions of American history. The Endowment has helped to fund multivolume editions of the founding fathers&emdash;Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and the Adams family&emdash;as well as documentary histories of the First Federal Congress and the Ratification of the Constitution, which give us insights into the day-to-day construction of our democracy.

It has been said that the humanities tell the grand universal story of civilization, and NEH grant recipients are the storytellers. In the case of scholarly editions, they do more. They provide not just the narrative of our past; they preserve and make accessible the fundamental documents and records of American history. And no one benefits more from these editions than historians. I know because many of you have told me how grateful you are to have such rich and reliable resources.

Scholarly editors and their staffs of associate and assistant editors are among the most dedicated and learned scholars I have met. They hold advanced degrees; they spend their professional lives toiling in libraries and archives verifying facts and identifying sources and allusions so that the rest of us do not have to do it. And we have learned to depend on their dedication to accuracy in the texts and annotations of their editions. That scholarship is the editorial work that NEH supports. The Endowment helps underwrite the long hours of research and fact checking and proofing that make NEH Scholarly Editions so valuable to the teachers, students, and others who use them.

The papers of the founding era, fundamental though they are, comprise only a part of our American story. NEH has supported the journals of the explorers Lewis and Clark, the slavery era papers of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs; and the civil rights writings, sermons, and speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Endowment has supported microfilm and selected print editions of the papers of reformers such as Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.

We are moving into new forms as well, as seen in the innovative multiple formats of the Thomas A. Edison Papers. Recently, through the “We the People” initiative in American History, the NEH has been supporting a new electronic edition of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and an online multimedia edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture.”

Increasingly, scholarly editing encompasses various forms of electronic media and online publication. The NEH, as part of this year’s Scholarly Editions competition, introduced a new digital initiative to encourage online electronic publication of volumes previously published only in print editions. We hope that over time this initiative, like the National Digital Newspaper Program, will assist in making our vital historical documents more widely available to scholars, historians, teachers, students, and the public at large. As more and more information becomes freely available on the Internet, the need for authoritative texts and historical documents becomes a crucial desideratum, especially for scholars and teachers. NEH remains committed to supporting editorial scholarship, so that those who rely on NEH-supported editions will remain confident they are getting the best available texts and consistently authoritative documents.