20-05-2025
Will federal funding cuts spell the end for history documentaries?
Tracie Holder thought her production grant might be spared.
After President Donald Trump returned to office, the filmmaker heard rumors about the National Endowment for the Humanities potentially terminating grants awarded during the Biden administration, but she had been promised $485,000 in the final months of Trump's first term. Surely this meant her documentary — about the Astor Place Riot, a deadly 1849 incident that started out as a squabble between competing performances of 'Macbeth' — wouldn't be targeted as objectionable, right?
