Our Beginnings
In the mid-20th century, the United States was deeply concerned with technological advancement. America was fully engaged in its space race with the Soviet Union, and fears of nuclear annihilation grew with each passing year. Our emphasis on science, however, endangered the humanities. National leaders came to understand that without history, literature, ethics, and philosophy, America could obtain immense power without an understanding of how to wield it effectively.
On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act into law. This law created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The purpose of the NEH is to advance the humanities and its respective disciplines into the public square. To respond more effectively to local needs, the NEH decided to establish a humanities council in every state, plus six U.S. territories. The Florida Humanities Council (FHC) was established in 1973 — known today as simply Florida Humanities.
Since the organization’s founding, we have been dedicated to advancing NEH’s core mission in the state of Florida. In order to accomplish that mission — to provide humanities access to all Floridians, wherever located — we emphasize partnership opportunities with nonprofit cultural organizations and locations with limited access to the humanities.
To date, Florida Humanities has awarded more than $20 million in funding to museums, libraries, historical societies and the like. The public programs we support bring Floridians together to develop a shared understanding of the past and a willingness to address future challenges.
What Exactly are the Humanities?
The Humanities are those academic disciplines that study human culture, using methods that are primarily critical and have a significant historical perspective. Through the humanities, we learn how to think creatively and critically, to reason, and to ask questions, coming to a broader understanding of our shared human experience.
The term ‘humanities’ includes the study and interpretation of: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.
