The National Humanities Medal recognizes those who have deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand our access to important resources in the humanities.
In November 2006, President George W. Bush awarded the medal to the Hoover Institution. Nine distinguished Americans also were recognized.
“This is a distinct honor for the Hoover Institution and Stanford University,” Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and Director John Raisian said as he accepted the award at the White House. “We have been honored recently with the awards that were bestowed on Hoover fellows Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. To have the medal awarded by the president to the Hoover Institution, as an institution, is a wonderful tribute and a huge source of pride for all of us.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities, which bestows the medal, highlighted the Institution’s central role in documenting the tumultuous twentieth century, beginning with its foundation by future president Herbert Hoover as a specialized collection of documents on the causes and consequences of World War I. In a statement, the NEH noted the path the Institution has taken since 1919: “The collection grew rapidly and soon became one of the largest archives and most complete libraries in the world devoted to political, economic, and social change in the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the richness of the collection had led to the recruitment of scholars to use the documents in their work. Expanding its agenda to include specific research endeavors led to a vast accumulation of knowledge, and the Hoover Institution became one of the first and most distinguished academic centers in the United States dedicated to public policy research. Today, with its world-renowned group of scholars and ongoing programs of policy-oriented research, the Hoover Institution puts its accumulated knowledge to work as a prominent contributor to the world marketplace of ideas defining a free society.”
The National Humanities Medal was first awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize. The bronze medallion on the cover of this issue was designed by David Macaulay, a 1995 Frankel Prize–winning author celebrated for his intricate books about the making of pyramids, castles, cathedrals, and other giant structures.
