Telling the Story at America’s Historic Places

Bruce Cole

Historic places have a special power to connect people to the past and to impress upon us the deeper lessons of history. According to a national survey, more than 60 million American travelers each year visit historic buildings, sites and communities. These travelers have come to be known as “heritage tourists.”  

As Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I see in this trend a superb opportunity to engage the general public in learning about our nation’s history. Research shows that what motivates heritage travel is the opportunity to experience America’s distinctive places, landscapes, cultures, and histories. As educators, we should view each visit to a historic place as a teachable moment.  

Three years ago, the NEH launched an initiative at the President's direction called We the People, designed to promote the study and teaching of American history and culture. Among other path-breaking programs introduced under this initiative, NEH has recently launched Interpreting America’s Historic Places, which makes funds available for consultation, planning, and implementation of projects that enhance interpretation at historic places. Put simply, Interpreting America's Historic Places is about exploiting the power of historic places to make American history and culture better known and understood by the general public.

Proposals for this program must demonstrate that the place to be interpreted has national historical significance and that the story to be told conveys this significance to the general public. Like other NEH grants, Interpreting America’s Historic Places programs must be well-researched and conceptualized—from beginning to end—with the aid of historians and other humanities scholars.

Interpreting America’s Historic Places is intended to complement and enrich the many historic preservation and heritage tourism efforts already being made across the country. Through this program, NEH asserts the importance of sound interpretation at historic sites. We believe that a building or site, however beautifully and authentically preserved, offers, on its own, neither a lesson in history nor an engaging experience for the visitor.

The expertise of historians, both academic and public, is indispensable for the development of the learning experience that heritage tourists seek. In the language of the cultural heritage tourism industry, “authenticity” and “quality” are the hallmarks of this experience. The chief role of the humanities scholars is to ensure the authenticity of the historic events and the interpretive quality of the presentation.  

During the past two summers, NEH has supported successful workshops at historic sites for K-12 teachers and community college faculty, known as Landmarks of American History. Over 3000 teachers and faculty have shored up their understanding of American history and culture through these encounters with peers, scholars, archives, and material culture in the places where history happened. Our new grant category, Interpreting America’s Historic Places, extends a similarly rich educational opportunity to the general public.  

Interpreting America’s Historic Places is not an entirely new area of support for NEH. It affirms and extends NEH’s long-standing commitment to investing in historic places as venues for lifelong learning. Over the years,  NEH support has helped enrich the story told to visitors at places as diverse as Plimouth Plantation, Kona Historic Ranch, Monticello, the Pueblo of Isleta, and the immigrant apartments in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City.

Historic houses and sites are likely to continue to be the primary institutions funded through Interpreting America’s Historic Places.  However, NEH will also encourage applications for projects that tie together a series of sites, tell the story of an entire community, or develop and implement a strategy for interpreting a larger geographical region. Already funded under a pilot version of the Interpreting America’s Historic Places grant line are projects on the social settlements in Chicago, the Civil War in the Mid-Atlantic border region, and a multi-layered website that enables real and virtual travelers to learn more about Pennsylvania history (http://www.ExplorePAHistory.com). 

As part of the NEH’s We the People initiative, Interpreting America’s Historic Places emphasizes the power of these places to enhance public knowledge and understanding of American history. The central interpretive story must address events, themes, or ideas in American history. The place itself –the site, its location, buildings, natural or built features—must have played a role in the story being told.  Interpretation must exploit the power of the place to bear witness to the story and evoke its significant elements in the visitor’s imagination.  The place and the story together should crystallize and bring some  piece of our heritage to life for anyone who visits, whether they are local, traveling, or online.   

Project formats funded through such grants might include visitor orientation exhibits, interpretive displays, revised tour scripts and content-based educational materials for docents, and publications such as brochures or guidebooks.  They also could include interpretive driving or walking trails or tours, annotated itineraries, trail signage, onsite interactive media, and digital products such as CD-ROMs or websites.    

Organizations outside the traditional history community are welcome to apply for Interpreting America’s Historic Places grants. These might include heritage tourism organizations, or agencies of local, state or tribal governments. We would expect such entities to have a formal partnership with one or more organizations experienced in delivering humanities programs.  As with all NEH-supported projects, they must consult in a meaningful way with historians and other scholars from beginning to end. 

NEH offers three levels of funding for Interpreting America’s Historic Places grants: consultation, planning, and implementation. February 6, 2006, is the next deadline for implementation proposals. Proposals for consultation and planning grants will be due on September 11, 2006. For further information on Interpreting America’s Historic Places grants contact the staff of the NEH's Division of Public Programs at 202-606-8269 or via e-mail at publicpgms@neh.gov. Guidelines can also be viewed at http://www.neh.gov.