In February 2003, President Bush awarded six individuals and two organizations the National Humanities Medal for their outstanding efforts to deepen public awareness of the humanities.

Courtesy Ford’s Theatre

Writer Frank Conroy    Courtesy Tom Langdon

When The Iowa Writers’Workshop at the University of Iowa began in 1936, it was the first creative writing degree program offered at an American university. Since then, a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, a number of National Book Award winners, and four of the last five poet laureates have been Workshop graduates. This two-year program in writing awards participants a master of fine arts and gives them a chance to learn from established writers and poets. The success of the program as a force in American literature is evident at the bookstore. Director Frank Conroy says that twenty-five prose students graduated from the program in 2001 and “by 2002, seven had serious books of literature in bookstores. In the face of popular culture, the Workshop helps keep alive literary culture.”

Courtesy Michael Marsland

Courtesy C–SPAN

Brian Lamb

As the founder of C-SPAN, Brian Lamb envisioned a different kind of television—one to inform a democracy instead of make a profit. Since its first broadcast of the House of Representatives in 1979, the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network has expanded to cover proceedings from both houses of Congress, lectures from the National Press Club, interviews with authors on Booknotes, and programming on two additional channels, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3. Lamb began his broadcasting career in Lafayette, Indiana, and went on to work in public affairs while he was in the Navy and stationed at the Pentagon and at the White House. About C-SPAN,Lamb says, “We are, in every single way, the antithesis of commercial television.”

Art Linkletter

For decades, Art Linkletter has been synonymous with laughter. Two of his television shows, House Party and People Are Funny, hold the top places for the longest-running shows on TV. Now in his nineties, Linkletter is known as an entertainer, an author, a businessman, and a philanthropist. He is a member of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which offers educational support and college scholarships to help students overcome adversity and earn a degree. He has served on the Presidential Commission to Improve Reading in the United States, and is involved in UCLA’s PLATO (Partners in Learning, Actively Teaching Ourselves) Society for over-fifties. The society builds on its association with UCLA by encouraging seniors to pursue learning.

Courtesy Andrew Greto

Patricia MacLachlan

Children’s writer Patricia MacLachlan believes that literature changes lives. Her book  Sarah Plain and Tall won the Newberry Medal from the American Library Association and the 1985 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Children. The book tells about two children and their widowed father living on the plains in the nineteenth century. Many of her sixteen books deal with the theme of family, partly because of her own experiences. She did not begin writing until age thirty-five, when her own three children were in school. Earlier in her career she had written a series of articles on adoption and foster care.When a child asked her what a family is, it reminded her of the importance of extended families and she wrote Journey, a story of a boy whose mother leaves him with his grandparents.

Mount Vernon circa 1855. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon     Ladies’Association

Mount Vernon Ladies’Association of the Union

Because of a century-and-a-half of research and restoration by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, about a million visitors each year are able to see the house and gardens of Mount Vernon much as they were in George Washington’s lifetime. The Association restored the house and gardens, expanded the land to five hundred acres, funded historical and archaeological research of the site, and engaged in educational outreach through tours and by distributing a biography lesson on Washington for fifth graders in more than thirty states. “The importance of children knowing how this country was put together is of inestimable value,” says Ellen Walton, the head of the association.

Courtesty of Creators Syndicate

Thomas Sowell

For more than thirty years, Thomas Sowell has been applying the principles of economics to a range of intellectual disciplines, including history, politics, and education. He began his career by teaching at Cornell University, and continued at Rutgers University, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Today he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. He has explored the intersection of economics and society in several bestsellers, including Race and Culture: A World View, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, and Vision for the Anointed: Self Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy.