In this seventeen minute talk, professor, curator, photographer Deborah Willis discusses the pictorial record and a “new memory of photography”—how these images have become standards for reimagining the lives of black soldiers and workers. As Civil War photographs were widely circulated, they became a story telling moment for those who posed. Looking at numerous images, she contemplates the “standard of pose” and what may have happened in front of the camera as well as the ways that these photos document the jobs, lives, aspirations, and beliefs of the soldiers. This talk was part of the public seminar: Is There Anything More to See?

March 24, 2011

Political scientist and labor studies professor Janice Fine spoke on a panel as part of the 100th anniversary remembrance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. She contrasts the situation of immigrant workers in at the turn of the twentieth century with low-wage immigrant workers today. This nineteen-minute talk covers the issues of migration and the role of migrants in the labor force, immigration policy, labor standards and occupational health, and trends in immigrant worker organizing. From 1990 to 2000 more immigrants arrived in the U.S. than in any previous decade, and while many lessons can be learned from past struggles for immigrant workers’ rights Professor Fine notes the ways that ethnicity, legal status, and the changing nature of work impact opportunities for low-wage immigrant workers and their ability to organize.

• How were they perceived?
• What institutions were built from their participation?
• What meaning might we extract from their experience?
• How does their experience resonate for today’s immigrant?

Groneman uses historical visual evidence and select primary sources such as census data to unpack the profound impact Irish immigration had on society. Different from the wave of Irish immigrants who came at the turn of the nineteenth-century, the Irish famine group swelled urban centers such as Boston, Chicago, and New York, and established Irish-American identity through the development of ethnic neighborhoods, the Democratic Party, parochial schools, and labor organizations.

Carol Groneman is professor emerita of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

The images shown here are from The Phillips Collection.  For more on the Great Migration go to Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War.

Gregory Downs, City College of New York, CUNY
“Power & Slavery: Slave Communities in the Antebellum South”
The Graduate Center, CUNY
December 4, 2008

Historian Gregory Downs explores the capacity for individual and social resistance evident in the American system of slavery. In the antebellum South, American slaves worked to build communities through religion, family, political networks, and communities of shared experience. In attempting to partially redefine slavery on their own terms in these ways, they changed the experience of slavery for themselves and also created problems that would change slavery for their masters.

In Part 1 of this podcast, Downs describes the worldwide history of non-chattel slavery, how and why slavery came to take its particular form in the early American colonies, and its subsequent geographical and demographic expansion into the nineteenth century. In Part 2, he explains how the enslaved used religious practices, family formation, and shared communication across space to assert their humanity and challenge their status as property.

Historian Jeanie Attie examines the significance of slavery to the people who fought in and lived during the American Civil War. Slaves, as constant observers of the lives of free men, clearly understood the value of freedom. Free whites in the antebellum South had a stake in preserving a state of “un-freedom” within their society because “un-freedom” ultimately defined their own state of freedom. White northern Republicans viewed the future of the nation, and their own freedom, as bound by whether new territories entered the Union as free or slave states. In this podcast Attie discusses the issues central to the sectional conflict that led to civil war and provides a close reading of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for New York City social studies teachers.

In this presentation to New York City teachers, historian Gerald Markowitz discusses Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. He begins by focusing on what was new about the New Deal, including the government’s response to the Great Depression, the relationship of the government to the people, and changes in the definition of freedom. Markowitz continues by discussing the limitations of the New Deal, which he describes as an innovative and unstable reform coalition that faced constraints when confronting agricultural, southern, and civil rights policies. Limitation, Markowitz concludes, is a consistent theme in U.S. history, and what is left undone in one era is often the basis for change and reform in the next.

Images used in this presentation:

Martha Hodes, New York University
“Land and Labor in the Era of Reconstruction: Conflict, Compromise, Violence”
The Graduate Center, CUNY
February 15, 2007

Historian Martha Hodes explores the many meanings of freedom that emerged at the end of the Civil War. Although the war was over, new conflict erupted between freed slaves and former slave owners over what form emancipation would take. Freedpeople viewed land ownership as essential to their independence, while former slave owners sought to establish a new system of rural wage labor. This essential struggle would shape the fate of Reconstruction. In Part 1 of this podcast, Martha Hodes speaks to New York City teachers about how to present the era of Reconstruction in the classroom. In Part 2, she provides a close reading of testimony from the 1871 Congressional Investigation into Ku Klux Klan violence and discusses its impact on teaching Reconstruction.

1871 Congressional Testimony Excerpt:

http://documents.scribd.com.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/jgcqf1lhj9v7npc.pdf?t=1271769952