01
Research
16434.9% of 2025
The Humanities Card Catalog
See what kinds of humanities work federal grants supported in any year.
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How to explore
The National Endowment for the Humanities supports research, teaching, preservation, exhibitions, and other public work. Its open archive records each grant and the labels attached to it.
Choose a year
Start with 2025, the latest complete fiscal year in this snapshot, or pick another year from 1966 onward.
Read the work types
Compare the NEH divisions that contain the selected year's grant records.
Find a location
Select a state or territory tile to see how many grantee addresses were listed there.
Check the labels
Finish with the discipline chart and limits before treating changes as changes in the humanities themselves.
- Grant record
- One awarded application with a unique NEH tracking number; grants of different sizes each count once here.
- Fiscal year
- The federal accounting year assigned to the grant, which can differ from the calendar year.
- NEH division
- The part of the agency that administered a grant program, such as Research or Public Programs.
- Primary discipline
- The main humanities subject label recorded for a grant; the available labels changed over time.
National Endowment for the Humanities · 1966–2026The humanities
The humanities
card catalog
See what kinds of humanities work federal grants supported in any year.
The National Endowment for the Humanities funds research, teaching, preservation, exhibitions, and other public work. This project counts the grants in its public record and shows how their labels and locations changed.
Choose a year in the record
Every view follows this choice. Start with the latest complete fiscal year, or move across six decades.
How to read this: taller cards mean more grant records in that fiscal year. The record peaks at 2,769 in 1978. Counts do not measure the size or effect of the work.
2025
- Grant records
- 470
- U.S.-located records
- 466
- States and territories listed
- 54
- Largest division
- Research · 164
What kind of work was recorded?
NEH assigns each grant to a division, such as Research or Public Programs. The names reflect the agency structure used for that record.
02
Lifelong Learning
6614.0% of 2025
03
Collections and Infrastructure
5110.9% of 2025
04
Education Programs
4710.0% of 2025
05
Preservation and Access
4710.0% of 2025
06
Federal/State Partnership
367.7% of 2025
07
Public Programs
286.0% of 2025
08
Challenge Programs
265.5% of 2025
09
Digital Humanities
30.6% of 2025
10
Agency-wide Projects
10.2% of 2025
11
Data and Evaluation
10.2% of 2025
How to read this: each row is one recorded NEH division. The bar and percentage show its share of all grant records in 2025. A name can appear or disappear when the agency reorganizes programs.
Where were the grantees listed?
Select a tile to read its count. The source records an institution address, not every place reached by the project.
How to read this: every tile prints its count; deeper color repeats that signal. Counts are not adjusted for population, and a grantee's address does not show a project's full audience.
Which subjects appear in the record?
The chart keeps ten common exact labels across all years. More than 100 other labels are combined so the same scale works throughout the archive.
01
Other recorded disciplines
25502
U.S. History
12303
Interdisciplinary Studies, General
2904
History, General
2305
American Literature
806
Music History and Criticism
807
Art History and Criticism
708
British Literature
709
Literature, General
510
Archaeology
311
European History
2How to read this: bar length compares counts within 2025; the printed number is exact. These are administrative labels, and the list changed over time.
A grant count is not an impact score
The archive shows awarded applications and the categories attached to them. It cannot say how many people used the work or how much difference it made.
The page counts unique application numbers. A large and a small grant each count once.
Divisions, programs, and discipline categories were revised. A shift can reflect administration as well as the work itself.
The state or territory belongs to the listed institution. It is not a map of everyone a project served.
How the source was reduced
I combined seven official decade files, checked each file's byte count and SHA-256 hash, and verified 70,788 unique application numbers. The page keeps yearly counts by division, primary discipline, and recognized U.S. state or territory.
The source was updated September 1, 2026. Fiscal year 2026 is incomplete in this snapshot. Foreign records and unrecognized location codes remain in yearly totals but do not appear in the U.S. tile view.
No source data is fetched in the browser. The checked-in snapshot is 68,588 bytes and contains aggregate counts, not participant names, project descriptions, or contact details.
Why this exists
The question
How did the number, agency division, institution location, and primary discipline of National Endowment for the Humanities grant records change from fiscal year 1966 through the partial 2026 record?
What to try
Choose a fiscal year to update the annual timeline, agency-division mix, state and territory tiles, and primary-discipline comparison; select a location tile for its exact count and share.
Method and limits
About the data
I found the National Endowment for the Humanities grant archive through Data.gov, then opened the underlying NEH source, its field dictionary, contextual reference, and the CC0 1.0 public-domain dedication. I retrieved the seven official decade CSVs from the NEH open-data portal on October 1, 2026. The files were last modified September 1, 2026. Together they contain 55,732,474 bytes and 70,788 unique application numbers. The reproducible Python reducer verifies the byte count and SHA-256 hash of each file, the required columns, row count, unique application numbers, and the 1966–2026 fiscal-year range.
The reducer groups records by the published YearAwarded field. It counts the exact Division and PrimaryDiscipline labels stored for each record. The discipline view keeps the ten most common exact labels across the full archive and combines every other label as “Other recorded disciplines.” It does not merge similar labels because their wording and use changed over time. The state and territory view includes records whose country is USA and whose location code matches one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Virgin Islands. Foreign records and unrecognized location codes remain in annual totals but are left out of that view.
The deterministic browser snapshot is 68,588 bytes with SHA-256 5b83e90e9f890d7b7cae272cb20ad22eb64af3edfacab366a87cab585074b3ca. It contains only aggregate counts, exact source URLs, source metadata, and source hashes. The page makes no runtime network request and does not include participant names, project descriptions, postal addresses, or contact details.
A record count gives equal weight to every awarded application. This project does not compare award amounts, adjust money for inflation, or measure audience, quality, completion, or effect. Division, program, and discipline categories can change when the agency reorganizes its work. The location is the grantee institution's address, not necessarily the audience or project site. Fiscal year 2026 is incomplete in the September 1 source snapshot. The archive can show what NEH recorded, but it cannot explain why annual counts changed or whether one year's work mattered more than another's.
Skills used
- Data analysis
- Data engineering
- Systems design
- Visualization
- Information design
- Interaction design
- Visual design
- Creative coding
- Product thinking
- Editorial storytelling
- Accessibility
- Performance
What the data shows
- The source contains 70,788 unique grant records assigned to fiscal years 1966 through 2026. The largest annual count is 2,769 records in 1978.
- Fiscal year 2025 contains 470 grant records. Of those, 466 have a recognized U.S. state or territory code across 54 places, and Research is the largest recorded division with 164 grants, or 34.9%.
- U.S. History is the largest single featured primary-discipline label in 2025 with 123 records. Another 255 records fall among the archive's many other discipline labels, so one label does not describe the year's full mix.
- The partial 2026 source snapshot contains 35 records across 19 listed states and territories. It should not be compared as a complete year.