Introduction to Federal and State Arts and Humanities Agencies

Since 1965 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), along with the state arts agencies (SAAs) and state humanities councils, as those were established, have been arguably the most influential of all institutions affecting the arts in the United States. As executive directors of, respectively, the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Committee for the Humanities we daily witnessed the impact of our institutions on the arts of the Great Plains. The following brief introduction to NEA and NEH provides the background for our individual articles about the types of agencies we administered