Tucked away in Durham’s Research Triangle Park across from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center lies the National Humanities Center. The country’s leading independent center for the study of the humanities, it has existed since the 1970s and is a major supporter of both scholarship and education.
The NHC’s founding story dates back to the 1960s, when Greogy Vlastos, Morton Bloomfield and M. H. Abrams all attended the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences was modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and focused on supporting cutting edge scholarship in the behavioral sciences. Vlastos, Bloomfield and Abrams all felt that the humanities needed a center of their own and decided to try and establish one.
To make this a reality, they gained support from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as famous humanities scholars like Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Once initial planning was complete, the focus moved from getting support for the center to identifying potential sites, for which there were several competing bids. In the end, it was a group of North Carolinians led by then Governor Luther Hodges and Wachovia bank head Archibald Davis that came out on top, the latter of whom was also instrumental in the birth of Research Triangle Park (RTP)…