PCAH New releases

Save America’s Treasures Report Published by PCAH

The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announces the publication of Save America’s Treasures Preserving the Legacy of our National Experience. The 80-page report demonstrates how successful and critical this program’s relatively small investment has been in rescuing, restoring and conserving our nation’s cultural and historic treasures. For the last seven years this federal grant program helped address the most prevalent threats to more than 800 projects representing the whole diversity of our national experience from restoring places and buildings to conserving journals and collections to rescuing steam engines and artistic works.

Through twelve detailed briefs, the report outlines the breadth of our nation’s cultural and historic patrimony, as well as the magnitude of its vulnerability. The sheer size of the legacy left to us by our forebears stretching back into pre-history is daunting. Yet this program, as the report demonstrates, has succeeded in galvanizing a whole host of citizens—engineers, dancers, historians, archivists, conservators, carpenters, plumbers, masons and others—as stewards through Save America’s Treasures projects to care for many irreplaceable national treasures so that this inheritance is passed on to future generations.

Complementing these longer treatments are a dozen more project snapshots that underscore the report’s conclusion that caring for these cultural and heritage resources is an ongoing responsibility. Effectively, the new report through its use of these highlights and other facts and figures confirms that Save America’s Treasures has put in place an effective and successful public/private mechanism to carry out the shared stewardship of this precious patrimony. Included with the report is a listing of SAT grants by state from 1999-2005 and an insert highlighting examples of at-risk treasures in all 50 states.

Save America’s Treasures is managed by the National Park Service in partnership with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Helping to underwrite the success of many SAT projects, is the program’s private sector partner, Save America’s Treasures at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has raised $60 million, in addition to more than $217 million raised in matching funds by SAT projects.

For more information on the report or Save America’s Treasures contact Kimber Craine at the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities or call 202/682-5661.