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She wrote and edited for the Stanford Daily and Stanford’s literary magazine, and tutored high school students in humanities classrooms across the bay.

While it would be hard to argue that Congress has ever lived up to those words, the money that it has allocated has been vital to the humanities across the country.

The arts and humanities organizations, led by visionary change agents, do much more than organizing cultural events: they play a crucial role in fostering social bonds, as well as community and local identity and pride.

Some public historians, left reeling from DOGE-spearheaded cuts to federal humanities and arts funding, view the order as an affront to the scholarship and nuance that undergirds the institutions' evidence-based tellings of American history.

On Wednesday night, state humanities councils across the country had begun receiving similar letters stating that their NEH funding had been terminated, one day after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency visited NEH headquarters.