We thank Eileen Manchester from the Library of Congress for this post.
The Library of Congress is excited to announce a new Notice of Funding Opportunity for Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative (LHI) Awards.
Awards of up to $100,000 are available to support projects in which analysis of the Library’s music or creative arts-related digitized primary sources is central to learning about history, civics, and/or democracy at the middle and high school levels. Eligible organizations that have not received prior LHI funding directly from the Library of Congress may apply. Grant awardees who make sufficient progress toward agreed-upon goals may apply for an additional two years of funding, up to $100,000 per year.
About the Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative
Named in honor of Rep. John R. Lewis (D-GA) and Rep. Amo Houghton (R-NY), the Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative supports the use of music and arts-related primary sources for meaningful teaching and learning about history, civics and/or democracy at the secondary level (middle and high school). The Library’s digital collections are full of rich musical and artistic primary sources including sound recordings, sheet music, literary manuscripts, paintings, photographs, book arts, dance manuals, poetry, and more. Analyzing these historical artifacts enables students to see, hear, feel, sing, and embody the past and be inspired to shape the future.
This year marks an exciting milestone: the first six organizations to receive LHI grants from the Library of Congress, in 2023, have developed educational resources and are sharing them with teachers and students across the country. Now, the Library is seeking proposals for six additional organizations to join the Lewis-Houghton Initiative under the TPS Consortium.
How to Apply
To apply for this opportunity, educational organizations should carefully follow the instructions in this Notice of Funding Opportunity on grants.gov
Proposals are due Friday, September 18, 2026, at 2 pm ET For more information about the application requirements and selection criteria, see the Notice of Funding Opportunity linked above. General questions relating to this Notice must be submitted via email to tps-grant@loc.gov no later than Monday, September 7. Technical questions must be submitted via email to tps-grant@loc.gov no later than Thursday, September 10. Library staff will be unable to answer questions submitted as comments on this post.
Register for Informational Webinars in July
Join Library of Congress staff for upcoming webinars about Lewis-Houghton Initiative grants by registering at the links below.
Finding Library of Congress Music and Arts-Related Primary Sources
The Library’s digital collections contain a wide variety of music and creative arts-related primary sources. Examples include but are not limited to recordings of songs performed by soldiers and military bands during the Civil War; poems penned by Ojibwe poet, essayist, linguist and translator Jane Johnston Schoolcraft; a wide variety of music in the National Jukebox, including songs by Irving Berlin; documentation of singing, dance, and other folk traditions of various ethnic groups in Chicago; instructional dance videos of popular dances such as the Washington Post march; portraits of artists Andy Warhol and Vladimir Yankilevsky among others with their works as photographed by Bernard Gotfryd; a cartoon video warning soldiers against “joyriding” after the armistice of November 1918; and sheet music related to the women’s suffrage movement. The Federal Theatre Project and Works Progress Association (WPA) poster collection are rich records of public arts during the New Deal era. The Library has also digitized all issues of The Brownies’ Book, the first magazine published for African American children, which contains poems and short stories written by young children alongside household names such as Jesse Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes.
Appendix D in the Notice of Funding Opportunity contains additional examples of digital collections that that contain and relate to music and other creative arts such as dance, theater, folk arts, film, photography, book arts, manuscripts, etc. However, this list is not comprehensive nor exclusive and is provided for applicants’ reference purposes only. Applicants are encouraged to explore the collections on loc.gov to find rights-free materials suitable for their proposals. Applicants may also contact reference specialists by topic area using the Library of Congress Ask a Librarian service.
TPS Educational Consortium
All LHI grantee organizations join the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Educational Consortium, a group of educational organizations that connect hundreds of thousands of American educators and learners, including K-12 teachers and their students, to Library of Congress methods and materials.
Additional Resources for Teaching with Primary Sources
- The Library’s Teacher’s Guides and Primary Source Sets
- This Teaching with the Library blog and other Library of Congress blogs
- A press release describing the inaugural LHI grants awarded in 2023
- TPS Teachers Network
- TPS Consortium Created Materials site
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