Historic site visitation is another important form of public engagement with the humanities (visitation to history museums will be described in a future edition of the Humanities Indicators). In an effort to assess rates of such visitation, the National Endowment for the Arts asked respondents to its Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) the following question: "Did you [in the past year] visit an historic park or monument, or tour buildings or neighborhoods for their historic or design value?" The data indicate that the percentage of Americans answering yes to this question declined gradually from 37% in 1982 to 31% in 2002 (Figure V-13a).

Figure V-13a, Full Size Supporting Data

This decline was most heavily concentrated in the 25-to-44-year-old population—an age group that includes the majority of parents of young and adolescent children. However, because no reliable national data on children's visits to historic sites currently exist, establishing whether there was a corresponding decline in the percentage of children who visited historic sites is not possible.

Figure V-13b presents these same data but in a way that illustrates generational differences in the tendency to visit a historic site. For example, those Americans who were born between 1938 and 1947 had a 45% likelihood of having visited a historic site in the previous 12 months when they were ages 35-44, while those who were born between 1958 and 1967 had only a 35.6% likelihood of having done so when they were the same age.

Figure V-13b, Full Size Supporting Data

Estimating the percentage of people who have visited a historic site in the way that the SPPA makes possible is one of two possible means of gauging the extent to which Americans utilize the nation's humanistic institutions. Another approach is to seek visitation data not from individuals ("Did you visit a historic site last year?") but from the historic sites ("How many people visited this site last year?"). No organization or individual researcher has yet produced a reliable estimate of total visitation for U.S. historic sites, but information on levels of visitation to National Park Service (NPS) historic sites and monuments are available for years 1975-present. It is important to remember that these data describe the number of visits to historic sites, not the number of people who visited. Since a single person can make multiple visits to national historic parks, institutional visitation levels will always exceed the number of individuals who visited the parks in any given year. Also, such data capture visits made by people from other nations. As a result of these two facts, these data reveal only so much about American's embrace of their historic resources, although they do reveal important trends in the demands made of such sites' physical infrastructure and staff.