When people ask Jon Parrish Peede what the humanities are, he often answers with a question of his own:
“Do you like Ken Burns documentaries?”
“Everybody understands what we’re talking about, whether that’s baseball, the Civil War, the Vietnam War. … That is the humanities, and we fund him. ... The anchor fields are certainly history, literature, but also political science, government, archeology, anthropology,” said Peede, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“It’s a branc