The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) supports humanities research through a number of grant lines, among them fellowships and summer stipends for researchers and the Public Scholar program. These grants, which typically result in a published book or article, often have effects that reverberate far beyond the individual grant product.

As we celebrate National Arts and Humanities Month, it’s worth taking a moment to learn from and enjoy the wide variety of books and articles that have been produced through these programs. Here are a few that have been on our minds lately:

Londa Schiebinger’s first book, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science, supported by an NEH research fellowship, examines women’s contributions to the Scientific Revolution. Schiebinger now directs Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment a collaborative, peer-reviewed project at Stanford University. The Mind Has No Sex? was recently featured in an episode of Scene on Radio, a podcast produced by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Judith Dupré’s One World Trade Center: Biography of a Building was one of the first books published as a result of the NEH’s Public Scholar program. Rich in detail and images, the book was well reviewed by Architectural Digest and the New York Times, as well as featured by CBS Sunday Morning.

Jill Norgren’s biography of the United States’s first woman to practice before the Supreme Court and female presidential candidate, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President, was supported by both an NEH summer stipend and research fellowship. The project spawned two further books, Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Laywers and Stories From Trailblazing Women Lawyers: Lives in the Law.

Benjamin Reiss’s most recent book, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World was positively reviewed in Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation as well as The New York Times. An interdisciplinary work of cultural history, the book got its start as an article on Henry David Thoreau that was supported by an NEH summer stipend.

NEH research fellowships supported Alan M. Kraut’s books, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945 and Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace, which investigate the United States’s treatment of refugees and immigrants during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kraut’s research has informed his work as an expert witness, in congressional testimonies, and in consultation for documentaries like America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, The People’s Plague: Tuberculosis in America and Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio.

The NEH supports groundbreaking research in every humanities field—far more than can be covered here. To learn more, visit NEHforAll.org.

Photo Credit: 

Thumbnail image: Old book bindings at the Merton College library. Photo by Tom Murphy VII distributed under CC-BY 3.0 License.