The National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges initiative has awarded a $359,659 cooperative contract to the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning in partnership with Queensborough Community College for Bridging Historias through Latino History and Culture, a professional development program for community college faculty.

The goal of Bridging Historias is to develop curricular materials that will deepen and expand the teaching and understanding of Latino history and culture across the humanities disciplines. The program will run from Fall 2013 through Spring 2015 and involves faculty members and administrators from 36 community colleges in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

The project’s activities include a seminar series run by Professor María Montoya (NYU) and Professor Lisandro Pérez (John Jay College, CUNY), online reading discussions, curricular development mentoring, and a program aimed at academic administrators. A culminating conference will feature the award-winning Latino studies scholar Vicki Ruiz, dean of the School of Humanities, University of California–Irvine.

ASHP/CML staff members Pennee Bender, Donna Thompson Ray, and Andrea Ades Vásquez will work with QCC Associate Dean Michelle Cuomo, who will lead the administrators’ program, and QCC history professor Megan Elias, who will guide the faculty mentors. Also among the project personnel are sixteen U.S. humanities and Latino studies scholars.

The application for community college faculty and administrators is available online now. The submission deadline is April 30, 2013, but we would appreciate the cover sheet indicating intent to apply by March 19, 2013.

AWARD SEASON CONTINUES FOR MISSION US

Since launching last year, Mission US: Flight to Freedom continues to win accolades from the education, media, and gaming worlds. Flight to Freedom, the second of the Mission US series of adventure games on which ASHP/CML has collaborated with public television station WNET/Thirteen and other partners, features the journey of Lucy King, a (fictional) 14-year-old girl enslaved on a Kentucky Plantation. The game and curriculum immerse players in the history of slave communities and resistance, and the wider anti-slavery struggles that led up to the Civil War. Flight to Freedom has been praised for it’s “intelligent” and “thought-provoking” approach to history. Recent awards and acknowledgements include:

• 2012 History Makers Awards: Nominee – Best Interactive Production
• 2012 International Serious Play Awards: Gold Medal – Education Category
• 2012 National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) Award: Winner for Classroom Content in the Instructional Media category
• 2012 Jayisgames Annual Awards: Nominee – Point-and-Click Adventure

ASHP/CML WEBSITE GETS A NEW LOOK

We are excited to announce a new look to our website. After a year of hard work and many discussions, we are pleased to go public with a home page that highlights new material and current ASHP/CML projects.  Also, items from HERB and our podcast series are featured right on the homepage.

ASHP/CML’s ELLEN NOONAN WINS BOOK PRIZE

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera by Ellen Noonan has been selected as the winner of the 2012 George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award, which is presented annually by the South Carolina Historical Society for the best book on South Carolina history published during the preceding year.

Published by University of North Carolina Press, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess examines the 1935 Gershwin opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. Weaving together the wide-ranging debates over the original DuBose Heyward novel, Porgy, and its adaptations on stage and film with a history of its intimate ties to Charleston, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess is, in the words of Stanford University’s Harry J. Elam, Jr., “engaging and informative, . . . a most notable book for scholars and students interested in American cultural history.”

NEW MEDIA LAB WELCOMES 10 NEW STUDENTS

As part of our continuing effort to support digital research and experimentation in a collaborative interdisciplinary environment, 2013 ushered in 10 new doctoral students into the ranks of the New Media Lab. Bringing our total to 24, NML’s coterie of students comes from 14 programs/subprograms at the Graduate Center, with each student incorporating a range of approaches and tools as they explore the use of new technology in his or her doctoral work. For the first time, we have representation from Educational Psychology (Second Life environments to teach autistic children), French (Digitization of 17th century manuscripts), and Criminal Justice (Othering and Selective Victimization).

Adding to the novelty, the NML now has five awards available to its students:

• The New Media Lab Digital Dissertation Award
• The History or Public Health Award
• The Social Justice Award
• The Dewey Digital Teaching Award
• NML Conference Travel Award

We are excited that, along with other recent Graduate Center digital initiatives, the New Media Lab is the site of the cross-pollination and birth of so many new projects and directions in research, teaching, learning, and publishing.

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Institute faculty member David Jaffee discusses a Civil War print with NEH summer scholars.

SEEING THE CIVIL WAR—ASHP/CML HOSTS AN NEH SUMMER INSTITUTE

 
During two weeks last July, the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning hosted a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War” at the CUNY Graduate Center and cultural institutions in the New York area. Attended by thirty NEH Summer Scholars from colleges and universities across the country, the institute featured presentations, discussions, visits to local archives and museums, and hands-on workshops that focused on the era’s visual media to assess how information and opinion about the war were recorded and disseminated, and to consider ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans’ understanding on both sides of the conflict.

NEH summer scholars and faculty at the New-York Historical Society.

The institute featured talks by seventeen noted historians, art historians, and archivists representing the range of current work in the field. The topics included Civil War photography and images of African Americans, the illustrated press, political cartoons, Emancipation and prints, the paintings of Winslow Homer, scrapbooks, and public monuments (the full schedule of activities and speakers is available here). Building on the information and resources discussed and viewed at the institute, the participants also worked independently on their own research and teaching projects utilizing visual evidence to enhance understanding of the history of the war.

Thanks to a supplementary NEH grant, many of the institute’s resources and activities will be available online in a special section of our Picturing U.S. History website. The Visual Culture of the American Civil War site will feature the institute’s illustrated lectures, complemented by contextual presentations, and related picture galleries, primary documents, bibliographies, and webographies. Watch for the announcement of the launching of this site later this fall on the ASHP/CML website.

 BRINGING OUR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ONLINE

 
ASHP/CML is pleased to announce its role as a

subgrantee on Zoom In, a new online professional development project being undertaken by our longtime evaluation partner Education Development Center (EDC) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We will work with EDC to create, test, and disseminate a suite of digital tools and resources for middle-school history education. Drawing on the professional development materials and approaches ASHP/CML has developed over the past two decades, the project will help teachers create document-rich inquiries in U.S. history, with explicit supports for building both historical content understanding and Common Core literacy skills among students. Zoom In will also include model historical inquiries that make innovative use of digital tools to help students read, write, and talk about compelling historical questions, grounded in evidence from textual and visual primary source materials.

 LOTS NEW AT THE NEW MEDIA LAB

Bolstered by the recent installation of sleek new computer tables that replaced the old and eclectic assortment of furniture we’ve had until now (see right), the New Media Lab—the Graduate Center’s interdisciplinary digital facility run by ASHP/CML—began the fall semester with new participants and innovative initiatives. The Lab is busier than ever with 22 students from 13 doctoral programs working from early in the morning until late in the evening on digital projects.

This academic year, the Lab’s activities have been enhanced by the Graduate Center’s inauguration of a number of programs to nurture digital research. Three NML students were appointed Digital Fellows and two others received Digital Initiative grants from the Office of the Provost to support the development of scholarly projects that use new technology in compelling ways. In addition, a History and Public Health student grant was established with funds from an anonymous donor to support student digital projects and research related to these fields; two grants have been awarded thus far, one to a student in environmental psychology, buy cialis the other, in anthropology. And a new grant to students will be announced shortly for digital work that accompanies doctoral dissertations. Finally, for a second year a student was designated as a Digital Fellow whose responsibilities include working with GC faculty members on their digital research projects.

 AWARDS FOR OUR DIGITAL PROJECTS

 
HERB: Social History for Every Classroom won a 2012 “Best of the Web” award from the Center for Digital Education. Named after our co-founder, the late distinguished historian Herbert Gutman, HERB is a free website that pulls together ASHP/CML’s most effective teaching activities, primary documents, and special collections into an accessible site for teachers and students. The award recognizes the site’s contribution to the benefit and quality of online education for students, teachers, and the community.

Our most recent interactive game for middle school students produced in collaboration with New York public television station Thirteen/WNET, Mission US 2: Flight to Freedom won a 2012 International Serious Play Gold Medal Award in the education division. Flight to Freedom, which tells the story of an enslaved teenager in the 1850s as she escapes north and confronts challenges presented by the Fugitive Slave Act, also has been receiving rave reviews from the press (such as this article in USA Today) as well as from teachers, and students.

 
We’re pleased to announce that ASHP/CML is one of the winners of the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, held in collaboration with Mozilla, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and administered by HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). This year’s competition focused on Badges for Lifelong Learning, and it awarded grants of up to $175,000 to projects designed to build digital badge systems that can help people learn new skills and demonstrate them to unlock job, educational, and civic opportunities.

Our project, Who Built America? Badges for Teaching Disciplinary Literacy in History, beat out 14 other finalists in the Teacher Mastery & Feedback division, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Working with Electric Funstuff (developer of the Mission US online game—see below) and the Education Development Center (our longtime evaluation partners), the project takes ASHP/CML’s proven professional development methods and uses an online badge-earning system to build professional learning communities and promote social history and inquiry-based teaching methods. It also helps history teachers design instructional materials that will help their students meet the demands of the Common Core Standards.

FLIGHT TO FREEDOM NOW LIVE: mission-us.org

 
Flight to Freedom is the second installment of Mission US, an interactive project that immerses players in U.S. history through free, role-playing games and for which ASHP/CML is the lead content developer. Mission US is produced by New York public television station WNET/THIRTEEN, developed by Electric Funstuff, and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In Flight to Freedom players take on the fictional role of Lucy King, a 14-year old enslaved girl on a Kentucky plantation in 1848. After escaping to Ohio, Lucy discovers that life in the North is fraught with difficulties and dangers that dramatically increase after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. The choices that players make throughout the game determine Lucy’s ultimate fate—for instance, Lucy can be re-enslaved “down river” to work on a cotton plantation or become a conductor for the Underground Railroad who helps other freedom seekers escape to Canada.

As students play Flight to Freedom, they build knowledge of the history of slavery buy cialis online and the abolitionist movement. Their understanding and critical perception of the historical context can deepen through the accompanying curriculum of activities and by examining a robust collection of primary sources such as maps, posters, runaway ads, slave narratives. Students also interact with the game’s embedded “Smartwords” to build vocabulary and historical literacy skills.  The game is designed to work in classroom settings, with each part playable in 20 to 30 minutes, as well as for students to play on their own.

In 2011, the Education Development Center (EDC) completed a major research study examining the use of Mission US by 1,118 seventh and eighth grade students in 50 schools across the country. The study found measurable gains in students’ historical knowledge and skills, and yielded positive feedback from teachers. A summary of the study’s key findings is available here.

Since launching in late January 2012, Flight to Freedom has attracted more than 12,000 players and earned strongly positive reviews in USA Today, Common Sense Media, and Kotaku.

ASHP/CML has begun introducing Flight to Freedom to local teachers in our Teaching American History seminars. The game is designed primarily for students in grades 5-8, but we encourage students of all ages to play the game (and share your thoughts with us).

ASHP/CML AND THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS

 
Adopted by 40 states, including New York, the Common Core Standards for education are designed to insure that students master the high level reading, writing, and thinking skills they need for college and career readiness. ASHP/CML has been asked by the New York City Department of Education to develop and test classroom materials that will help social studies teachers integrate the Common Core Standards into their teaching. Using materials from our HERB: Social History for Every Classroom, we have developed two units that contain a sequence of lessons and a final performance task that aligns with selected Common Core Standards. Teachers in our Teaching American History professional development programs are testing these units in their classrooms this month and will collect samples of the resulting student work, which we will analyze in order to refine the lessons.

CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY PUBLIC PROGRAM NOW ON-LINE

 
“Is There Anything More to See? Civil War Photography and History,” the third in a series of public programs sponsored by ASHP/CML marking the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, is now available online. The event took place at the City University Graduate Center last November and featured leading scholars of the war and photography, including Anthony Lee (Mount Holyoke College), Mary Niall Mitchell (University of New Orleans), Martha Sandweiss (Princeton University), and Deborah Willis (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University). The speakers discussed the persistence of photography’s influence over the vision of the Civil War, and some of the critical historical questions the medium’s record of the war addresses, distorts, and ignores. The program is viewable or can canadian pharmacy no prescription be downloaded as podcasts.

THE CIVIL WAR @ 150: A Public Program on Civil War Photography

Come to the Martin Segal Theatre at the CUNY lowest price viagra Graduate Center on Thursday, November 3, 2011, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, for the third of our public seminars marking the sesquicentennial of the start of the U.S. Civil War. Supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities, previous programs in the series brought together leading scholars and educators to discuss recent trends in the study of the conflict and the gap between scholarly and popular understanding of the war.

At the November 3rd event, entitled “Is There Anything More to See? Civil War Photography and History,” Anthony Lee (Mount Holyoke College), Mary Niall Mitchell (University of New Orleans), Martha Sandweiss (Princeton University), and Deborah Willis (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) will discuss the persistence of photography’s influence over the vision of the Civil War, and what remains to be learned from the medium and the war’s visual record. Among other questions, the panelists will discuss photography’s impact on Americans’ perceptions of the conflict in the past and how the meanings and uses of the visualization of the war have changed over time.

The event is free of charge and organized in collaboration with the Ph.D. Program in History, the Ph.D. Program in Art History, and the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center. Click here for more on the event and the Civil War @ 150 series. And if you can’t attend the event, podcasts of the three programs will be available on the ASHP/CML website by the end of the year.

ASHP/CML AWARDED IMLS PLANNING GRANT

We are pleased to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), in partnership with the American Social History Project, a National Leadership Planning Grant for Contextualizing the Visual Archive for Teaching. This project is designed to research and prototype an interactive online interface for archives and libraries that will help teachers use historical American images by linking them to rich contextual information as well as to full catalog records. During the planning phase of the grant, we will conduct research among potential users and program a sample set of test images for an online, open-source resource prototype that will demonstrate how visual images from any library or museum collection can be linked to collection records and teaching materials.

ASHP/CML LAUNCHES NEH SUMMER INSTITUTE WEBSITE: The Visual Culture of the American Civil War

We are pleased to announce buy viagra online the launch of our NEH Summer Institute website, The Visual Culture of the American Civil War.  On this site you will find information about our July 2012 summer institute for college and university faculty, which we are hosting at the CUNY Graduate Center. The institute will focus on the the Civil War’s array of visual media—including the fine arts, ephemera, and photography—to assess how information and opinion about the war and its impact were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans’ understanding on both sides of the conflict. The site contains such items as a “Dear Colleague” letter for prospective applicants, application instructions, a listing of institute faculty, a preliminary institute schedule and syllabus, and a mini-poster. If you plan to apply, be sure to review NEH’s Application Information and Instructions to determine your eligibility.

A NOTE TO CUNY FACULTY AND STAFF

Planning to make a contribution to the CUNY Campaign? Help ASHP/CML continue to produce teaching materials and bring services to New York City’s history teachers. We are #2949 in the CUNY Campaign list of participating agencies, under “CUNY-Based Organizations.” Thank you!

Thirty. Such a full, round, and venerable number leaves us amazed, proud, and a little chastened. Our achievements are based on a long, long, long list of talented and farsighted staff members and collaborators the combined number of which would fill a good-sized auditorium. And our numbers continue to grow as each new effort and project adds more names to the ASHP/CML roster.

Looking back after so many years and so many projects, we are happy to admit that we learned from all of them; indeed, during our prolonged march through decades of successive “cutting edge” media, we’ve accumulated  a good deal of knowledge as well as a fair amount of humility. But, overall, it’s been a good and fruitful journey and we are excited by the newest resources we’ve created (our extensive and growing HERB! database) and latest initiatives we’ve started (our 2012 NEH Summer Institute—see below). As we enter our fourth decade, these and other activities herald new approaches as they also remain true to our long-term commitment to democratize and enhance learning about the U.S. past.

JULY 2012 ASHP/CML INSTITUTE FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHERS
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded ASHP/CML a grant to host a two-week institute in July 2012 on the visual media—including the fine arts, photography, and ephemera—that helped define the American Civil War. “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War” will assess how information and opinion about the war and its impact were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans’ understanding on both sides of the conflict. Institute participants will

attend seminars led by noted historians, art historians, and archivists; take part in hands-on sessions in museums and archives; and take part in new media lab workshops. Guided by a faculty team that represents the range of work in the field, these institute activities will introduce the rich body of scholarship that addresses or incorporates Civil War era visual culture, prompt exploration for further research in the field, and assist in devising approaches that use visual evidence to enhance teaching and researching the history of the war. Click here for further information about the Institute–and check back later this fall to apply!

THE CIVIL WAR @ 150: A Public Program on Civil War Photography
Mark your calendars for Thursday, November 3, 2011, 6:00 to 8:00 pm and join ASHP/CML in the Martin Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center for the third of our public seminars marking the sesquicentennial of the start of the U.S. Civil War. Supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities, previous programs in the series brought together leading scholars and educators to discuss recent trends in the study of the conflict and the gap between scholarly and popular understanding of the war.

At the November 3rd event, entitled “Is There Anything More to See? Civil War Photography and History,” Anthony Lee (Mount Holyoke College), Mary Niall Mitchell (University of New Orleans), Martha Sandweiss (Princeton University), and Deborah Willis (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) will discuss the persistence of photography’s influence over the vision of the Civil War, and what remains to be learned from the medium and the war’s visual record. Among other questions, the panelists will discuss photography’s impact on Americans’ perceptions of the conflict in the past and how the meanings and uses of the visualization of the war have changed over time.

The event is free of charge and organized in collaboration with the Ph.D. Program in History, the Ph.D. Program in Art History, and the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center. Click here for more on the event and the Civil War @ 150 series. And for if you can’t attend the event, podcasts of the three programs will be available on the ASHP/CML by the end of the year.

DEFENDING PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION: A Graduate Center Conference
Over the course of the past three decades investment in public higher education has declined dramatically. Most American public university systems, such as California, Wisconsin, and Illinois, have experienced serious reductions in their state funding requiring dramatic cutbacks in academic programs and services they provide to their students.

Here at the City University of New York (CUNY), we have gone from a tuition-free system as late as 1976 to one that receives more than 45% of its operating budget from student fees and tuition. During this same time, the faculty workforce has been completely transformed. In the past almost all of the courses were taught by full time faculty. Today more than 50% of the courses are taught by adjunct faculty. Academic and student support services such as library, financial aid, and counseling have had serious staff reductions. Simultaneously, CUNY enrollments are at an all-time high. In the midst of these greater demands and a reduced full time work force, CUNY has lost $330 million, or 15%, of its state funding over the past three years. Finally, present plans are to further privatize or shift the cost of financing CUNY from the state to students.What can we do to reverse these trends?

This question prompted a number of CUNY Graduate Center faculty, staff, doctoral programs, and research centers (including ASHP/CML) to organize “Defending Public Higher Education,” a one-day conference on Friday, October 7, from 8:30 am to 3:30 pm. Please join us in the Proshansky Auditorium at The Graduate Center for a day of collective thinking about the challenges facing public higher education. Turn this time of disinvestment into an opportunity to think strategically about mounting a defense of a precious resource, the City University of New York. Click here for further information and to register.

KEEPING UP WITH US VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
While our e-newsletter will keep arriving in your inbox, you can also keep up with what we’re doing here at ASHP/CML on a buy cialis more regular basis. Our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ashpcml) and Twitter account (@ASHP_HERB) will alert you to our new podcasts, highlights from our online projects, public seminars, and links to useful and enlightening items from around the Web. So “like” us on Facebook and “follow” us on Twitter—historical insight is just a click away!

Explore HERB

In addition to the fully searchable primary sources and activities that anchor HERB, we’ve created Collections that feature HERB’s most effective documents, teaching activities, films, podcasts, and buy viagra online web projects.  Many of HERB’s documents and activities have been designed for special education students and English Language Learners. Tagged as having “Reading Supports” these documents and activities include vocabulary, pedagogical strategies, and other supports for struggling English readers. As HERB launches, we’ve also made it easier to learn about the professional development workshops we offer. In the coming weeks and months we will be adding new resources and functions to HERB, so be sure to come back often, and to tell us what you think. We encourage you to share this announcement about HERB with your friends and colleagues who teach U.S. history or who are lifelong students themselves. Your feedback will help us make HERB a better and more useful site.

Social Media

You can follow ASHP/CML on twitter (@ASHP_HERB) and our new Youtube channel, where you can watch videos about our work

and trailers from our documentaries. And we’re still blogging about politics, education, and the intersection of past and present at our staff blog, Now and Then.

ASHP/CML is delighted to announce that we are now distributing a version

of our DVD documentary Up South: African American Migration in the Era of the Great War that has optional subtitles in Spanish. We have also created a Spanish script of the program that can be downloaded from the Up South web page. We hope this proves popular for use in other countries, in classrooms where Spanish is spoken, and for English Language Learners and their teachers.

2. THE CIVIL WAR @ 150
Mark your calendars for Thursday, February 3, 2011, 6:00-8:00 pm and join ASHP/CML in the Martin Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center for the first of three public seminars on the sesquicentennial of the start of the U.S. Civil War. Supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities and organized in collaboration with the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center, this series will bring together leading scholars and educators to discuss recent trends in the study of the conflict, the gap between scholarly and popular understanding of the war, and how photography continues to shape its meaning. We begin on February 3rd with “Did the Real War Ever Get in the Books?” with Bruce Levine (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Stephanie McCurry (University of Pennsylvania), James Oakes (The Graduate Center, CUNY), and Gregory Downs (City College of New York, CUNY). Click here for more on CW @ 150.

3. TEMPORARY CHANGES AT ASHP

ASHP/CML congratulates Executive Director Joshua Brown on his 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in U.S. history for Studies in the Visual Culture of the American Civil War. This new work builds upon Josh’s earlier book Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (University of California, 2002). The importance of studying visual cultural is one of Josh’s key contributions to the field of 19th century U.S.

history and this fellowship acknowledges the significance of his past work and gives support to his ongoing scholarship. We wish him great progress during his six-month leave starting in March.

While Josh is on leave, Associate Director Pennee Bender will serve as Acting Director. Pennee came to ASHP in 1992 to produce video, CD-ROM, and Web projects and became Associate Director in 2000. She was supervising editor of the third edition of Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History Volume II. Her film and video credits include: Savage Acts: Wars, Fairs and Empire, Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl, The West Bank: Whose Promised Land, Bitter Cane, Missing Persons/ Personas Ausentes, and Labor Produces.  She has a Ph.D. in American History from New York University, is on the faculty of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and has taught history and media production to students from elementary school through college.

4. FEATURED DOCUMENT: Free Blacks in the South: The Life of Thomas Day

Last October historian Peter H. Wood, professor emeritus at Duke University, gave a talk at the Graduate Center sponsored by ASHP/CML and the Ph.D. programs in History and Art History about Winslow Homer’s recently rediscovered 1866 painting, Near Andersonville (marking the publication of his new book on the subject). He was kind enough to also record a podcast conversation with ASHP/CML’s Donna Thompson Ray about the life of North Carolina cabinetmaker Thomas Day, and how his experience as a free black characterized nineteenth-century race relations in the South. Peter assesses Day’s life as a businessman who crafted sought-after furniture collected by an exclusively white clientele—and as a man of deep social conviction operating in tenuous circumstances.

“Thomas Day: Nineteenth-Century Free Black Cabinetmaker” is a Now and Then podcast conversation.  The Now and Then podcast series features discussions with scholars, educators, and ASHP staff members about new work in public and scholarly history.

Don’t forget to visit Now and Then: An ASHP Blog for updates on ASHP/CML events and other staff musings

We are pleased to announce the public launch of a groundbreaking multimedia initiative: Mission US, a free online history

game designed to improve middle school students’ understanding of US history and their critical-thinking skills through innovative, engaging play. The first game, “For Crown or Colony?,” is now live. In the game, students assume the role of Nathaniel Wheeler, a young printer’s apprentice, and through encounter, inquiry, and decision-making learn about the critical events of 1770 leading up to the Boston Massacre. Three additional games focusing on significant eras and events in U.S. history will follow in the next two years.

ASHP/CML is working on S in partnership with New York

public television station Thirteen/WNET; Electric Funstuff, a commercial gaming company focusing on education; and the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provided major funding for the project.

Read more about Mission US ! Play “For Crown or Colony”!!

2. Two New Teaching American History Programs at ASHP/CML

In August, we received word that two New York City Department of Education professional development programs involving ASHP/CML received funding through the U. S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History grant competition. In one of these programs, we will work with 7^th and 8^th grade social studies teachers in three Brooklyn and Queens districts. This program will combine compelling social history content with document-based classroom approaches designed to support the learning of these teachers’ special needs and English Language Learner (ELL) students. In our second new TAH program we will be working with teachers at small high schools in the Bronx, guiding teachers as they use social history sources to develop new classroom materials for their students.

3. Civil War Sesquicentennial Public Program: Still Hazy After All These Years

Edwin Forbes, "Reading the news--off duty," drawing, Morgan collection of Civil War drawings, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

To mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, ASHP/CML in collaboration with the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in History has organized three public programs during 2011 where leading scholars and educators will explore recent trends in the study of the conflict, the gap between scholarly and popular understanding of the war, and how photography continues to shape its meaning.

DID THE REAL WAR EVER GET IN THE BOOKS? NEW SCHOLARSHIP ON THE CIVIL WAR
Thursday, February 3, 2011, at 6:00 pm

Panelists: Gregory Downs, City College of New York, CUNY; Bruce Levine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania; James Oakes, The Graduate Center, CUNY

THE GREAT DIVIDE? CIVIL WAR MYTHS AND MISINFORMATION
Tuesday, April 5, 2011, at 6:00 pm

Panelists: Jim Cullen, The Ethical Culture Fieldston School; Stan Deaton, Georgia Historical Society; Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia; Scott Nelson, College of William and Mary

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE TO SEE? CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
Wednesday, November 3, 2011, at 6:00 pm

Panelists: Anthony Lee, Mount Holyoke College; Mary Niall Mitchell, University of New Orleans; Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton University; Deborah Willis, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

All sessions are free of charge and will be held in the Martin Segal Theatre at the Graduate Center (34th Street and Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan). More on the series.

4. HERB: Social History for Every Classroom

ASHP/CML is continuing work in earnest on our online teacher resource database, which will be known as HERB (in honor of the late historian and our co-founder Herbert Gutman). We’ve entered more than 1,000 social history documents, teaching activities, images, and other resources, and currently are finalizing design and building a beta version with the aim of a full public launch in January 2011.

HERB is being built with Omeka, an open source curation and document management application created by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. We’re attempting to incorporate as much of the feedback we received from teachers and historians who responded to a survey and will test a demo beta version later this fall.  Check the ASHP/CML homepage and our Now and Then blog for updates on HERB’s progress!

5.  Featured Document: Mary Reynolds

Though rare, slave cabins still dot the landscape of the southern United States.   Some are parts of plantation museums, though former quarters are seldom interpreted with the same zeal as the main house. Almost invariably, former slave quarters stand empty today, making it hard to picture the complex and vibrant communities that once occupied them.  This month’s featured document is an oral history of Mary Reynolds, who recalls her girlhood growing up on cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana.  Though 105 years old when she narrated her story to a W.P.A. interviewer, Reynolds’ descriptions are vivid (and her contempt for her former master is still sharp).  Reynolds’ oral history is one source for understanding the complicated power negotiations between masters and slaves, as slaves raised families, created stories, crafts and music, and sought a measure of autonomy in places designed by and owned by slaveholders.  Read Mary Reynolds’ oral history and learn more about the geography of the plantation.

Don’t forget to visit Now and Then: An ASHP blog for updates on ASHP/CML events and other staff musings.

Mission US, an innovative multimedia game project to improve learning U.S. history in middle and high schools, has received funding from theCorporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)- American History and Civics Initiative. A finalist in the nationwide competition, Mission US is an unusual cooperative effort among historians, educators, broadcasters, and gamers, with the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (serving as the project’s principal content developer and advisor) working in a collaboration with New York’s public television stationThirteen/WNET; Electric Funstuff, a Manhattan-based game developer; and  Education Development Center- Center for Children and Technology, a leader in educational research.

Mission US features five online video games set in different eras in U.S. history. Assuming the roles of printer’s apprentice, runaway slave, railroad worker, muckraking journalist, and Dust Bowl migrant, student-players explore rich historical settings, develop relationships with key figures, investigate primary documents, witness pivotal events, and choose their own path in life. In the prototype game produced in 2008, “For Crown or Colony?,” students play Nat Wheeler, a printer’s apprentice who arrives in Boston in 1770 on the eve of the Boston Massacre. By completing tasks assigned to Nat by the printer, students explore colonial Boston and learn about the growing tensions between Patriots, redcoats, and loyalists. In addition to the game,Mission US provides online resources for teachers and students that include a robust set of classroom activities and assignments to enhance learning.

With the awarding of this grant, the prototype will be publicly released later this year. And we now will embark with our partners to establish the historical narrative, characters, visualizations, character dialogue, primary documents, and classroom materials for upcoming games.

2. Teacher Resource Database

In the next several months, the American Social History Project/Center for Media Learning plans to launch an online resource database of history materials for educators. To assist with planning, ASHP/CML recently conducted a survey of educators to learn more about how they use the Web to find resources for their classrooms. We were curious to know about what kinds of Web-based technology teachers had access to, what sorts of materials they look for online, and what they generally do with what they find online. We collected 228 responses from 38 states and the District of Columbia. (By the way, thank you to those of you on our mailing lists who took the time to complete the survey or to pass it

along to colleagues.)

Overall we discovered that teachers use the Web primarily

to find primary sources and to brush up on their background knowledge of topics. We were gratified to learn that a majority of our history teachers use arts and literature sources daily or once a week. Survey results confirmed that teachers want but have difficulty finding great primary sources for students: materials they want are scattered, difficult to navigate, or do not address the social history questions they wish to raise. A fuller report on our survey data can be found on ASHP/CML’s  Now and Then blog.

3. Upcoming Event: ASHP at the OAH

On April 9, 2010, at the Organization of American Historians annual conference in Washington, D.C., ASHP/CML’s Teaching American History Programs Project Director Ellen Noonan will participate in a roundtable discussion on “Putting Pedagogy into Digital Archives: Making Online Collections Useful for K-12 Teachers and Students. William J. Tally of the Center for Children and Technology will moderate the discussion, joined by panelists Kathleen Barker of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Stacia Smith of Paxton Center School.

4. New Media Lab Co-sponsors Conference: The Digital University: Power Relations, Publishing, Authority and Community in the 21^st Century Academy

The City University of New York’s Digital Media Studies Group, in collaboration with the Center for the Humanities and the New Media Lab, has organized an all-day conference on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, at the CUNY Graduate Center. Bringing together an invited group of media practitioners, academic publishers, digital content developers, and academics, the conference will assess the impact of digital media on academic work and academic policy. The conference will include a series of workshops, round table discussions, and panels at which participants will discuss and debate a broad range of issues related to the main conference themes: the impact of digital technology on academic instruction and research; the transformative impact of digital media on traditional forms of publishing, including academic monographs, textbooks, and academic journals; tenure and promotion in an era of digital scholarship; and collaborative research relationships within and across academic institutions and national boundaries. Demonstrations of diverse digital media projects, developed by faculty and doctoral students, will be offered throughout the day.

The conference will culminate in an evening public keynote address by cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. Prof. Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). We anticipate streaming the conference panels and keynote on the Internet, both to preserve a record of the proceedings and also to make them accessible to people unable to attend in person.

5.  Featured Document: 1930s Diaries of Blink and Simple Sam

During the 1930s depression hundred of thousands of young people took to the road in search of work and adventure, or to help relieve their impoverished families. Thanks to Minnesota sociologist Thomas Mineham, we have excerpts of diaries from two youths nicknamed Blink and Simple Sam. Mineham traveled the freight trains and hitchhiked among the transient youths for three years recording their experiences and words. See this month’s In the Limelight feature on ASHP/CML’s homepage to read diary excerpts and more about youth on the road in the 1930s.

6. Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

The career of Howard Zinn took him from the Brooklyn shipyards to New York University on the G.I. Bill to a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and then to the faculties of Spelman College and Boston University, where he urged his students to social activism and mightily irritated university administrators. He published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, a single volume that told a very different story of U.S. history than traditional textbooks did at the time. If the broad strokes and unabashed romanticization of working-class struggle that characterize A People’s History make some historians wince (ASHP’s own Who Built America? textbook, for example, deliberately offers a more warts-and-all telling of similar stories), the book has been hugely influential in bringing social history to people who felt the subject had little to do with their lives and experiences. Zinn was a trailblazer who opened doors for many readers, prompting them to critically engage with the past, and in that spirit we honor his work.

Don’t forget to visit Now and Then: An ASHP blog for updates on ASHP/CML events and other staff musings.

The American Social History Project’s website has undergone an extreme makeover! Our

new, improved and vastly more informative site, which went live this month, offers easier navigability, greater clarity, and lots and lots of resources. We’ve added new features such as podcasts of talks by noted historians and teachers at our seminars and clips from our award winning documentaries. You can still keep up with our latest activities-and insights-in the ASHP blog, or find more information about our books and other projects. We hope you will take the time to visit us and we invite any feedback or comments you might have on the new site.

2. Picturing United States History Forums

This fall the American Social History Project’s latest Web resource, Picturing United States History: An Interactive Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence, will host two online forums on teaching with visual evidence. The October 2009 forum on the West will be guest-moderated by Professor Catherine Lavender of the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York; the November 2009 forum on the Civil War will be guest-moderated by Professor Alice Fahs of the University of California-Irvine.

Representing a unique collaboration between historians and art historians, Picturing U.S. History is based on the belief that visual materials are vital to understanding the American past. Visitors to the website will find Web-based guides, essays, case studies, classroom activities, and online forums to assist high school teachers and college instructors to incorporate visual evidence into their classroom practice. The website supplements other U.S. history resources with visual materials, analysis, and activities that allow students to engage with the process of interpretation in a more robust fashion than through text alone.

The West and Civil War forums are the latest in our series of online conversations about the visualization of the past. To sign-up for the Picturing U.S. History forums, go to: Forums.

Picturing U.S. History is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its We, The People initiative.

3. History Hits the Road with Mobile Technology

This fall ASHP/CML begins partnering with the Apprend Foundation, a non-profit educational organization based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, on a new digital initiative called “Crafting Freedom on NC 86: Discovering Hidden History with Mobile Technology.” With funding from a NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, the team will plan and develop

the first steps of a “re-version” of a highway tour, originally produced during the 1930s by the Federal Writer’s Project, focusing on the rich history of African Americans along North Carolina Highway 86. A major goal of the project is to evaluate how open source mobile technology can help to engage a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, ordinary citizens, museums, and cultural partners in humanities content.

4. New Teaching American History Program for Social Studies Special Education

In July, we learned that ASHP/CML received funding to carry out a new Teaching American History professional development program (our eighth since 2003). The U.S. Department of Education awarded this grant to Districts 19, 20, 21, 23, and 31 of the New York City Department of Education. The program will serve social studies teachers who teach U.S. history to special education students, engaging them in the development of curriculum materials and pedagogical approaches that are both intellectually rigorous and meet the needs of diverse learners.

5. Featured Document: Bracero Workers

Bracero workers being fumigated with DDT in Houston, Texas, 1956. Leonard Nadel Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

In recognition of Labor Day and our professional development program focus on immigration, we’ve selected a document from our collection of material on the Bracero Program. Between 1942 and 1964, millions of Mexican agricultural workers entered the U.S. to work as farm laborers through the government-sponsored Bracero Program. This photograph of Department of Agriculture personnel spraying braceros with the now-banned pesticide DDT as they arrive at the U.S. processing centers reveals the workers’ experience of being treated like livestock.

As bracero worker Rigoberto Garcia Perez recalled, “Thousands of men came every day. Once we got there, they’d send us in groups of two hundred, as naked as we came into the world, into a big room, about sixty feet square. Then men would come in in masks, with tanks on their backs, and they’d fumigate us from top to bottom. Supposedly we were flea-ridden, germ-ridden. No matter, they just did it.”

The Bracero Program was the largest and most significant U.S. labor guest worker program of the twentieth century with more than 4.5 million workers coming to the U.S. It exemplified the dilemma of immigrant workers-wanted as low-cost laborers, but unwelcome as citizens and facing discrimination. Supporters of the program viewed it as an opportunity for Mexican nationals to make a living and improve the conditions of their families. But the migrant labor movement, including Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers, opposed the program because of its exploitation of workers. Mexican agribusinesses and agricultural unions also opposed the program on the grounds that it not only drained the Mexican economy of agricultural workers but allowed the U.S. to develop a surplus of crops, such as cotton, that then hurt the price of Mexican cotton on the market. One profound effect of the program was its influence on Mexican American settlement patterns in the U.S. and the shared experience of many Latino families whose ancestors were involved in the Bracero Program.

Don’t forget to visit Now and Then: An ASHP blog for updates on ASHP/CML events and other staff musings.