In addition to supporting four summer professional development programs, the NEH helped Gilder Lehrman develop its Affiliate School Program with a $1 million challenge grant—this grant helped the organization raise an additional $3 million in private support for the project. The program, which the institute offers at no cost to schools, provides teachers with unlimited access to the primary sources drawn from its collections, educational resources, eligibility for teacher seminars, and books, posters, and other materials for their classrooms. The program is now reaching more than 20,000 schools located in the United States and Department of Defense schools located abroad.

NEH funding is also helping Gilder Lehrman reach libraries, museums, and other organizations. The Created Equal campaign, for which Gilder Lehrman developed educational resources, and Looking at Lincoln, an NEH-funded traveling exhibition, have reached communities and schools throughout the country. Now an NEH grant is supporting Gilder Lehrman’s Revisiting the Founding Era program, which aims to spark conversations that put current concerns in dialogue with ideas and voices from the founding of the United States. Designed especially for rural libraries, this initiative is providing grants for public events as well as educational resources to at least one library in every state. Each participating library is also receiving multiple copies of an anthology featuring accessible scholarly essays and documents drawn from Gilder Lehrman’s collection. In addition to writings from George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the reader features those of Mercy Otis Warren, Phyllis Wheatley, and other notable women and African American thinkers of the time.